Castlevania Lament of Innocence was released by Konami in 2003 for the PS2.
A knight of the 11th century, Leon Belmont and his company fought, along with his friend Mathias Cronqvist, fought for the church. Leon and his knights wanted to fight monsters that appeared in their domain but the church would not give permission. Bedridden after falling ill because of the death of his wife, Mathias tells Leon that the appearance of monsters is because of a vampire in the Forest of Eternal Night, and that Leon's wife was kidnapped by the vampire Walter. Renouncing his title of baron, Leon leaves his company and makes way to the forest to rescue his beloved. Upon entering the forest, Leon senses he's unable to escape and meets with a man named Rinaldo Gandolfi, who explains the reason behind the kidnappings is that to Walter, this is all a game. Because he came without a weapon, Rinaldo gives Leon a whip made of alchemy and enchants his gauntlet, providing assistance before Leon enters the castle.
Leon has never used the whip before so what he can do at first is limited to a few variations of attacks. You have weak and strong attacks that give you a sort of open ended combo system. As you progress you'll be able to do longer combo strings, learn new attacks that are done by doing a short combo string but will also work in a longer combo both on the ground or in the air. Leon has access to different sub weapons, the dagger, axe, cross, crystal, and holy water, and can acquire six different elemental stones that will allow you to do up to seven different sub weapon attacks each weapon. While Leon will learn new attacks the more enemies he kills, he doesn't acquire experience points. Leon can acquire health, MP, and heart upgrades that permanently increases those, and he can equip different accessories and one set of armor which will reduce damage received by a percentage up to a max reduction of 30%. Then finally, with the gauntlet that Rinaldo has enchanted, Leon can gather magical power by blocking certain attacks and absorbing that power into the gauntlet, releasing it to use different magic relics that will add some sort of effect for a limited time.
Unable to reach Walter until defeating the five guardians that seal the way to the throne room, the main portion of the castle is a central hub. By stepping on one of the teleporters, Leon will be taken to one of the areas in that game that has to be explored to reach the boss. While there are unique areas within these areas, most of the time you'll run along a hallway, kill a few enemies, into a locked room to kill more enemies. Most of these rooms and hallways are nothing more than copy and paste, so you'll repeatedly see the same few rooms over and over. The combat is good, but aside from the a few platforming sections, that's almost all there is.
After finishing the game you'll unlock an extra character and a different difficulty. Crazy mode doesn't increase enemy stats, but rather has different enemy placement so it's harder at the beginning, while at the end it's just as difficult as playing through it normally. You're also limited to five of each item. Joachim mode has you playing as one of the bosses in the game that has swords circling you, where triangle has you switch how the swords are circling to either slash or pierce at the enemies. Joachim mode gets extremely repetitive as you're just dodging enemies repeatedly hitting square for your swords to attack them. After completing Joachim mode, you'll unlock Pumpkin mode which you're a small character with a pumpkin for a head. In pumpkin mode, you use a whip and start with all of Leon's attacks available to you, but with a pumpkin looking sub weapon that each of the seven sub weapon attacks you can use are pulled from different attacks that Leon's sub weapons have.
7/10
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Scoring system.
1-3 - bad
4 - 5 below average
5.5 - average
6 - 10 - good to excellent
