Dawn of Sorrow: Reviewed by Darkmoon

US Release Date: 10/4/2005
System: Nintendo DS
Players: 1 (with limited online features)

Dawn of Sorrow Extras:

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Dawn of Sorrow, I will admit right off the bat, is the sole reason I ended up with a NintendoDS to begin with. If a CV game hadn't come out on the system, I wouldn't have even wanted one at all. When you think about it, that puts a lot of preconcieved hype, on my part, on the game. To say that it lives up to the hype is high praise, and about the best review I can give for the game. It is among my top favorite CV games ever.

The main reason why DoS ranks so highly for me is because, like with CotM and SCV4 before it (my other favorites), it strikes the righ balance of fun and challenge. It's not easy, but not frustrating. For me, it is as fun to play as Symphony, and luckily, a little harder to, so I was actually sweating in most cases. I haven't had a challenge in a CV game since CotM.

All gushing aside, let's go over the basics of the game itself. We pick up some time after Aria. A new villainess, Celia, has come forward, and she wants to resurrect the Dark Lord. Her hope is to use Soma for it, but if she has to find some other suitable host for the Dark spirit, she will. And so, Soma gets sucked into another adventure, one where he has to fight his inner demons and save the day, or become the Dark Lord and doom the world.

The game features a few improvements over the previous game. Firstly, the Soul system has been drastically improved. Now, not only do you collect souls to use powers, as in Aria, but the more souls you collect, the more power the souls are. Having 5 Student Witch souls makes the Student Witch power that much more powerful than having just one soul of it.

More intriguing, for me anyway, is the Weapon Synthesis system. Instead of finding more powerful weapons on enemies and scattered around the castle, you actually forge your own weapons (with the help of Yoko). A partocular weapon can have a soul forged into it, making it an even better weapon. They make the system a little easier than it needs to be by only allowing for so many souls to be forged into particular weapons, and having specific levels that each weapon can attain and max at. Having you be able to forge any kind of soul into a weapon for all kinds of powers would have been cooler, if more difficult to control and implement.

The touch screen is also used, but in this case only with limited success. The main feature of the screen is for the use of Magic Seals. You will find sealed doors around the castle that block access to Boss fights. You have to find the right seals to open the doors, and then you have to use them again, in the boss fight, once the boss is low enough in energy. At this point, you have to draw the seal as it is shown (there is a bit of a tutorial with each seal), or the boss will gain more energy and the fight will continue. I'm not really much for the boss seals. Having to find keys to doors is fine, but the seals don't really feel like a part of the action, just an annoyance that's only partially related to the action on screen.

The other main use of the screen is the ability to destroy some crystal squares that block your path in the game. You can draw paths, staircases, whatever. This is a silly addition that was obviously thrown in because there was a touch screen in the system, and nothing more.

The game plays and controls otherwise just like Aria, at least in all the ways that game was good. It is, as I said, more difficult, especially in the boss battles. It is also in many ways prettier, although the main hero sprites seem very flat in comparison to everything else in game.

In many ways, the best part of the game, though, is Julius Mode. Being far more advanced than same mode in Aria, this mode features Julius goign through the castle on his quest. As a bonus, though, you get to take Yoko (who plays much like Sypha in CV3) and Alucard/Arkikado (in his SotN form). It plays like a very CV3 kind of mode. For you oldschoolers, it even harder than the Soma mode, which really makes this mode a blast to play. Sadly, you can't use items, or collect souls, or even, for that matter, see how close you are to your next experience level, so it's still not as fleshed out as it could be. It is a blast to play though, and a great second trip through the castle.

The simple truth is, if you liked Aria, this game is gonna be a blast for you. In fact, if you like any of the Castleroids at all (the SotN style games), you'll like DoS. It is everything people have been hoping for in a follow-up since SotN came out many moons ago.

Score: 8.3 out of 10