Metroidvanias can be a tough sell for me. Part of that is because after playing Hollow Knight, the bar is almost impossibly high, but frankly many of them feel a little same-y to me. Walk down a corridor, explore a little, fight a boss, get a power up, explore the area you couldn’t explore before, fight more enemies, wash, rinse, repeat. Even in 2024, when there are a plethora of options out there that iterate on previous concepts to great success, I still fall off of around 80% of them.
For some reason, the Iga-vania Castlevania games fall in that other 20%. They combine excellent atmosphere, tight gameplay, and banging soundtracks with progression that feels uncommonly good. So, as a first-time player of the three DS games within the Castlevania Dominus Collection — Dawn of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin, and Order of Ecclesia — I expected greatness but with gameplay similar to Symphony of the Night. What I found most pleasantly surprising is that they each have different flavors; they experiment and iterate on what has come before, and while they all have their flaws, are still excellent games that stand toe to toe with most of what the genre is doing today.
M2 and Konami did an admirable job with the packaging for these games, too. Along with the three Iga-vania titles, they included the original Haunted Castle arcade game: the second Castlevania title. I didn’t play much of it because the difficulty is brutal, to put it mildly, and I can’t imagine anyone would find it that fun nowadays. Luckily, they’ve also added a brand new remake, Haunted Castle Revisited, which is a much better looking (think late 90s arcade style) take on the game, along with lowering the difficulty significantly. It’s a fun bonus that is completely unnecessary but shows the care they put into this collection.
Of course, the biggest adjustment necessary for the Dominus Collection was translating DS games to play on one screen. The default view for the trio has the action centered on the left side of the screen in 4:3, with the map and status screen on the right side. You can adjust it to have the map on the top and the action happening on the bottom, and you can also have the map or status screen up independently, or make the right-side screens smaller. This mostly works, but I wish you had the option to fill the screen with the game and go into a (larger) map in the menu. The smaller map often made it challenging for me to read the map correctly, an issue exacerbated by my colorblindness. It’s a minor quibble, but it definitely detracted from the package.
That’s okay, though, because all the added quality-of-life features make these games go down smoothly. They give you soundtracks (which is good because the music is still excellent), and art galleries, and even let you play different versions of the games from various regions. There’s a rewind function to go back roughly 30 seconds at any point, and you can save at any point. It all comes together to create a lovely package for these previously hard-to-access games.
In terms of the games themselves, Dawn of Sorrow plays it the safest of the three. As a direct sequel to Aria of Sorrow, you play as Soma and once again explore a massive castle as you try to thwart a cult that wants to (you guessed it) resurrect Dracula. Like previous Castlevania games, the castle is one continuous map that gradually opens up as you gain more abilities. Outside of Symphony, it might be the best map in the Iga-vania series. It’s incredibly intricate, the areas are varied, and it takes some real thought to figure out how to get to certain areas. It’s the highlight of the game, and even with more than a few recycled enemies and bosses, makes Dawn feel like its own entity.
The Tactical Soul system from Aria is back, where enemies drop abilities when they die sometimes, allowing Soma to equip and use them. It adds a ton of versatility to the game, yet as cool as this is in concept, I wasn’t a big fan of it in Aria, and I’m even less of a fan here. It feels like 30% of the enemies drop souls at a painfully low rate, and the Luck stat is still broken in this version, too. Sometimes you need these drops to access part of the castle, while other times fundamental weapon upgrades require incredibly rare souls. It makes soul farming feel like a chore, and I didn’t have patience for the grind.
The most unique part of Dawn of Sorrow is the Magic Seal system. On the DS, you need to use the stylus and touchscreen to draw a pattern to seal the bosses after defeating them. If you fail, the boss gets some HP back. On the PS5 version, they’ve simplified it into a set of button presses, and with a little quick practice, it’s pretty easy to get down. It still feels like a weird gimmick that doesn’t add anything to the experience.
Thankfully, Portrait of Ruin ditches the touchscreen gimmicks, and its additions make the gameplay unique and rewarding. This time you play as two characters, Jonathan Morris (the son of John Morris from Castlevania: Bloodlines) and his friend Charlotte as they explore Dracula’s Castle in 1944. You switch between Jonathan and Charlotte, allowing you to use two completely different playstyles and sometimes even solve puzzles. Switching between them is quick and buttery smooth, and while I preferred Jonathan’s more melee-focused move set, having Charlotte there to fire off a spell at just the right moment makes combat in Portrait of Ruin a blast.
Exploration in Portrait of Ruin is a little different, too. Dracula’s Castle is significantly smaller than the massive map in Dawn of Sorrow; instead, you jump into different paintings to explore wildly different maps, like a pyramid or the streets of London. This is both a blessing and a curse. At first, it’s awesome to play a Castlevania game where you’re exploring a wide variety of settings. Most of the maps are pretty good, too. Exploration is a lot more linear as a result, though, and halfway through you have to explore “inverted” versions of the earlier portraits, which makes the game feel a little repetitive and padded. Regardless, I liked that I was exploring a little differently from a normal Castlevania game, so the portrait system is largely a success.
The Dominus Collection is capped off with the crown jewel of DS Castlevania games: Order of Ecclesia. Almost everything is a step up from the previous two games, even the story, which is actually pretty good this time around. You play as Shanoa, a member of the titular Order of Ecclesia, a group researching how to combat Dracula while the Belmonts are nowhere to be found. Shanoa is chosen as the human vessel for Dominus, a set of three magical glyphs meant to keep Dracula at bay. Before the ritual can begin, though, Shanoa’s adoptive brother Albus steals Dominus and Shanoa’s memories and runs away. Shanoa goes after Albus and discovers he’s kidnapped almost every member of a local village. As you continue your pursuit, you rescue the villagers along the way.
The story doesn’t go anywhere amazing from there, but there are some fun twists and turns. However, it does lead to my favorite side quest type in a Metroidvania: rescuing townspeople who, in turn, give you quests and sell you items. I’m sure it’s just the Suikoden fan in me, but I’m a sucker for “recruiting” people and helping to put a town back together. Most are simple fetch quests, but it makes the story land significantly better than previous entries for me.
Order of Ecclesia also presents heavily refined gameplay. Shanoa gains all her abilities through different kinds of “glyphs,” equippable magical spells that allow her to use weapons, spells, and other common Metroidvania abilities. You can use three of them at a time, which means you can hit an enemy with a scythe and then a hammer in quick succession. This leads to a lot of fun strategizing about enemy weaknesses, and the ability to use multiple abilities at once makes it a breeze. Order of Ecclesia is easily the most difficult of these three games, but engaging with the combat was so fun I didn’t mind.
The only real knock I have on Order of Ecclesia is just how linear the first half of the game is. You don’t reach a large “Metroidvania” map until the second half, and the first is full of smaller levels to progress through. There’s little exploration, and some maps are literally a straight line. I understand why they made this choice, but it definitely takes something away from the experience.
So, yes, Igarashi is a genius, and the brilliance of his Castlevania games still holds up. Is this collection perfect? No. Each game has different flaws, and there are some minor issues with the overall presentation. Nonetheless, the DS trilogy in the Castlevania Dominus Collection are all clean, tight experiences with just enough experimentation to make each of them excellent and unique, even in a market flooded with Metroidvanias. Put simply, even 16 years later, Castlevania is still a genre giant.
