Castlevania Portrait of Ruin was released by Konami in 2006 for the Nintendo DS.
Jonathan Morris, son of John Morris from Castlevania Bloodlines and Charlotte enter Dracula's castle to defeat Dracula, and find out that Dracula isn't being resurrected and his power is being controlled by a vampire named Brauner and his daughters. While the main castle itself is explorable, Brauner has several paintings in the castle, each one leading to different explorable areas.
While the main game isn't co op, would be kind of cool if it was, the player has control of both Jonathan and Charlotte. Both characters can equip different armor and two accessories, while for weapons, Charlotte can only equip different types of books Jonathan carries the Vampire Killer with him, but unable to use it properly, it's too weak to be effective, so there are many other whips in the game as well, but Jonathan can also use swords, great swords, fist weapons, etc. While you need to acquire a skill for it as you progress through the game, the whips can attack in diagonally downward as well as using the hanging whip. Aside from the weapons the characters can use, Jonathan can also use different sub weapons while Charlotte can use spells. Combat skills and spells can be found around the castle, so a reuse of the soul mechanic. This time around, souls and spells aren't acquired from every enemy, but there's really no way of knowing what enemy has one or not until they drop the combat skill or magic spell.
Charlotte has attack magic, status upgrades, summons, and spells that allow the player to transform. While there are useful spells, there are also a lot of spells that aren't as useful. Jonathan's combat skills are are mostly sub weapons, but he has a few other ones as well. Every single one of Jonathan's combat skills are pretty worthless at the start, atleast until you put in the effort to master them. Mastery of a combat skill isn't just use it this amount of times, etc, it takes 1000 - 1500 points to master a skill, and the combat skill has to hit an enemy, then the enemy has to be killed after the combat skill hits them. Throughout most of the early game, just about every enemy is going to give you one point towards skill mastery, so to continue progressing through the game but attempting to master skills, you'll want to use a skill and hit the enemy before killing them then keep going. Even after mastering the skills, most of the skills are rather weak in comparison to the souls from the previous games. Some of the most useful skills are through quests, while another can be found at the beginning of the game, but through a wall you have to break. By the time you receive the skills that are most useful, you'll have to grind points to master them, because you're not going to master them through regular use. So most of the game, the combat skills are rather useless. Magic spells will be useful, but you'll probably only stick with a few.
You can switch between the both characters whenever you want so long as you're on the ground, you can call the second one out to fight with you except they'll be controlled by the computer AI and lose MP when they receive damage, and you can have them use a sub weapon or a spell. The characters also get dual cast spells that use both characters to cast powerful screen wide effects, and other such skills where you can use your ally to gain extra height or have them wait at a specific location so long as you remain on screen. The second character will also be useful as somewhat of a shorter double jump when you get the ability and a few of Charlotte's spells will allow you to progress further through the game with transformation skills or a skill that unlocks the true final boss and good ending.
You can purchase items, weapons, and equipment from a priest who follows you into the castle, or take quests from another character in the castle, with the quests getting you equipment and combat skills you can't receive elsewhere.
When traversing through thet game, while the castle has several short cuts that you can use while progressing through the game and trying to clear the map, most of the paintings you'll go straight ahead aside from some branching dead ends. If you happen to skip something and there's no teleporter around it, you have to walk all the way the way back there as there's rarely any short cuts that will let you bypass part of the stages. There are nine paintings in the game, four of which are duplicates of the first four you go through aside from enemy layout and design, while the last painting is like the arena in Circle of the Moon, where on this game you'll fight a few bosses from Dawn of Sorrow and one boss from Symphony of the Night at the end of each section.
The game also has enemies that have physical and magic resistances, so enemies each character can't hurt very well unless they're equipped with an elemental or physical weapon. Not very many enemies do this, more later in the game than earlier in the game but it's a feature in the game that I dislike.
After completing the game it gives you a few different character modes. There's one mode letting you play as Richter and Maria, another as an Axe Armor, and then another as Brauner's daughters where you move the characters on screen and touch enemies with the stylus to damage them. It also unlocks hard difficulty with max level 50, 25, and 1 available for hard difficultly and a boss rush mode.
7.75/10
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