Forget about those lame 3-D Castlevania games. Konami also built a fan base for its macabre series on the Nintendo DS by releasing quality action adventure games with tons of snarling creatures, a creepy looking castle and memorable soundtracks. Now the hunt continues with the upcoming Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, a whip-cracking 2-D romp through Dracula's crib, full of sprawling environments, a powerful combat system and lots of monster bashing mayhem.
Order of Ecclesia takes place during a dark time in the world's history, where the famous Belmont clan (the vampire hunters of the series) no longer exist. In order to combat Dracula and his undead legions, humans form the Order of Ecclesia, an elite group of warriors that rely on magic to slaughter their enemies. You play as Shanoa, a no nonsense video game babe that has the ability to absorb glyphs, energy she can convert into magical attacks and weapons. Because she's a badass, she walks right into Dracula's castle and starts a ruckus.
With the glyph system, you're able to assign various weapons (such as a rapier and a bow and arrow) to your left and right hands, or put one item in both hands and unleash some crazy attacks. First, however, you must acquire glyphs, and you'll do this by locating the energy (free in the game world or inside of monsters) and pressing up and the d-pad. Once possessed, you can upgrade abilities, weapons and spells, making a sword tougher or giving Shanoa a magnetic quality that lets her stick to metal objects. But all of this abiliity comes at the price of draining her magic power. Although it replenishes quickly, it's not fast enough to account for reckless button mashing, so players will need to keep an eye on the meter to avoid an embarrassing beat down.
During the course of her harrowing adventure, Shanoa will do battle with Frankenstein, skeletons, fish men, zombies, a gigantic crab looking thing and a plethora of other terrors, all of which look glorious displayed across the DS touch screen. In fact, Konami ditched the anime styling of the previous DS Castlevanias and went with a more realistic looking art style that harks back to the series glory days on the SNES, Genesis and PSOne. With that said, Shanoa is a long, black-haired beauty, and the various locales (including a huge pirate ship) appeal to our love of all things Halloween.
In addition, Castlevania features one-on-one versus via Wi-Fi, though Konami hasn't gone into detail on how that plays or whether there is a ranking system. Whether or not that'll enhance Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, though, remains to be seen.
While all of this sounds great, Order of Ecclesia seems to play almost exactly like it's DS prequels, and although those are great games, the 2-D Castlevania template has grown stale. We can only take so much of fighting the same looking bosses and using the same items, so there's a concern that, while this will be a fun game, its antics will get old. Our suggestion is to cut off all contact with the series, so that by the time this arrives at the end of 2008, you'll drool at the thought of cleaving a zombie in two. Based on the screens, though, we can't wait to storm Dracula's castle.
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