Phil Central

So, I have a lot of time to spend at work, and I spend it playing my DS and PSP mostly… The most recent game I’ve been playing is Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. It continues to Gothic Metroid theme that’s been going on for a while. The premise of this game is that some powerful vampire has taken over Dracula’s castle for his own gain, you have come to stop him I guess. He uses paintings to gain his power. That’s roughly the plot, to be honest, I didn’t pay much attention.

The nice thing about this game is that you have to go through and “destroy” the paintings, and you do that by entering the painting, traversing the level inside and defeating the boss. This breaks up the Castle monotony with locations such as towns, forests, deserts, etc. There are a total of 8 paintings to go into total, which makes the game pretty big. While the castle is certainly not linear, the paintings pretty much are, although some have some interesting gimmicks.

The bosses go from ridiculously easy to insanely hard. Because you level up in this game, you can always go kill some more monsters to get stronger then go back and fight a boss again. Also, as you gain some of the super abilities, some of the boss fights that would normally be very difficult using standard attacks, become trivial at the hands of these skills.

And skills are really the name of this game. There are two characters you can switch between, one uses weapons, the other uses magic, and each has about 30 of both. The weapon character uses everything from axes to shurikens to bibles, and each weapon skill gains experience as you use it eventually becoming mastered and dealing more damage. The magic that you learn starts out mastered, but typically has the option to be cast quickly for regular damage, or twice as long for maximum damage. With enemies and bosses being vulnerable to different types of attacks and magics (and some even changing their vulnerabilities midway through the battle), using both characters and a variety of skills is required.

Speaking of both characters, your main character, Jonathan is the weapon user. He is the more mobile of the two, and you will do most of your exploring while controlling him. The second character, Charlotte is a magic user, she is less mobile and her melee attacks are shorter range. Although you start out only controlling only Jonathan, about 5 minutes into the game, you’ll be able to switch back and forth and even have your partner follow you around and help you. You can switch on the fly and even call your partner out to perform a special attack while still fully controlling your main character. Also, you eventually learn several powerful attacks that involve both characters teaming up to deal devastating damage.

The last new thing is quests. A character named Wind will assign tasks to you, you can complete them to earn items, skills, magic, or stat boosts. They involve everything from killing a certain number of enemies to gathering items or discovering certain parts of the castle. They are completely optional, but fun none the less and usually aren’t to daunting as long as you check in regularly you can usually complete them as you progress through the game. Some of the quest involves items you only get once in the game, and it is possible to sell or eat these items (some even seem to be meant to be consume to revive hit points until you receive the quest and realize your mistake), if you do this you will need to restart your game or using the online shop mode to purchase the items from other players.

Overall the game is solid, leveling your weapons and character by killing the same monsters over and over again can become tedious, but is typically rewarding. The game never seems to drag, and all of the tedious tasks can be skipped and the game can be played through for the story alone in about 5 hours. Gathering everything and leveling up your weapons is a big part of the game, and will extend the life to about 10 hours for the first play through, there are also several different challenges after you beat the game, including playing through on hard mode with a level cap or using different characters to play through the game, also there is a boss rush mode which is also online that you can team up with a friend for. Overall, there is no reason to pass this game up if your a fan of the genre; if you plan to just run through the game for the story, it’s probably best suited for rental, but if your the type of gamer that loves to milk every ounce of value out of a game, there is plenty in Castlevania: PoR to justify it’s retail price.