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GBA | Action | Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

Boxart for Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow 57 screen shots
  • GRAPHICS: 5.00
  • SOUND: 4.50
  • CONTROL: 4.50
  • FUN FACTOR 4.50
  • AVG USER SCORE 4.8
  • AVG CRITIC SCORE 4.3
Winner of the GamePro Editor's Choice Award

Review: Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

Review by STARDINGO | 07/13/2006 | 13:14:13 PM PST

The dark music of the night returns with another coda---but is this Aria more or less dissonant than the one before?

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow addresses all the complaints leveraged against its predecessors and improves upon them in every single way. It's 2D porta-gaming at its most refined, even if the song seems a little familiar.

An Aria of Dissonance
Aria of Sorrow is more challenging than Harmony of Dissonance, and the music is 10 times better. The spectacular graphics look appropriately dark while still somehow being visually bright with some really beautiful backgrounds. The levels manage to avoid any of the endlessly repeating stairwells that plagued Circle of the Moon. The bosses are nuttier (Legion, baby, Legion), and the game's soul-collecting weapon and magic system is one of the best yet in the series.

Symphony of the Sorrow
The only strike against Aria, really, is that its lineage contains a few too many similarly great games. Aria is yet another clone of one of the best 2D games ever made (Symphony of the Night), which was an homage to another 2D masterpiece (Super Metroid). Many area motifs (clock towers with medusa heads) and enemies (hawks that drop flea-men) have been repeated repeatedly in Castlevania games before. The law of diminishing returns has to kick in somewhere...right?

That Aria is a masterpiece of 2D gaming there's no denying, and the gamers who will get the most out of Aria of Sorrow are the ones who've never played a Castlevania game. Everyone else will recognize the mastery, stand up and applaud the improvements, and silently sigh as they wait for Castlevania to come up with an entirely different kind of magnum opus.


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