A fun game that manages to mix it up for 75% of the game, but the final few hours are a letdown.
User Rating: 7.5 | Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin DS
The last Castlevania game that I played was Circle of the Moon for the GBA, so needless to say, it has been a while. Even so, I had a lot of fun playing this game... For the few six or seven hours. The weapon and enemy variety makes combat interesting, and the level design (which ranges from London to Egypt) kept the game feeling very fresh. The graphics in this game were very pleasing to the eye. The DS is obviously capable of handling some fantastic 2D visuals (which is what I think it should stick to) and Portrait of Ruin is the perfect representation of this. The best part about the game, however, is the music. The background tunes are all catchy, varied and set a perfectly exciting/eerie mood throughout the game. What I don't understand, though, is why the developers made the last four or five areas of the game, EXACT REPLICAS of previous areas with slightly different color schemes. This completely slows down the progression of the game, and for the final few hours, I found myself trudging through familiar locations just so I could reach the end of the game. This really doesn't make any sense to me at all. Why couldn't these portraits be cool locations across the globe? Half the fun of the first part of the game was the anticipation of what the next portrait will be like. I found this to be quite disappointing. Also, I found this game to be far, far easier than Circle of the Moon. While this wasn't a huge downside to me, it did make the game much shorter and made the overworld seem a bit smaller, since I was moving from location to location very quickly. Overall this is a good action game, but I really don't understand where the developers were going with the final few hours of it. And also, they have to ditch the anime art style. It completely undermines the atmosphere of the game. 
