So yes. I’m going to assume that, if you’re reading this far, you’re reading it because you’ve played the game already, or don’t plan to, and just like hearing me talk. I’m not trying to sell this game to you. Hell, if Konami had sent me the game for free, I’d at least feel some duty. They didn’t, though. I received my copy of the game from one Philip Kollar as an answer to a plea for Gameboy games that I posted on my livejournal. He also sent me Metroid Fusion, which I honestly don’t like one bit. They should have called it Metroid Run ‘n’Gun Puzzle Challenge, and it bores me, and I will speak no more of it.
Ahem.
I will spoil Aria of Sorrow’s story now, for the greater good:
Soma Cruz is a girlish boy in the year 2035. He’s an exchange student in Japan. Together with his school friend Mina Hakuba, he goes to the Hakuba Shrine on the day of the total eclipse. He is warped, without warning, inside the eclipse. Inside the eclipse, of course, is where Dracula’s Castle is . . . held. He awakens, meets a man named Genya Arikado, who is of course Alucard, hero of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and learns quickly of his power to steal souls from monsters. Arikado tells him to go to the throne room, the one Dracula used to inhabit before he was killed for good 35 years ago. This is the goal of his quest: to go to the throne room, just because. Kookily warped inside of a Romanian castle inside of a solar eclipse, a white-haired South-American girl-boy with some vague interest in Japanese linguistics and really nice jeans launches himself toward a vampire’s throne room; in fifty seconds, he smashes a container and is rewarded with a "grave keeper" soul, which allows him to back-dash with a press of the L button. He will never, ever, have to use this back-dash (unless you count that one time, of course), though careful use of it can make simple monster fights at least look like thrilling duels.
Soon, he meets a man who calls himself "J." This man has no memory of the past predating 35 years ago. He is, however, exactly 35 years older than your typical vampire hunter. Just for the hell of it, you soon cross paths with Yoko Belnades, who, at the end of the day, serves no significance in the story. Her last name, however, is the same as that of Sypha Belnades, magician of Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse. She later gets stabbed by a man named Graham Jones, just so Arikado can show up to whisk her to the front gates. Graham Jones stabs her, of course, because he believes he’s Dracula. He believes he’s Dracula because he’s a missionary to Romania, he wears a nice suit, has an evil enough face, and was born at the exact moment of the exact day Dracula died. When you finally rush to the throne room to meet Graham, now sporting some vicious magic attacks, he falls quickly to your superior power. If you’ve got the right souls positioned in your inventory (the proper positioning is hinted at, and boldly, by way of three magical books which you might not need to collect), at the conclusion of the battle, Soma will become aware that Graham is not Dracula, because Soma is Dracula. Arikado will confirm this. You are then awarded with Dracula’s Tunic and a soul power that lets you dash thank god how much longer was I going to have to wait for a dash ability I mean hell. You then work your way to the floating garden, an area you’ve been to before, in all probability. There’s a part of one room you never needed to go to before. If you can make it there, you find a save chamber, and just outside that save chamber, a skeleton with a little red cape. This skeleton, the only one of its kind in the castle, jumps back and forth while delivering a karate kick. It’s baffling to look at this guy. How the hell did he get here? To be honest, the moment I saw the karate-kicking skeleton, I wanted his soul, so I had it. I kept entering and exiting the save room so I could kill the skeleton, until he yielded his soul.
The thing with souls -- you kill an enemy, and there’s something like a five-percent chance it’ll yield its soul. Its soul can be red, blue, or . . . an orange-ish color. The red souls are "bullet souls" Equip one via the status screen, and then press up on the control pad along with the B button to fire that respective soul’s weapon. (The best one by far, I’ve found, is the "Lightning Doll" which can hit enemies like three times, if you know how to use it, and/or hit an entire screen of enemies at once, if you know where to aim it.) A blue soul is one you activate with the R button. These include the "Floating Armor," which lets you glide in your jumps, or the "Shadow Knight," whose giant shadow appears above you, slashing his sword as you slash yours. The other souls -- the orange-y ones -- are souls that are always in effect. Like "Succubus," which, as long as its equipped, allows you to leech five hit points of life out of an enemy every time you attack. Soma can draw these powers from enemies, we know all along if we’re not mentally retarded, because he is Dracula reincarnated.
Witness, then, this Kicker Skeleton’s power -- it’s a jumping kick. Not just that -- it’s free of magic-point usage. You jump up, you jump again (with the double-jump ability in place, that is), and then you press down on the control pad and the A button to launch yourself downward at an enemy. Collide correctly, and you hit him, and bounce back up, where you’re free to kick again, like Chun-Li’s heel-kick in Street Fighter II. Needless to say, you don’t need this attack. Yet the bare fact that it exists is beyond compelling. I have trained myself to use this. I can gleefully hop around the entrance hall of the castle, from zombie-head to zombie-head, with this downward kick.
Yet I’m getting ahead of myself. What I really want to do is tell you what happens after Soma crosses this Kicker Skeleton’s path again, on his way to the final encounter. See -- you meet Julius Belmont, formerly known as "J," and he’s full of rage. He is holding the legendary Vampire Killer whip. He wants to fight you, and fight you he does. When you’re done fighting him, Soma is angry. He accuses Julius of holding back. Julius, who had been, perhaps, the game’s toughest boss fight by far, says he held back because he detected Soma’s righteousness trying to fight the influence of Dracula’s power. Soma tells him, I’m going to go fight the evil within my soul. If I don’t win, promise to come back here and kill me.
This is an airtight little bit of exposition: Soma declares that Julius’ power was way, way shackled. As gamers, no matter how hardcore we are, we know that Julius was one hell of a tough boss, and one accompanied by the game’s only noteworthy piece of rock music, even if we beat him on our first try. So we know, for sure, if Soma says -- and says so surely -- that Julius was taking it easy, that if Soma really does become Dracula, and Julius comes back to the throne room to see Soma, Julius will, without doubt, win. He is, after all, a Belmont, and Belmonts kill Dracula, because that is their destiny.
(Aside): wouldn’t it be an interesting spin on the Belmont legacy to make a life-sim / dating-sim / adventure game about one of the lesser Belmonts, one that never had to kill Dracula, one whose father didn’t even have to kill Dracula, and about how he’s trained to learn to use axes, boomerangs, and the whip while living on a farm in Romania in the mid-1800s, in the midst of courting the future Vampire Hunter’s mother, harvesting crops, and milking goats, kind of like Harvest Moon with vampire-killing-training thrown in?)
After this fight with Julius, Soma enters the Chaotic Realm, a sepia-toned rehash of earlier segments of the castle, one which ends with Soma hacking away with, ideally, Ronginus (Engrish for "Longinus"), at the black-hole anus of the dark core of his soul. The boss battle makes us yawn. Once or twice. And then we wake up, and witness the "Good Ending." Fail -- perhaps the real challenge! -- and witness the "Bad Ending," in which Julius enters Dracula’s throne room to find Soma sitting on the throne. "It’s time to make good on that promise," Julius says. Soma throws a wine glass down onto the floor, and the credits begin. We know, of course, that Julius will win. Just as we know that the evil within Soma’s soul was a far easier boss than Julius; Julius is tougher than even the pure evil within Soma. That’s why he’s going to win.
Rewinding back a bit -- the battle with Julius is the high point of the game. This is the climax of the game. This is the moment where the game goes from being a Castlevania game to being a hell of a Castlevania game. This is where it succeeds, and, ultimately, where it begins to fail. It is perfection, and it is because of this perfection that the imperfection of the Chaotic Realm and its ho-hum final boss must exist. We need that after-battle dialogue to seal Soma’s fate. We need to know Julius is the real bad motherfucker here, not Soma. Once we know this, we are free. The game is free. However, it is only free to end. As a piece of narrative, it can only end by winding down into misery. Into sorrow. It sings its last aria, so to speak, and it’s a slow, unmoving one.
Ahem.
Back on track, now, gentlemen: The Julius Battle is Bad-Ass. Julius moves like a Belmont. He jumps like a Belmont. He whips like a Belmont. He slides, he kicks, and he throws holy water. As a boss, he is exactly the same height and width as Soma. Yet we have no trouble hitting him -- and he has no trouble hitting us. This battle is a revelation in more than ten unique ways, and it rings far truer than that battle between Alucard and Richter at the pseudo-end of Symphony of the Night. In that battle, Richter is a man possessed by demon-power. If we have the right glasses, we can see the possessing demon. In that case, we fight, being careful only to hit the floating evil above Richter’s head. If we want the shitty ending, we go for it, fighting Richter as a man fights another man when one of them has white hair and is half-undead. Yet Richter, perhaps because the game requires him to be sucked of his soul, is a pansy in the fight. He doesn’t feel like he has a shred of artificial intelligence in him anywhere. He lacks gusto. Comparing him to a real player-controlled Belmont is like comparing one of those god-awful boring puzzle-battles ("Dodge the barreling fat man four times to WIIIIIN!") in Shenmue II to a good, solid match of Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution.
I’m sure Aria of Sorrow producer Koji "IGA" Igarashi remembers the Richter fight well; the battle with Julius is his way of making amends. Julius moves with the strength, anger, and l33t sk1lz of a seasoned game-player playing a Castlevania game. Somehow, he’s changing his weapons, attacking us with holy water one minute, axes the next, boomerangs the next, and then jump-kicking our skulls in. We don’t complain about his tactic-switching, because by this point we’ve probably changed our lead weapon soul about four times. The battle pulls us in, and when we finally win, we want to do it again, and again.
The game cannot live up to this battle because, clearly, this battle is the game’s one shining moment, and perhaps the one clever idea in IGA’s head that spurred him to make this game in the first place -- we are, for the first time, controlling Dracula himself against a Belmont who’s thinking of a real purpose. What’s more is that there’s something emotional going on behind that Belmont’s purpose. This makes it something of a taut little struggle. And it makes me thirst, for blood . . .
. . . the blood of player-versus-player online Castlevania!!!
Yes, I’ve harped on this before, and now I’m going to do it again! God damn it, bear with me, and I’ll kill you and your internet-fearing dog!
[NEXT]
|
