The third Castlevania installment for the Game Boy Advance, bringing the tale of Castlevania to the 21st century and putting players in the shoes of Soma Cruz, a seemingly-normal guy who has the power to absorb souls of the castle's demons.
We're another day closer to the end of E3. Doesn't that sound swell? I mean, sure, it's really only just started, but there's no reason we can't be optimistic about it.
Talking of optimism, what's more friendly and inviting than a gothic castle full of demons? Not a whole lot, is what. The Week of the Randomizers continues today with Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, perhaps the second best of the IGAvania spacewhippers and certainly the easiest technologically-speaking to put through the randomization gauntlet. If you're not sure what a randomizer is and whether or not it's for you, be sure to get caught up with this in-depth A Link to the Past Randomizer LP, and maybe check some of the other Randomizers we've looked at during E3 2018 by referring to the table at the bottom of this blog. Just hit PgDn a few times; there's more than a few screenshots in your way.
Day -1: "A Arrival of a Nice Ass or Two"
The Game: Konami's Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, released for the Game Boy Advance in 2003. (Anyone looking to play it today might want to check the Wii U Virtual Console while it's still active.)
The Rules of the Randomizer: Aria of Sorrow is functionally similar to A Link to the Past in terms of randomization potential, in that so much is contingent on finding out where the randomizer has stashed all the progression-necessary items. That said, this one's a little more straightforward because of how the IGAvanias tend to gate off so much of themselves from those without the right gear: for instance, if 70% of the game is inaccessible until you find the double-jump, there aren't a whole lot of places it could logically be hiding. (Far as I know, the creator of this randomizer has ensured it's possible to finish the game by not stashing necessary upgrades in places you can't reach without them.)
That said, for as simple as the AoS Randomizer is, it can create some big sweeping changes to the game's challenge level if nothing else. You essentially have three flags you can activate: the first randomizes the souls and item drops that you get from enemies, the second switches all the item locations in the environment (including the sconces that give you special souls, like the double jump), and the third randomizes Hammer's storefront, the prices for the new items presumably based on their sale value.
The difficulty these randomizers provide, it must be stated for the record, doesn't necessarily correlate to the standard degree of challenge you'd normally be facing with the game's bosses, traps, and level design. You'll probably find a lot of powerful items early on that'll mitigate most of that trouble. Instead, the true difficulty (with AoS at least) comes from figuring out the wholly new path to the true ending. If you're not quite sure what I mean, I'll get into more detail with the screenshots, but suffice it to say that there are certain wrinkles in this randomized run that'll have Aria of Sorrow veterans (and speedrunners, especially) sweating bullets. (Oh, and since I'll be talking about true endings and such, there might be a few spoilers to that effect.)
The Playthrough:
Aria of Sorrow doesn't quite have the expansive range of alternative paths that A Link to the Past does, but I sort of suspected that might be the case. If it wasn't for the fact I was more familiar with Aria of Sorrow, this slot might've been taken up by Super Metroid and probably would've reached a similar conclusion. There's a lot of funnelling going on in these spacewhipper games; they want you to fight the bosses in a semi-set order, reaching new traversal abilities in the areas behind each boss room, and use that to access a higher-level area with the next boss in the sequence.
Taking away the traversal-enabling items, which seemed to be barely randomized, you essentially have the same kind of progression-skipping and item "cheating" that we saw in EarthBound yesterday. Fun, especially if you've beaten the original game more times than you can count, but it doesn't really shake things up in a significant manner beyond the insidious challenge of determining and finding the new correct trio of souls for that pivotal boss fight. If anything, I may have preferred the silly humor of the EarthBound Reshuffler's sprite switching and name generators, but I also think the whole item randomizer idea is still perhaps a little more apropos to a spacewhipper.
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