Revisiting Castlevania on the DS

We're now just a weekend away from the gaming industry's next major anniversary, as Konami's venerable Castlevania series will turn 25 on Monday, September 26.

If you were hanging around IGN a couple of days ago you might have seen us kicking off the celebration by Revisiting Castlevania on the NES, where we took the time to look back on the three titles that launched the franchise on Nintendo's original 8-bit console. Today we're jumping to the opposite end of the chronology, going back just a handful of years to examine the three most recent series sequels to hit the Big N's machines -- all of them on the handheld DS.

How did each of these three modern 'Vanias reflect the franchise as a whole? How did they tie back into earlier installments? And what information can we glean from them to help us envision where the series will go next, potentially on Nintendo's 3DS? Read on as we set out to destroy Dracula three more times.

Well, maybe destroying Dracula isn't always the end goal in Castlevania games -- because in Dawn of Sorrow you actually played as the villain himself. A direct sequel to the Game Boy Advance's final series installment Aria of Sorrow, Dawn of Sorrow once again put players in command of the white-haired, white-jacketed Soma Cruz.

SPOILER ALERT In Aria it was revealed that Soma would be the year 2035's reincarnation of Dracula. Dawn of Sorrow picked up the story one year later, chronicling Soma's attempts to suppress his inevitable transformation into the dark lord -- all while battling a new set of villains also trying to bring the vampire back to life. The fact that the storyline was a direct continuation of the previous title was rare for the series.


The first couple of Castlevanias on the NES both starred the same hero, Simon Belmont. But since their release the games of the series have more commonly jumped all around the timeline to tell stories taking place often hundreds of years apart from one another. Having the same hero twice in a row must have been proof that Konami wanted to see if lightning could strike twice.

That storyline decision ended up affecting Dawn of Sorrow's gameplay design, though, as keeping the same hero in place meant that there would be no major revision to in-game mechanics. So, like Aria, the focus on this trip through the Castle was on absorbing "souls" from fallen foes -- killing a bone-throwing skeleton gives you the ability to throw bones yourself. Defeating a flame demon lets you conjure fireballs, and so on.


It was an innovative system in Aria that gave the quest a bit of a "catch 'em all" vibe as you tried to collect all the different possible souls, and it luckily had enough appeal left after the GBA title to carry a second game. But that left Dawn of Sorrow with only a few gimmicky touch screen activities that were truly new -- drawing patterns with the stylus to defeat bosses and tapping ice blocks to break them so Soma could advance.

More than any other element, though, the most talked-about part of Dawn of Sorrow was its new, cartoony anime style. Konami made the decision to skew younger with the series starting with this sequel, so Soma and his enemies were rendered in cutscenes and dialogue profiles in the same way you might imagine them being shown on Cartoon Network. It was an odd choice. And since no previous Castlevania game had used that kind of visual style, it felt inconsistent when placed next to its predecessors (even Aria, which used more traditional art).

One year after the release of Dawn of Sorrow, Konami was back again with yet another portable Castlevania adventure -- Portrait of Ruin. This one took a couple of cues from its immediate predecessor, but also dipped back much further into series history to find inspiration as well.

One element held over from Dawn of Sorrow was, perhaps unfortunately, the anime-looking character design. New protagonists Jonathan Morris and Charlotte Audin looked almost as toonish as Soma and his crew had the year before, though the style was toned down just a bit. Portrait of Ruin also followed Dawn's lead by tying its storyline back into an older Castlevania game, though there was a lot more separation between release years this time around.


That's because Portrait of Ruin was presented as a follow-up to Castlevania: Bloodlines, the Sega Genesis game that had been released way back in 1994. And try to keep your years straight, because here come a couple more -- Bloodlines was set in the year 1917 and starred a character named John Morris as a playable hero, while Portrait was set in 1944 and starred his son of the same name.