Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow -- The Devil is in the Details.

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrows is the fourth game in the line GBA / NDS line of portable Castlevania games, and it shows. It shows in a good way. It shows in the details. Normally by the fourth game in a series it starts to show its age. It's not so with this line of portable Castlevania games. The systems being employed in each game help to break up bad familiarity. From Castlevania: Circle of the Moon's Dual Set-Up System, to Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance's Spell Fusion, to Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow's Tactical Soul System, how the games worked have been different each time. And that aspect works. On the other hand, there is a good familiarity to this line of games. All the creatures, weapons, castle locations, bosses, and music that appear from game to game help to insure that it feels like Castlevania. Both of these aspects are important and why this series of games has been so successful at maintaining its freshness without straying too far away from Castlevania. With Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow they were able to reuse the Tactical Soul System, given that the game is a sequel to Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. Adding the weapons fusion goes a little way at keeping it fresh. The touch aspect adds a little more freshness. I get the impression that the team knows what it's doing to the point of having it down cold. That seemingly allows for the team to mess around with the details. The little details. The kind of thing that you might not even notice, but they were far enough along and not rushed to the point where they could add these extras. Stuff like snow dropping off the cars in the village. The action specific animations you might never see depending on how you deal with certain enemies. Persephone for instance is a young French maid looking enemy. If you by chance happen to use a certain attack that causes a breeze, Persephone will stop what she's doing, cry out in shock, and attempt to keep her skirt from blowing up and revealing that she's presumably not wearing any panties. There are a bunch of these sort of little details that you just might never see. There are details in the backgrounds that you may or may not notice. Some of these really come into play if you're looking for completion of the soul collection. This game is full of these little details. I appreciate the extra effort. It's something more companies with long running series need to do better. Koji Igarashi really does this the right way.