Week of 09 Feb 2025
“He called me l-o-v-e-l-y!”
Achievements Earned In:
- Castlevania Dominus Collection
I had a bit of a lull in my plans since my “Bad” Game of 2024 game for February was so short, so I thought I’d have some fun… and play MultiVersus. This is a very cool and fun Smash Bros. clone starring characters from across Warner Bros properties. But, as you can see, the banner isn’t for that! As I played I noticed no achievements were popping, and some quick reading around the ‘net revealed this to be an ongoing issue. As much as I wanted to play it before the servers were closed, I’m not taking a chance. So, instead I went for something else I wanted to play: the Castlevania Dominus Collection (bought for me by TommyToday). There have been two collections previously that had come to Xbox with achievements, but they were games pulled from “traditional” consoles; this is a collection of the Castlevania entries from the Nintendo DS. But, here they are! They decided to split the screen to display both top and bottom screens, alongside a helpful enemies portion with all their drops and such. There are three titles included, and I actually owned them all back in the day. My first issue with this collection is in relation to the achievements, in that they’re all solely tied to beating the mandatory bosses, with one additional achievement for each game to play the alternate post-game character. I don’t know, just kind of disappointing.
I started on Monday with Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, which I’d played a little on DS but never made any progress. This is the most recent of the three in the collection, but I can kinda see why I put this down in my Metroidvania heyday: this game is hard. Or at least it would be if I didn’t have save states and a rewind feature, but I didn’t wanna use that if I didn’t have to. The reason this is so tough is the lack of options, where the resistances and weaknesses of the enemies weigh heavier on your playing than any of the other “modern” entries in the series. You also have a handful of weapons/Glyphs you can use, and every swing of a sword or lance costs MP. It’s kind of a pain, and just doesn’t do it for me in particular when every enemy doesn’t have the chance of dropping some incredibly powerful sword or a creampuff. I made it through easily enough, though, using rewind to save myself much pain. It’s also a very linear game, so I was following a guide at first to help with getting any secrets and such but soon dropped that strategy for just barreling forward. Once you complete the game, you then have to replay as Albus, locking your loadout to his attacks. It was a quick sprint through, though, since his attacks are powerful and his skills allow you to skip chunks of the game. Definitely one of my least favorite post-Symphony of the Night games in the series.
Next up was Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. This is much more like a the Sorrow games, or spiritual successor Bloodstained, so I’m enjoying this a lot. It can always be faster, but I love grinding enemies until I get all their drops recorded, which is extending the playthrough a good bit even though I’m pretty efficient at killing the required enemies. I only made it through the first couple bosses before the week ended, but I can’t imagine this will be much longer. Even better, this is much easier and I’ve rarely had to use any of the added features!
Achievements unlocked: 21 (+21) | Completion: 40%
Oh… oh, you were just a normal maid. I’m so sorry.
Highest ratio: 2.72
Wielder of Magical Gun Agartha (Castlevania Dominus Collection)
Lowest ratio: 1.14
Order of Ecclesia (Castlevania Dominus Collection)
