Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21468 in Computer & Video Games
• Model: 24106
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platform: Nintendo DS
• Dimensions: .75" h x 5.25" w x 4.75" l, .20 pounds

Customer Reviews

Pretty good, but by no means great
A femmy whining protagonist, a lousy generic art style and shameless recycling of graphics makes Dawn of Sorrow one of the worst Castlevania titles to date. To further soil things, the story and dialogue are almost as laughable as the boss fights unique to DoS, the only entertaining ones being re-used from previous games. If you don't like re-using of graphics in games, then you should definitely give Dawn of Sorrow a miss.

The backgrounds are all original, and they start off strong but soon fizzle out and start looking more and more rushed as the game progresses. DoS sports a few neat features which save it from being unplayable, namely the soul stealing and monster magazines.

All-in-all, highly missable.

Thoroughly enjoyable
Dawn of Sorrow is the first Castlevania game I've played since the Xbox live release of the Saturn/PS1 classic Symphony of the Night. It plays in a similar way with 2D platform exploration tied together with a similar hack and slash approach. It isn't breaking down genre barriers and doesn't provide any large innovations or features that haven't been seen before. It does however provide a very competent, balanced and enjoyable game-play experience and is certainly an essential purchase for any fans of this Castlevania/Metroid sub-genre of the platformer.

Dawn of Sorrow adds a few new elements to the traditional platform/exploration bowl by providing you with a fair few ways of customising your character and his stats. There are a selection of weapons, armour and stat boosting accessories to pick up, as you would find in your standard grass roots Role-playing game (and Symphony of the Night) but the most interesting feature is the use of souls. Each enemy in the game has a soul containing a unique ability which are acquired randomly should you kill them. These range from a series of stat boosts to a vast array of special attacks. Along with the weapon variety this adds a more tactical approach to combat as with so many different offensive and defensive abilities to acquire no two players would likely use the same powers and subsequently approach combat in different ways.

The downside to this is that souls are notoriously hard to come by and gaining them is completely random save for the luck stat has some small bearing on soul capture frequency. For completionists this will mean a lot of going back and forth between screens, killing the same enemy several times just to get their soul. However most people who just want to play the game and avoid this "grinding" should still be able to acquire a reasonable amount of souls just through the exploration of the castle so the chore is an avoidable one. This also eases the pain of backtracking through the game, which is likely to occur if you get stuck and can't work out where to go next as you'll still be levelling up your character and hopefully grabbing some extra souls along the way.

Dawn of Sorrow is not perfect but it is a very good example of the genre and I found my whole experience with it far more enjoyable than I had expected. It has certainly fired my interest in picking up the other DS games and possibly even hunting out the old Gameboy Advance ones. The graphics do the job, character animation is decent, the controls work well, the difficulty level is tough but not impossible or unfair. Symphony of the Night is still the benchmark for the series but Dawn of Sorrow does come close in many aspects and even exceeds in a few.