*DEEP sigh*... Well, I finished Castlevania Circle of the Moon today. It was... Interesting to say the least. To start, if I'd have played CotM first, I wouldn't have ended up a CV series fan lol. The game plays very old and janky, the save rooms are in terrible spots and so are the warps, the items are mostly trash, the card system is wonky as hell and very annoying to collect, and lastly the bosses... >.> Ooooh wow the bosses lol. Most of them I'd call 'fine but uninteresting' with exception to the last couple, Death (a series staple) didn't even give me a 'Death' vibe, looking more like a fallen priest or something, and his attacks were pathetically easy to dodge in comparison to some of his later series iterations, which was a pretty big let-down for me since he's normally my favorite boss to find (not necessarily to fight, though) whenever I play a new Vania game. And lastly, the Drac fight... So the first phase was an absolute joke and I wasn't even close to over-leveled for it (if anything I was pretty under-leveled, but I didn't want to waste the time grinding). But the second phase... Well that might just be my least favorite Drac fight I've done thus far. In fact, I was only able to eventually win by turning the second phase of the second phase (lol) into a war of attrition that took a literal 20+ IRL minutes to defeat using the poison spray card set + the cross item to whittle his health down VERY slowly. But even with all of that, I didn't exactly hate the game, I just think it's aged horribly when compared to something even like SotN, which still had a world of jank, but was still really fun to play (especially with save states (the save rooms were broken on my version, don't ask)). I think if they ever 'remastered' it with a mountain of QoL improvments it'd be a pretty good, if a bit short, Castlevania game. Overall 4/10.
