#28 - Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow
After SOTN, the Metroidvania Castlevanias moved onto the portable consoles while Konami experimented on home consoles with various types of 3D games. Dawn of Sorrow plays pretty similarly to the post-SOTN Castlevanias. You spend most of the game exploring a version of Dracula's castle, finding weapons and other upgrades and beating bosses. In this game like Aria of Sorrow the main character is Soma. Soma's moves are very similar to Alucard's in terms of the jumping arc, the attack and the slide. In SOTN you would get upgrades like being able to turn into a wolf by collecting cubes, in this game the way you get upgrades is by getting souls. Every monster has a soul you can collect which gives quite a bit of depth to the game and it encourages you to collect them all, the only issue is the souls are based on RNG so there is a lot of grinding involved to get 100% completion. Like always the graphics and music are excellent. Dawn of Sorrow doesn't really do anything new with the dual screens but having the map of the castle on the bottom is a nice touch.
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