Just finished playing through Castlevania: Circle of the Moon for the first time. I’d only previously played Aria of Sorrow in the GBA trilogy.
Circle of the Moon is a more impressive game.
The way the castle is designed gives the game classic Castlevania flow in that there is often a long journey between save rooms, with enemies hitting hard, forcing you to play consistently well. You frequently move through older areas to make your way to new ones, too, which reinforces the layout in your head.
The game doesn’t suffer from a lack of focus like other games in the series post-SoTN do. There are item drops, but they are few. Istead you can combine cards to create abilities, making every playthrough unique, with these abilities feeling well balanced for the most part.
What’s interesting is the game was made by a team within Konami Kobe who hadn’t been involved with Castlevania at all, despite Kobe’s involvement with Castlevania 64. Yet it’s every bit as expertly designed as the best games in the genre. It’s also refreshing to see sprite art that’s wholly original and separate to the Igarashi-produced titles.
Circle of the Moon is a trailblazer because it shows us that fresh, small teams can deliver their own take on the (sigh) “Metroidvania” formula and still knock it out the park.
No wonder the genre is so saturated now, but of course, not every developer is a master of their craft. CoTM is one of the few truly standout titles, I feel.
I absolutely adore it, the card system is so good, only slightly bested by the soul system from Aria and Dawn. the music is awesome as well (seriously its rendition of The Sinking Old Sanctuary is amazing and I’m glad it’s the song you hear the most during the game)
it also has my fav castle from the GBA games at least, each area is so memorable and you feel like you’re delving deeper into dangerous territory with each one unlike later games where you just go to some random garden or clown house late in games (or Portrait’s random portraits)
it also is quite a bit more difficult than the Igavanias which is a good thing. grinding for consumables so that you can best that colosseum gauntlet area is satisfying, not to mention for the cards themselves (though trying to get those last couple of cards in the colosseum is a step too far for me, that is a ridiculous amount of grinding and not worth it)
the only place I think it’s lacking is the controls, you constantly need to be running to do anything and double tapping gets old very quick (thankfully there is an auto dash hack that is a godsend). also the colors being too muted on the original GBA was an issue (that they later overcorrected on), but that’s not really an issue anymore
Overall I prefer Aria, Igarashi’s only outright great game.
But COTM is certainly the best designed of all the Metroid clone Castlevania games. Really well organised challenge and progression, and the cards system was nicely discreet, vs all the layered systems in the rest of the GBA/DS games which IMO are mostly cruft.
And incidentally it’s also by far the highest selling, including SOTN. What a strange situation where the team that made the smash hit game never got to make another one, but the team that made possibly the worst and ugliest Castlavania game (considering technology available and time of release), and worst selling main entry, Harmony of Dissonance, got to make half a dozen more.
As Akumagorath mentioned double tapping to run gets very annoying, and random drops are crap too, I loathe RPG loot as a concept. It also has a low number of animation frames for quite a few sprites, but as a first gen GBA game they were just getting a handle on it.
Harmony was such a drag in comparison to Circle. progression was so obtuse and while the main gimmick of the castle was a cool concept, the execution left a lot to be desired. and as you say it is pretty garish looking. easily my least favorite Metroidvania of the series but I still enjoy it
Wow, didn’t realise CoTM was the top selling game (I’m guessing that includes Famicom, since the original team was dissolved before the next gen games as they weren’t big sellers like TMNT)
From what I remember, Igarashi took on the role of “producer” for the western releases of CoTM in exchange for Konami green lighting yearly Castlevania from him and his team.
“When KCEK’s Circle of the Moon was planned for an American release, Igarashi requested to Konami’s American president to become the game’s producer in America, handling the PR. In return, the president requested Igarashi to produce a Castlevania game every year.”
We don’t have accurately tracked figures earlier than the late 90s, but realistically Castlevania 1 almost certainly sold quite a bit more. It had several reprints in North America, a couple of Famicom Disk and a cart release on Famicom. Definitely more than a million, probably multiple millions all up.
Loved this game and played it straight through as my first Game Boy Advance game. I was just enthralled by it from beginning to end, even on the dark screen at the time.
I intend to revisit it sometime on modern hardware (Analogue Pocket) just to see it again for the first time in color. lol
CotM was my first experience with castlevania and still the only one I’ve ever beaten. Nothing else in the series has grabbed me in quite the same way.
