CGA-2026-06 🦇🧛‍♀️🔥 REMOVE CARTRIDGE ⏏️ Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

CGA Announcement: We have officially ejected the cartridge for Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow.

This topic is for people to share their parting thoughts and experiences. Spoilers are NOT required to be hidden for this topic, so if you're reading this before you've finished, be careful about reading any comments here.

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Aria impressed me.

I didn't replay it for CGA, but I played it for the first time last year, so my playthrough is still recent enough to talk about (though some of the finer details have been lost to time).

It's hard to think of it as a Game Boy Advance game, because it feels so substantial. It stands tall alongside Symphony of the Night, that defining PlayStation classic, despite being made for a portable pocket console with a native resolution of 240x160 and cartidges that held a whopping 32 megabytes.

It looks great. It's got a big world. It's got big ideas. There's so MUCH there, crammed into such a tiny little package.

During my playthrough, I tried to avoid looking up information as I played. It's easy these days to just pull up a wiki, min-max optimally, and find the best items and secrets, and call it a day. It's efficient, and I'm not above doing this for some games.

But for this one I wanted to put myself back in the old-school mindset where we didn't have on-demand access to that information unless we bought a strategy guide. Instead, we had to stumble on secrets ourselves, get (and sometimes stay) lost, play suboptimally, etc.

Of course, this meant that I did get frustrated during my playthrough. I did get lost. Navigating rooms over and over again got a tad annoying.

But it also helped me understand that this is genuinely intended as a part of the game's design. The experience and soul system are meant to be built-in rewards for having to traverse the same rooms and fight the same enemies repeatedly. The game knows you're going to have to backtrack and revisit and whatnot, so it tries to make that less frustrating.

If you were to play this game fully optimally, I assume you'd be significantly underleveled for most of the boss fights. Heck, for some of them I had to grind a bit a lot beforehand because I kept getting absolutely smoked, though this probably says more about my general lack of skill at videogames than it does the game itself.

I loved all of the different abilities the game gives you via the souls, though admittedly swapping between them got clunky at times. If they ever remake the game, I'd love more QoL with regards to activating/using them. Going into the menu repeatedly to swap out what's equipped kills the game flow a bit.

But again, I can't really complain about that because this game was made over 20 years ago with all of those aformentioned limitations. I think it's aged very gracefully and is still worth playing today.

This was fun, and my first time playing this game, or for that matter, any of the Castlevania games that lend their name to the Castlevania half of the Metroidvania genre. (I have played and beat the original linear Castlevania and Super Castlevania IV games, back before Metroidvanias were a thing; so this wasn't my first Castlevania title; just my first of the later era.)

Time-wise, I very much appreciated that this was a shorter game. I'd just come off of a 160 hr play through of Dragon Quest XI S, so this was a nice palette cleanser.

I just finished it last night, rushing through the last few zones to Graham, Julius, and Chaos in one setting. Oddly of the three, I found Julius the hardest. He killed me a couple of times and I had to burn a ton of potions and consumables on him; mostly because he was fast and could be hard to hit. By comparison, Chaos was super easy - there were so many little things that I could attack for hits that I was getting a constant health infusion via the Succubus soul. I think I ended with something like a 99.8% map completion; I'm not sure what I missed.

The difficulty curve was interesting. There was a fun point mid-game where I accidentally found the Claimh Solais once I'd found my way past the waterfall. (Okay, yes, I had to look up the waterfall - it was obvious that there was supposed to be a way past it, given the armor sitting there under it.) That, plus that armor made the game feel brokenly easy for a little bit midway through, until late game the enemies started to catch up again - somewhere around the Arena. And speaking of the Arena - grrr... that one long room with the conveyor belts, spikes, and medusa heads... I can honestly say that room killed me more than any of the bosses! But yeah, that sword carried through the second half of the game. (The chain sword was my main weapon through most of the first half.)

The soul switching mechanic was interesting, but got a bit tedious. I think I like games slightly better where you outright get key powerups rather than having to farm them until they randomly drop. Sure, most of the key ones are given to you outright for defeating certain bosses. But things like the Gargoyle soul sure helped when I finally got it late game and made it easier to revisit areas with medusa heads and cockatrices. I also found myself really wishing the the Skula soul was just one of those automatic permanent upgrades (like the Hippogryph soul which was pretty awesome, but came so late in the game that I didn't real have any use for it, nor did it have any puzzles built around it, which was a shame).

I loved the sprite work/animation and some of the sound design. There was something about the fluidity and style of the sprite work that made me think that I could easily have been playing an arcade game. Especially little details like when you the knock-back as you destroy a torch or sarcophagus and it falls to pieces that bounce a little, with a nice bass thump. Likewise the colors and the shadows. It seemed like it could would have been suitable as a Neo Geo game a few years earlier.

Oh! One thing I did find odd and a bit of a miss was the cut scenes and dialogues with NPCs. I'm not sure what was up with the translation, but I felt like I was getting half the story, and that garbled through a game of telephone or something. So many stilted and random disconnected-feeling sentences. Usually I love a good story-heavy game and savor the dialogue. But on this one, I just kinda started skimming through it, which I pretty much never do. Oh well. It was mostly about the action anyway.

Anyway, those were my first-time impressions.

I had some challenges getting into this one, but those had nothing to do with the game as it was originally released. Rather they came from the Steam version, my bone-headedness, and what turned out to be a faulty controller.

Once I got things working, I fell in love with the music. Occasionally, it reminded me of Chrono Trigger's soundtrack. I could also appreciate the graphics, although they probably work much better on GBA than a TV.

As for the gameplay itself, I think it's a very well made metroidvania, but it doesn't seem to take many risks. I didn't come across anything out of the ordinary, particularly inventive, or downright crazy. The level design was polished, but a little forgettable. It also felt quite easy, especially the further I progressed. The story and characters were similarly passable, but not particularly memorable.

The enemy absorbing mechanic is interesting, but I'm also one of those players who dislikes micromanaging gear to a point where I often play games without really changing my starting setup. (Most crafting, base building and party management systems are similarly beyond my patience.) So, the main aspect that makes Aria of Sorrow unique happened to be something that I don't really care for that much. Again, definitely not the game's fault.

So, I would call this a very well made game, just not something that I will remember all that fondly. Except for that music! Oh boy was that good.

Since this is CGA's first metroidvania title, I'd love to hear what everyone's favourite games in the genre are. Do you gravitate more towards the minimalism of Metroid or the complexity of Castlevania? Do you prefer the challenge of something like Silksong or the relative chill of the Ori series?

My own favourites are probably Super Metroid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (a boring start, I know), Shadow Complex, Axiom Verge and Yoku's Island Express. I might also argue that Sekiro is something of a metroidvania and as such belongs to that list.

Aria of Sorrow was my first encounter with Castlevania, which I had back in 2021 while visiting my sister-in-law's house on a road trip. I don't remember what sparked my interest, but I downloaded the ROM on my laptop I had with me and transferred it over to my Vita. Over the next week or so, I completed it and then went on to the other two GBA games, which I found very much inferior.

Since then, I've kind of felt that I've had my fill of Metroidvania style games. I went on to later beat Symphony of the Night over the course of about a year or more, but that really felt like a slog to me. Since then, I've repeatedly started Dawn of Sorrow on DS, gotten a ways through it and then put it down; incidentally, I was playing that just before starting Aria again for this particular CGA.

I definitely enjoyed going back to this one, much more so than playing DoS, which I just haven't found very inspiring. I did think that I would end-up completing this one all the way through again, but I actually only ended-up getting about 68% map completion before going back to a different game I had been playing.

I still very much enjoyed going back to it and I think it's the best of the (very few) Metroidvania's I've played, but it also leads me back to this idea I keep having everytime I try to play Dawn of Sorrow, that being, I think I'm done with the Metroidvania formula. It's not bad by any means and I do tend to be a natural explorer in games, but side scrolling platforming and exploration doesn't appeal to me in the same manner that third person or first person exploration does; maybe this means I need to finally try the Metroid Prime series (never played one outside of a demo kiosk, ages ago).

Little post to express my admiration on the spritework. It's gorgeous! I think that for a time the GBA (and later on the DS) was the last bastion of quality sprite, until indie game made pixel art cool again.