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CGA-2026-06 🦇🧛♀️🔥 REMOVE CARTRIDGE ⏏️ Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
The eclipse is over! Dracula is sealed. Again. Kinda? Who knows, man, this was a weird bout for him. Nostradamus has gotta have some more stuff in the tank for another Belmont, but for now let's just enjoy all the Axe Armor souls we farmed.
I hope you enjoyed Aria of Sorrow! Playing it again, I've found this game is comfort food - simple and straightforward, but clicky and fun. How does it match up to the rest of the genre, or series, for you? Did you try any mods? HOW DO YOU GET PAST THE WATERFALL?!
Join us in July when u/zod000 presents Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals!
Gonna kick off discussion with a bit of a goofy story. For this month, I decided to give Aria Alter a try! It rearranges the castle, giving a fresh experience with some additions like a revamped arena, some new puzzles, and a very different Clock Tower experience. Doing this made for a nice refresh. Would recommend! I also used a recolor mod. It has some interesting color changes, but definitely gives the game some vibrancy on a modern display. Would maybe recommend!
Of course, I saw a comments saying not to mix these specific two mods together. Checking the recolor, I noticed they patched some updates to accommodate Alter. How bad could it be?
Well, about a third of the way through the game I got to a bottom of a room where a bunch of platforms exist to go back up. It turned out they were completely non-functional, so I couldn't get out. That prompted me to break out the ol' Codebreaker cheats to give myself infinite jumps, avoiding a softlock. On the plus side, there was a Peeping Eye and I farmed it in case I was missing something... Nope. Would've been a cool puzzle?
Unfortunately then I got to the revamped arena. I haven't the slightest idea of how that's supposed to actually be coded, but a giant greenscreen-green bar on the right followed by an infinitely vertical repeating room probably wasn't it! After messing around with this, I went too far right and Soma discovered the actual castle exit, which is OOB. The game crashed, somehow sending me multiple saves back.
That, uh, was the end of my stint with Aria. Hmm. I might fight my way back through with 100% souls enabled for funsies to see if I can beat this. I saw one comment mention that the layout becomes "incomprehensible" later with these kinds of issues, which like a fever dream challenge? For now I gotta finish Deltarune before internet osmosis spoils me.
Glitches aside, I think the biggest takeaway I had replaying Aria is that Soma's jump reset feels so fucking good. The rhythm and finesse to most of the weapons it adds make you feel way better at this than you are. And I remembered it felt good, but past giving the combat a bit of a higher skill ceiling it makes the castle feel engaging to move through; each torch, each enemy to swat down, asks if you want to optimize it and develop your rhythm.
A review somewhere put recontextualization as a good term that makes a Metroidvania interesting - not just backtracking, but the ability for the game to make you look at its areas in a new manner, however that may be. There is backtracking here, but giving this fluid combat style spices up every generic hallway. It forces you to turn all the higher level actions into muscle memory, and as you bat the enemies which previously caused trouble aside the castle becomes more and more yours... I love how this game feels, and it's hard to imagine something like Hollow Knight without this flexible attack pattern.