N-Philes

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin

Posted December 31st 2006 by Jared Thomas.

Getting excited about a new Castlevania game is like getting excited about going to a new restaurant so you can order the same meal as you do in every other restaurant. It's hard to fault this mentality, as probable enjoyment is a fair trade-off for sacrificing variety, but it's also hard to deny a certain inaneness about it all. To be a Castlevania fan is to treasure reassuring patterns over innovative change. It's a franchise built around solid action and platforming gameplay, opting to improve slowly but surely and rarely reinventing more than the frills. In that spirit we have Portrait of Ruin: the latest Castlevania title forged in the image of its predecessor, Dawn of Sorrow, with the only notable change being that it features two heroes rather than one.

Jonathan Morris and Charlotte Aulin team up to prevent a vampire from taking over Dracula's castle for no reason, or maybe there was a reason and I missed it in the 12-second intro. Said intro is actually a plus, and God bless Castlevania for its simple premise, because as much as I enjoy storylines in games that benefit from them, I am even more grateful when developers recognize that their game doesn't need one and just avoid the whole mess.

The vampire in question isn't Dracula, but he is a painter, which provides the game with a title and really little else. He paints landscapes and enchants them with a Super Mario 64 hex that lets interlopers jump into them for fanciful adventures. Other than paint-based attacks in the climactic battle, that's about the extent of the portraitdom. The paintings make the map a little less cluttered than having all the worlds connected in one tower, especially given the relatively large scope of the maps, but it feels like a theme that wasn't entirely expanded upon. There isn't much advantage taken in the use of mystical paintings since most stages take place indoors anyway. It's not an important factor to the game, but it's slightly vexing that they introduced this theme and then basically let that be the end of it. But not the end of unfulfilled ambitions.

The game's title should really be Brilliant Underachiever, because that's the real theme here. Everyone already loves Castlevania, and Dawn of Sorrow in particular, and by now it should be pretty obvious that Konami knows they don't have to push the envelope to make another blockbuster. Everything about this game aims low. Everything about this game is great.

Take the teamwork element of the game, for instance – a duo that rivals Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in terms of untapped potential. Assuming you're playing as Johnathan (going forward), Charlotte follows a step behind and attacks any enemies she comes into contact with, which is extremely useful because it essentially doubles up the damage you do to enemies. For an added bonus you can use R to activate her special attack, while you either use your own with Up and X or continue to smash away with your weapon. There are team attacks that can be performed when the situation calls for it, and while they're impressive and do an excellent job of getting our heroes out of a pinch, they're just about the end of the list of reasons that this game features two characters.

While you can send her away at the push of a button, there's almost no incentive to ever go it alone. Health is linked, so it's not like one character can die and leave you handicapped with only one. There's no time when Jonathan's health is a concern so you switch to Charlotte and send him away so he doesn't die. Really, the only time you'd ever want to go solo is during some boss fights, as the second character experiences damage in the form of lowering your magic supply, which is fairly essential in boss battles.

There are situations where you can do neat tricks like have Charlotte stand on a block while you push it toward a high walkway, and then switch to her to hop there from the block, but objects you can interact with in this way are highlighted with a green border that gives the impression that you're being babysat by the game itself. Sometimes you need two people to stand on a switch and press it down, or two people to push an object, but I can guarantee the excitement you feel when doing this does not exceeed what would be experienced with a more conservative one person.

What you're left with is Dawn of Sorrow, which is hardly a criticism, as this means excellent graphics, tightly-honed control, and classic side-scrolling gameplay. Arm yourself with a wide variety of weapons and magic spells, and unleash them on an equally wide variety of monsters as you pass through the castle's corridors, solving puzzles, backtracking when new abilities are needed, and all the while slowly upping your levels in the same moderate and complimentary RPG system that graced Dawn of Sorrow. It's the comfortable position between "hack 'n' slash" and "adventure" that's worked so well for the Castlevania series thus far, and with new attacks and team-up specials, it plays as well as the best of them.

There are of course a few new enemies among the army of returning badniks, and a few new tricks such as 3D backgrounds that you really don't notice much until you move and the perspective changes, which is clever. For some reason it's only used a few times, but arguably it doesn't really look as good as sprite backgrounds anyway. There's also some noteworthy level design to be enjoyed, such as the carnival-themed world that has you traversing sideways, longways, and upside-down through four quadrants that surround a main boss room. The bosses themselves, of course, are original creations that for the most part satisfy what you'd expect from Castlevania.

Weapons used to take down these bosses are mostly Dawn of Sorrow hand-me-downs, which makes little sense as Jonathan and Charlotte's adventure is supposed to take place almost a century before Soma Cruz's. They're also fairly neutered, because our current heroes lack the ability to steal souls and infuse them into their weapons for more power and unpredictable benefits. Basically, you get a weapon when it falls or when you buy it, and you carry that until you find something better, which is seldom. I carried the same long spear throughout the better half of the game because I never found a better weapon to use. It's disappointing, and one major area where the game actually has less content than its predecessor.

Where Portrait of Ruin takes off is in its online multiplayer, which is a first. You can't play the storyline adventure cooperatively, which at first sounds like a bad joke what with all the hype of two characters. Instead there's a Boss Rush mode that lets you team up to make your way past a number of bosses without dying in the shortest possible time. It's surprisingly fun, but again its limited by the simplicity of having both characters share a life bar. You might think that it increases teamwork to know that when you get hit your partner hurts for it, but in practice it's actually just kind of annoying.

Steady Beat - Not everything it could be,

but everything it needs to be.

Released roughly a year after Dawn of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin comes across more as a sister title in the vein of Pokémon than a true sequel. In nearly every way, it is exactly the same as its predecessor, from enemies to weapons and even concerning a good deal of the special abilities. Of course, being nearly everything that Dawn of Sorrow was is this game's strength as much as it is a fault, and since Castlevania has been using the same formulas, items, and enemies since the 80s, it's hard to make an issue out of rehashing at this point. And given that Dawn of Sorrow is a fairly rare game, Portrait of Ruin is a godsend to those who never got to experience the first DS title.

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