We agree these are as much aesthetic experiences as anything, and so, my friends…
It’s time to talk about Order of Ecclesia.
As soon as you pick up this box you know it’s gonna be good.
Oh yeah.
Have a look at the character art by Masaki HIrooka:
I love this style. Not the same as Kojima’s, but beautiful in different ways (certainly an improvement over Portrait and Dawn, in this forum poster’s opinion…). Look at the texture of the outfits, the shadows on faces, the muted yet distinct colors. The hair is great. And it translates to the game nicely:
And the sprites look great, especially in motion.
The opening cinematic is a lightly animated compilation of character promo art, I love it. Also a nice preview of the music…
Speaking of music, this one has a different texture compared to previous DSVanias. Dawn of Sorrow has more of those '80s drums, and what seemed to me a lot of mellow woodwind instrument tunes.
Ecclesia still has some of those drums of course, but in general the orchestration is different. There’s more focus on strings, guitars, piano; it’s a variety of instruments I like more. There are some more flute/woodwind-heavy tracks but they’ve got enough of that thick bass in there to make it feel balanced.
Structurally the game is somewhere between the previous two DS games—the first half of Ecclesia takes you through a variety of forests, mountains, and oceans on the journey to Dracula’s castle, kind of like the smaller levels found in Portrait’s portraits (though not as high-concept as say an ancient Egyptian tomb).
The second half of the game is Dracula’s castle, which is certainly smaller than previous game-length castles, but it doesn’t disappoint. It feels pretty huge, especially following the not insignificant array of other levels. And the castle music takes it to the next level:
Originally from the X86000 悪魔城ドラキュラ, this remix of “Tower of Dolls” is my favorite Casltevania track:
The bosses in Ecclesia are tough, not quite in the same way as Portrait’s, where you might get killed in two hits in the early game—whatever the difference is I enjoyed Ecclesia’s difficulty tuning a bit more. Of course it might just be that certain glyph combinations effectively allow you to turn down the difficulty and wipe the floor with later bosses, where Portrait offers no such concession.
I enjoy Ecclesia’s glyphs, which strike a balance between the weapon system from Symphony and enemy souls in Aria/Dawn. In Symphony, there are ten thousand different weapons, of which you can only equip one at a time (in Aria/Dawn you can switch between two weapon sets with a button press). In Ecclesia, weapons and subweapons (and souls) are replaced by glyphs, which are each distinct—instead of having twenty different straight swords and katanas and claymores etc. as in Symphony/Aria/Dawn, there is one straight sword-type glyph and one rapier-type glyph. It’s easier to run through your options when deciding how to deal with enemies. Glyphs are not just close quarters physical weapons, but also spells and ranged weapons. You assign one glyph to each hand (X and Y buttons) and alternate pressing the two buttons when attacking, allowing for either rapid-fire use of a given attack (if the same glyph is equipped to both hands) or strategic alternation between two different attacks (enemies are vulnerable to different damage types). And! you can customize and switch between three separate glyph sets, cutting down on menu time.
The menu sound effects are cool.
At the end of the day it‘s still an IGAvania, not an exceptionally deep game, but it’s well put together and has little nooks and crannies and secrets that are fun to dig into. It looks and sounds nice and is a DS game which means it’s 2x cooler than a game on any other console.