Huh? I..Write... Things? (Random Castlevania DLC Opinion..thingy...)

What is this... why am I here? This place... these things... so familiar... yet so distant...

So yeah, hey guys, apologies. School.

Anyway, I recently re acquired Castlevania Lord of Shadows (courtesy of Gamefly) with the intent of finally playing through the DLC hoping it would shed some light on the rather controversial ending of the game itself. While it did, with brilliant story telling and dialogue, I might have been happier just watching videos of the DLC....

The story telling, the dialogue, the background and the overall plot were pretty interesting. I was awesome to see  Gabriel change from the noble warrior for good, to the Lord of Darkness. He has found that his path has been laden with blood and death this whole time, and though what he did, he did in the name of Light, he has found his  soul has been blackened. He has now become Shadow.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut, aside from that... I can't say I had much fun.
My first issue right off the bat was the strange cutscene style that as implemented. It was kinda cool, in a "I made this game for XBLA" sort of way. They used this paper cut-out-stop-motion style that, while it's pretty neat and artistic... I felt that after the full game (which had real cutscenes) this method seems... well... lazy.

Bastard bastard, fatherless bastard hard. Most of the puzzles were entirely legitimate, and I enjoyed solving them, but every fight throughout the whole thing felt almost unfair, and I wasn't even playing on the hardest difficulty. I will grant some lenience in that I had not played the game in a long time, and I had to work my way back into the combos, but that was a minor issue. Not to mention that there was only a handful of enemies in each level, the whole bloody thing was full of puzzles, with one boss fight at the end that made me feel like some developer was practicing overt displays of assholery. Stop. Break it down.

Super Pissy Puzzle Designers.
This... just... this....




Tutorial video, so he makes it look easy mode... but as you can probably tell there are a few factors that make this quite tricky. The blades (obviously) keep moving for some time after the power is off, this makes it a timing game, which is lame. Second, it isn't always explicitly obvious how close you can get to the blades before they hurt you, so at times, you think you will be safe, and you will instead be very much dead. What you might not be able to tell by watching the video, is that Laura doesn't react immediately. You push the slow down button (or speed up button) and it takes her a cool second or two before she starts to slow it, and then it takes another moment for her spell to complete. Can't say that I can blame her...

The steely determined eyes.....ooohhh yeeeaaaahhh... amirite?

So, it's pretty lame. I was very happy to be done with this, and the only side effects are that I now assume that all people are just slow when I tell them to do something, and I have now made it my sole goal in life to find the designer of this puzzle and make him play this game over and over and over and over and over and over.....................


Super Satan

So, in a nutshell [MINOR SPOILERS] the brotherhood created some super demon, and now it's free, or will he soon, and Gabriel must stop it. He is a super bitch.
I know, it's a hack n' slash boss, it is supposed to be hard, I understand that. It's more than just being a difficult boss, he is almost an impossible boss. The idea they tried to convey (a tactic on which Gabriel himself expands) is that you are fighting the most powerful being ever conceived, second to God. Created than any evil Satan himself could conjure. So the method is supposed to revolve around the idea that you must be patient, and strike only when the moment is right, which you must do. You cannot land any substantial combos, unless he does his taunting move, and then you can only land maybe one good combo. During his normal phase, he switches from attack to attack, giving visual cues that hardly allow enough time to escape if you have over committed to a combo. It's just sprinting, waiting for a time to strike, and ensuring you never get hit.



Of course, he has full health and mana. I was not granted that luxury, because I had been hurt previously, and all the checkpoints caught me with no mana at all, and half health, and I had no real intention of doing the whole chapter over, so I could maybe have full bars by the time I made it back. Not fun.

All in all I was not impressed. I really feel like this could have easily been implemented into the full length game, and been done in a much more impressive manner. It felt rushed, unloved, and incomplete. Gabriel's dialogue was awesome, just to feel the change in the man that used to be full of such Light, and now, he is Shadow.