Castlevania: Curse of Darkness -- Or Just Cursed?

I don't understand what's wrong here. I mean, Castlevania doesn't require anything special. There is nothing different about it. It doesn't demand something impossible to do in 3D and retain what makes it Castlevania. Yet somehow they can't get it right. The controls are simple enough. Left analog stick to move the character around. The right analog stick controls the camera. The square button is attack. The X button jumps. The triangle button is for abilities. Read that as magic.  The circle button is context sensitive. It's the final stronger blow in combat, it steals in combat, it examines, and it opens doors to new rooms. The R1 button guards. R1 + square to launch a ground based enemy into the air. The R2 button locks-on and disengages the lock-on. The L1 button centers the camera. The L2 button cycles between locked-on targets. The select button brings up the map. The start button brings up the submenu. The D-pad up or down cycles through your innocent devil commands. You can have them follow your command, have them fight as they wish, or have them guard. Left or right on the D-pad cycles through the innocent devil's abilities. Read that as your magic.  The controls are all very simple and quite traditionally mapped out. So what's the problem? Hector moves ploddingly and in a boxy manner. He's not as fast or agile as he should be. You need to lock-on to a lot of the targets to hit them and even then you're swinging around and missing a lot of the time. Locking-on to swift moving enemies will often cause the camera to spaz out as it follows their movement. You're doing this within the most generic looking art design I've ever seen. Beyond the character design that is. The world is just incredibly boring.  The game has you wandering through very long corridors that feel extended just to increase the game's overall size. The character art is the opposite. It's just all so fruity to the point of being ludicrous. There are a couple of decent aspects to the game. The innocent devil and item creation systems are great. In item creation you collect materials dropped from the enemies. You can also steal material from the enemies. You then combine this or that in various amounts to create all your weapons and armor. It's more fun to fiddle with what can be made than it is to play the actual game. The innocent devil system is an interesting take on the magic. The story, which happens to be the direct sequel to Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse has you playing as a devil forge-master. You can create innocent devils. These devils act as familiars that you can level up. As they level up they learn abilities that allow you to enter new areas of the castle. They also learn magic. You have control over when they use it. It's a simple system that actually works well. You can guide how they evolve. Creatures will drop evolution crystals when defeated. They will be color based depending on the weapon you use. Using a sword drops red crystals, using an ax drops blue and so forth. You can look at their charts and see what it will take to get them to go whichever route. They evolve to different looks and have different magic. Their core abilities will remain the same as you'll need those to get through certain areas of the castle. The load time in switching between the innocent devils is pretty long. You have to switch from the battle types to the healer well in advance because the game doesn't stop while it's loading the new devil in. You have to switch the devils from the submenu, which also sucks. They should have done it from the main game. The load time in general is pretty bad. Between each room it loads. You're loading for six to eight seconds every other minute or so for the whole game. I will try to finish this game, but I seriously question whether I'll be able to make it or not...