Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow Review

The first time I tried out Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow was actually around two years ago. Back then I had never heard of Castlevania so I decided to give it a shot. What turned me off the most was the fact that it was a side-scrolling game and that its graphics were relatively poor compared to the other DS games out there such as Super Mario 64 and many others. I decided to put the game aside and completely forgot about it until now when I was rummaging around looking for some quality DS games to play when I thought back to Castlevania. It was worth a shot after all. And so I flipped open my DS and booted up Castlevania. 

I flashed back to when I first attempted to play Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, but this time instead of putting down the game I decided to play through a bit before calling it quits. And it was certainly a great decision for me. As I played and played I got more and more attached to the game and realized that it actually was quite a fun game despite it being a side-scrolling video game. 

Overall, out of the five categories I rate DS games by: sound, gameplay, story, graphics, and difficulty, I would have to give Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow an 7.5/10. I gave it a 9/10 for its sound since its background music is always the perfect mood for whichever part of the castle is being explored, but I subtracted one since some of the music just wasn’t in my preferred musical taste. Dawn of Sorrow received an 7/10 for gameplay because it’s a lot of fun to whack around zombies and skeletons, but eventually its side-scrolling beat-em-up style gets repetitive. The game got a 7/10 for its story because although it had interesting characters, the game hardly embellished on the storyline as it would tend to focus on sending the player around to each boss to battle. Also, it got a 7/10 for its graphics since it’s a side-scroller first off, but the background pictures were well thought out to present the mood of the castle sections. However, sometimes these backgrounds were a little too much and distracted the player from the monsters or other things. Finally, the difficulty level of the game was given an 8/10 since in my opinion it was way too hard. Often times I was forced to do some repetitive crash training on monsters over and over again to level up enough to face a hard boss. Also to avoid the “bad ending” I had to attain a soul that I had no idea where to find. It required me to use a walkthrough to find that soul. All in all a 7.5/10 is a great score for a DS game and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow deserves much kudos for being such a great game.

Perhaps it was the drought of fun and exhilarating DS games that brought me to become attached to Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, but maybe it was its quiet allure of fun gameplay mixed with a decent story background. This game was definitely worthy of the great Nintendo DS and so immediately afterwards I completed the next in line of the DS series which was Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin.