Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

Gameplay

Functionally, Order of Ecclesia is roughly the same as the other Castlevania games on the DS. It’s a colourful 2D platformer, complete with some light-RPG frills and a whole lot of puzzlesolving and backtracking. It’s awesome and we could probably just leave the general description at that.

Except where Order of Ecclesia differs is in the details.

For starters, weapons are now handled totally differently to how they were in the previous two DS games and rather than collecting melee weapons and spells from fallen enemies and defeated bosses, you can now only get glyphs at certain points of the game or by stealing them from enemies as they charge special attacks.

Glyphs are fundamentally different from most other weapons in the more recent Castlevania games as they drain Shanoa’s MP whenever she uses them, meaning that you can only attack so many times before you have to stop and let your MP automatically recharge.


The most remarkable thing about the glyphs though is that they can be put together to form Glyph Unions, powered by hearts you collect as you go through the game. By levelling up certain glyphs or using the right combination of attacks you can create some truly devastating attacks which are especially handy for taking on the bosses you find in some of the areas you’ll explore.

Strangely, the exploration side of Ecclesia is something which has been massively tweaked so that now, rather than exploring one massive castle in your effort to reach Dracula, Shanoa now has to close in on her destination by increments. The levels are now shorter, more varied and focused and you can quickly jump from one destination to another.

Unfortunately, the map-based hub system is both a good and a bad thing for Order of Ecclesia. On the plus side it means that it's very easy to get around and the regular, drastic changes in scenery are more easily explained than the Piano Room in Dawn of Sorrow, but the downside is that the game is extremely linear at the start. It’s disappointing that one of the first areas you’ll come across is nothing more than one very long, straight room.

Still, by far the most infuriating thing about the game is the way the difficulty steadily ramps up to levels that can only be described as epic. Of course, coping with that rising difficulty curve as you backtrack through levels with your new abilities in search of secrets, is also one of the main attractions for the game.


And Order of Ecclesia definitely is a very attractive game. Everything from the handling to the menu design just screams of a high-level of polish, with careful attention going into virtually every aspect of the game design. Ecclesia manages to tick all our boxes from graphical appeal right down sheer longevity, which Ecclesia manages to provide oodles of despite being very much a pick-up-and-play handheld game.

At times the game can be overwhelming and frustrating, that much is true, but the game manages to remain absorbing and addictive despite (and maybe because of) that. It’s the type of game you’ll pick up to play for twenty minutes while you wait at the doctor's office, only to immediately prefer dying of leprosy to actually putting the DS back down again.

That said, the game can’t quite claim to be perfect because, as we always say, when it comes to handing out a score of 10/10 we’re usually looking for something innovative or new in a game. Order of Ecclesia doesn’t offer that, despite the tweaks to the combat system and the new area-by-area navigation system.

It is an awesome game and if you’ve got a DS then you’d be doing yourself a huge injustice if you didn’t pick it up, but it’s still very much standing on the shoulders of those who came before. Excellent, but not exactly groundbreaking.

Score Guide