Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia
Nintendo DS
Released: October 21, 2008

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia is the girlfriend that beats the kids and breaks your dishes, then makes the best damn food you’ve ever eaten.  Solid voice acting adds life to a forgettable story.  Great combat carries boring level design.  In a year where loading your game onto a Nintendo DS makes it a Game of the Year candidate for the platform, continuing Symphony of the Night’s legacy makes you a serious contender.  Unfortunately, Ecclesia plays like the beta test for an historic achievement.  Too bad you’re playing the finished product.

For centuries, the Belmonts turned their rivalry with Dracula into Steelers-Browns.  This time, the Order of Ecclesia (another defense against vamp boy) serves up Shanoa, a brunette whose defining personality trait is “boring mess”.  She’s like the fat chick who doesn’t say a word to anyone, only to go home and channel her rage with the samurai sword she bought after watching Kill Bill.  Developers: Cracking a smile may be for pussies, but when your boss screamed that gamers should be able to relate to the characters, that didn’t mean to make the protagonist completely uninteresting.  Not saying a memorable protagonist would have saved the uneventful story, but it would have kept the ending from hitting a totally cheesy side of sappiness.

Solution?  Enjoy the combat.  The game’s eight-bit-throwback difficulty will make the most of it.  Combat functions through a spell system that lets Shanoa transform her magic into a variety of weapons and passive abilities.  Left and right-handed weapons work through different buttons, turning a potential button-masher into a finesse game.  You will need that finesse.  Boss fights are easily the game’s best moments, and they will kick your ass.  The Halo fanboys will complain, but Ecclesia never becomes unfair.  As a famous man once said: “It’s fine, learn to counter.”

Too bad Ecclesia represents a metaphor for modern suburbia and its redundancy.  You know how JRPGs employed random battles, each one taking place in a pre-rendered environment?  By the time you’ve ventured through the sixth identical room in Dracula’s castle, you’ll be wondering if Kefka will come crashing through the wall.  Linear gameplay has quickly become a big no-no, and most levels can be covered by shredding any organism in your way.  The “Metroidvania” scheme put the series back on the map, but it only works if the backtracking requires and rewards player creativity.  Running the course of a dungeon to access “that thing you couldn’t reach” doesn’t cut it.

I don’t know how it compares with Symphony of the Night and its non-Portrait of Ruin offspring, but I feel like I played the Kelly Clarkson of video games: Brilliant voice that’s stuck singing lyrics straight from the music mill.  The game industry gets flak for its deadline-oriented production scheme, and if Ecclesia didn’t boast spectacular combat, people would be calling it a casualty of the system.  You enjoy side-scrollers?  Play it.  But when you’re finished, try to forget it could have been something special.

*** out of *****