OK, so really now, back to the game. Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (AoS) makes some changes to the formula this time through. It takes place in the future, and heart and magic meters have been combined. The main character, Soma Cruz, doesn't possess the standard vampire killer's weapons: knife, axe, holy water, stopwatch and boomerang. Well, this is not entirely true. Soma has a chance to absorb the soul of 110 of the 112 enemies he will face, some of these souls providing him with weapons that are the same or similar to the famous five. The Evil Butcher and Ripper souls let Soma throw knives, and the Ripper's knife even looks like Simon's silver knife from Castlevania II, a historical reference I had not seen yet in the newer games. Axe Armor's soul throws axes, but they don't behave like Castlevania axes. Instead, they behave like Castlevania boomerangs. Why? I suppose because Axe Armor's axes have always acted like the hero's boomerangs. Still, its unnerving. Biphron's soul creates a trail of flame that behaves like a super powered version of the more recent snake-like holy water, while Werewolf's soul acts a bit like the original Castlevania's holy water. Chronomage's soul provides the stopwatch, though I haven't used it enough to know if its actually any good. Does it stop most enemies? Bosses? Finally, there is no boomerang, other than the misbehaving axe. This really seems strange to me. The boomerang or holy water have always been the weapons of choice in a Castlevania game. They always net you lots of hits. Plus, the boomerang looks like a cross, so its great thematically. But now, no boomerang. Except for the axe. Which means there is no axe really. But this doesn't bother me as much because I always hated the axe. Anyway, also absent is the Item Crash ability. However, as a feature it didn't show up in the series until Demon Castle Dracula X, so I can't say it's that apocryphal to exclude it.

Post-SotN Castlevania games have been really big on collecting things, in a way that was really pioneered by Metroid. In AoS' predecessor, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, this "gotta catch 'em all" mentality was taken to a new extreme with the Interior Design system, as I call it, where the player collects furniture and decorations from all over Dracula's castle in order to dress up their drab room. After every candle stick and end table has been collected, your reward is a crammed room, and nothing more. Not even a "Congratulations", let alone a secret item or mode. AoS sends us off collecting again, but this time our collectables (the souls) give us new powers, which is a good bit more fun than a crammed room. The powers range from useful to wacky to worthless, but what can be expected when a selection of 110 powers are jammed into one game? A certain amount of overlap or uselessness is to be expected, I guess. Which means there must be more to it. The main impetus for getting more than just the most useful souls is really just to see that two digit soul collection rate become a nice round, 3 digit 100%. To say, I caught 'em all. Or is it? There are those who for the love of the game or lack of funds will continue to play AoS for a long time. They will come up with new and challenging ways to play, by using the less powerful or misunderstood souls. These people will gain a deeper level satisfaction by using Flesh Golem's ability to eat rotten meat, or Ukoback's little stationary fires to… do something. The possibility to enjoy all 110 of these different powers certainly exists, but because you are not required to use them all, the vast majority of people will never give most of them more than a cursory look. So does this amount to filler, or wasted development time? Or is it a really just a treat for more dedicated gamers? Anyone can beat Super Mario 64 with 70 stars, so why are there 120? AoS must be repeating that logic.

So, we've decided that we want to collect every soul, to see every power at least once, to see our soul collection rate hit 100%. This brings me to Legion. Legion has shown up as a boss off and on since SotN. You must penetrate its surrounding shell of corpses and strike at the core to defeat it. Fans know the drill. It is actually one of the more entertaining yet disturbing Castlevania bosses. So, it turns out that if you just whack through the shell and destroy Legion, you will not be rewarded with its soul. And once Legion is gone, its gone for good, so you've missed your one opportunity to get it. You will finish the game with 99.09% of souls collected and will never be able to see that blissful 100%. Unless you start over and play through again, fighting Legion repeatedly until you figure the trick out. So, these kinds of things bother me. I don't like it when it becomes impossible for you to get everything there is to get in a game. Especially, if that fact that its impossible is non-obvious. I really don't like games where if one of your attributes increases, it automatically means a decrease in another attribute. Or games where choices you make along the way forever bar you from certain events or sections…. requiring multiple play throughs to see everything possible. I want full coverage to be possible with one play through. Now in this case, it can be said that once Legion had been defeated and no soul emerged, I should have repeatedly reloaded and fought it again, until I got one. But in AoS, many bosses show up again as non-boss enemies. You can blow away Great Armor and Big Golem until they cough up their soul, later in the game. I assumed, naively I'm sure, that Legion would show up again later for soul harvesting. I mean, there was really no way for me to know either way, but it seemed like a safe assumption. Ultimately, I think if you do get Legion's soul first time through on your own, it will be because you were lucky and happened to destroy its entire shell (which, otherwise, there would be no reason to do) before destroying its core. If I had been one of those lucky ones, I would be secretly smug about it.

The menu system and castle map in AoS are improved over previous offerings, in some ways. The castle map pops up instantly when requested, switching souls is a very fast process, as the menus are quick and they keep your recently used souls at the top of the list. This means that Skula (mistranslated, should be Scuba), required to swim underwater, will always be near the top of the list within easy reach. The monster encyclopedia does a great job of helping figure out which souls you are missing and is generally fun to just examine. One inexplicable change to the mapping system, however, is that doors now appear as faint walls, rather than gaps. They can be very difficult to distinguish from actual walls. A door mistaken for a wall could easily be blamed for a 99.8% map coverage situation… and God forbid that you are playing on the original GBA, sans backlight. Especially streamlined is the Warp system, which allows the player to move between special castle rooms instantly. Initiating a warp actually brings up the full castle map from which the specific destination is chosen. It is very efficient, almost too efficient. No longer do you have to count the number of times you've warped, or constantly check the map to see where you've ended up. Like the removal of the separate heart and magic meters, it makes sense, but feels almost brutal. It almost seems that if they change any more then the game will no longer be Castlevania, but the truth is the modern games really aren't Castlevania anymore, at least, not like the original Castlevania. You can classify each title in the series into one of a few segments, specifically, "2D with pit deaths", "2D without pit deaths" and "3D". 2DwPD contains most games of the series. 2DwoPD contains SotN, CotM, HoD and AoS. 3D contains Castlevania 64, Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness and Castlevania: Lament of Innocence. Its easy to see how games in each segment are similar to each other, and its just as easy to see how each segment is quite different from each other. The series is ever-changing, ever-evolving.