The story is as stale and same as ever, like it's now more of a running in-joke than anything else. You have your hero, whether he's a Belmont or not doesn't matter anymore, and his friends, whose sole purposes are to get possessed and provide multiple endings. Something bad happens or someone disappears and then - quickly now! - everyone act surprised when the castle appears. Well, considering that Konami has only made three truly memorable Castlevania games after 16 years (Super Castlevania IV and Dracula X: Rondo of Blood first of all), is it any wonder that once they struck critical and modestly commercial gold with Symphony of the Night they can't figure out what to do besides this for modern times?

Perhaps because it's been miniaturized onto a five-inch screen, everything that made the non-linear Castlevanias fun seems to have miniaturized along with it, while the negative fine print just exploded. I really don't recall any moment in time when the series was ever this shallow or easy, but the experience points system once again makes the button mashing satisfying, quantifying and cataloguing progress with a neat bow tie. (Though, ironically, this is one of the main culprits that make the game so easy in the first place.) Enemy and boss patterns are not necessary to learn at all since none of them deal enough damage and you're always equipped well enough to overpower them with the greatest of ease. The save rooms that completely refill your health now seem gratuitous and the limitless quick save function is really quite babying.

New to the series is something called Spell Fusion, where, with the help of spell books littered throughout the castle, sub-weapons have new alternative attacks that use up an MP bar instead of hearts. Spell Fusion quickly turns the tide to your favor as most of them are don't seem to have been balanced with too much care, and deal more damage than enemies can withstand.

With all the morbid furnishings and decaying walls, split with sometimes paradoxical splendor, the game tries for a lugubrious, unsettling, and gloomy mood (well, as gloomy as a 2D game can get), but all there is in the end is a castle awash with gray, tints of gray, and gradations of gray, where everything starts to look like a reflection of everything else - a dangerous thing since the game heavily relies on your ability to use visual cues to recall what items should be used and where. Every time the game starts and every time another item is claimed, there's a renewed sense of freedom and new possibilities to be explored. That is, until you hit a brick wall and find yourself utterly lost. Wandering around, wondering where to go happens way too often, as there's never anything around to give you a small push in the right direction, requiring you to remember every last detail of the castle (a similar problem plagued the disappointing Herc's Adventures). And unfortunately, on the small screen, the map seems to be more quiescent and vague than ever, giving very little succor. But despite my tired remarks and complaints, the core gameplay is still strangely fun, becoming a sort of transcendental experience as you can feel your brain floating away from disuse and repeated button mashing.

There's a stubborn, shaky feeling that this is really only Symphony all over again, sheared, shrunken and with the gloss shaved off; that is to say that had it been released a few years ago, this would justly be the very revolutionary game it deserved to be. But this is a new millennium and some things are starting to look very old hat. With the basic, bare-bone designs of the non-linear Castlevanias, I'm left scratching my head over why Konami hasn't bothered to improve the series significantly and a little bit over why another company hasn't stepped in yet with a little comeuppance.

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· · · Sqoon