Castlevania: Circle of the Moon

 

Castlevania: Circlke of the Moon, more commonly known as Castlevania for the Game Boy Advance was the second game I bought for the Game Boy Advance and the second Castlevania game I ever played (the first one being Castlevania 64) and it's one of my favorite Castlevania games. The design of the castle and enemies, the magic system and best of all the best music of any Castlevania game that I've played (might be due to reusing much music from Castlevania: Bloodlines on a better hardware). The story is that Dracula has been resurrected by Camille and you as Nathan Graves have to stop him and rescue your master Morris Baldwin to be sacrificed. You aren't a Belmont so instead of the Vampire Killer you have the Hunter's Whip.

This is Metroidvania game so you run around the castle looking for artifacts to give you special abilities so that you can traverse more of the Castle. Things that stand out from later games is that you can hold 99 things of anything (compared to max 9 in later portable Castlevanias) and your magic system is card based. You gather attribute and action cards and combine two to make a magical effect like summoning familiars or damaging screen clearing spells, changing weapons to swords or punches etc or boosting attributes or enhance thing like exp and so on. The bad thing about this system is that the cards is randomly dropped from certain monsters and there is no clue to which one so you must be rather lucky to get them in some cases. Worst are the false candles that reappears in the two first bosses rooms after defeating certain bosses. So an item walkthrough is recommended. Also a walkthrough for each cards combination effect since they don't say what it is until you done it, for example it doesn't show protecting against poison until you have that combination activated and run into a poisonous enemy. And this game came out in 2001, glad I had Super Play that gave me the basic rundown of where to find the cards and how to use them. Worst are the summoning cards which needs a button combo to perform. How would you know that without looking it up on the internet?

So those things can be a bit annoying. The same goes for the item drop system. You don't have a monster collection book so you yourself have to remember which monster drops what. Where do I get the super potions? Those are a must if you are going through the arena since you don't have any magic there and it's rather impossible otherwise. The arena also has two unique monsters caring a card each. Thanks for that game designers! Luckily the following games fixed that problem by having both a store and a monster collection book with item drops in them (together with a percentage so you know which monsters to fight for the best item drop).

Why do I bring it up? It was released a couple of weeks ago on the Wii U virtual console and I had to have it and replay it, this time on a screen that I actually could see on (compared to the original Advance where I had to point a light directly on the screen to see what was going on. And it still looked amazing and the sound, the sound was fantastic. 8 hours to run through this game (of course this time I knew what I was doing but still) and then I looked at the electronic instruction manual (a scanned version of the one that came with the game) and so many memories followed when I read through the manual over and over again so that the pages fell of. Still has the game, box and manual in the attic at home (maybe a bit squashed, but still). It was so fun. Expected the sequel one week later, but it took them a bit longer to release.