Mobile and ready
Castlevania as a franchise isn’t super important anymore. Lately it’s polygonal titles (and even a 2D one) have been good to middling to crap according to online aggregate scores. While I’ve never really been captivated by the series, lately I just have not given a shit about Castlevania games. I don’t think I’m missing out. Castlevania has had some real good games though. Supposedly the franchise’s handheld titles have been pretty phenomenal. I decided a few months back to do some quality assurance of the titles.
Circle Of The Moon is not the first mobile Castlevania title. Circle Of The Moon is the first Gameboy Advance Castlevania title. It was designed by Ko-G and the music was composed by Sataro Tojima and Hiroshi Mitsuoka. I’m not sure who “Ko-G” actually is, but his unique touch on this title is very evident. Circle Of The Moon stands out as one of the most unique Castlevania games for many reasons I’ll talk about.
The context must be stated. This game came out on Nintendo’s brand new Game Boy Advance system. In fact it was a launch title, so it could have potentially been a system seller. At the same time, the title was a 2D game. A new 2D castlevania game in 2001 meant that Konami was gearing Circle Of The Moon to be kind of a follow up to one of the most praised games of the playstation era: Castlevania - Symphony Of The Night. Ko-G and his team must have felt enormous pressure creating this product. It was going to be something that showed the power of Konami, Nintendo and the Castlevania franchise itself.
So this is a Castlevania game in the vein of Metroid. “Metroidvania” as we call them. This means that it’s a 2D area like Mega Man, but that it has no levels. It’s just one gigantic area. The way the developers block progress is by putting obstacles in the way which can only be cleared by defeating certain bosses and finding certain items. This puts you on a large search through the environment constantly trying to find new things and open new areas.
This all applies to any decent Metroidvania game, so what else is there? Well Circle Of The Moon changes things quite a bit with it’s DSS system. With this system you can collect cards dropped by enemies throughout the map and combine them to make powerful abilities. I like carda as a trope in video games, but this game’s card system is very simple and powerful. Every set of two cards creates an ability for your character. There are 100 combinations and most of them are very effectful. I found myself using the Rose Sword through the first half of the game, and then I started using double XP as I went along.
I can’t emphasize how cool this system is. Every element has a sword, a whip, a summon, a bomb, a magical projectile, a familiar and other properties that can make many different people play the game very differently.
No matter how you play the Circle Of The Moon, you get to hear the music. Luckily, Hiroshi Mitsuoka and Sotaro Tojima did a freaking great job with the music. The original music they wrote is very melodic and sticks in your head long after playing the game. The Clock Tower Theme in particular is especially good. This game actually bothered me in a good way. I’d find myself singing the songs long after playing the game.
There were complaints about the game’s graphics being too dark. But I can’t speak to this. The original Gameboy Advance did not have a backlight so I could see this being a problem. With modern society we don’t deal with ‘low light’ situations anymore, so I can’t fault Ko-G for approving the dark graphics. The graphics are great. With what they can do, Konami has created really great sprites of Nathan (the main character) and the art is very good. This is the kind of stuff people aim to emulate nowadays with pixel art. The weapons all have different colorful and beautiful effects and the summons are especially intense and large.
Castlevania: Circle Of The Moon is a title that time can’t tarnish. If released today this game would still be innovative and interesting. The game holds a difficult and addictive allure for me and I’ll definitely give it another play through in the future. 9.0/10
