Castlevania: Circle of the Moon Review by Diplo

astlevania: Circle of the Moon is okay, and not much more. I mean, it's the sort of game I've played and every other minute I'm thinking, "This should probably be like this," and no one likes to be distracted from the task at hand. Unless a super secret mission involving the study of the Loch Ness monster calls us away from raking up leaves. So here is Circle of the Moon, where I am nodding one minute and, uh, considering making eggs the next, the Castlevania game K.C.E.K. finished before getting the boot (some of its members would return years later), the title that brought back Symphony of the Night's model, probably not with the intentions of sticking to Metroidvaniadom forevermore, but as a temporary return to an applauded format. An apology, I guess, after the tame, lock-and-key-ish Castlevania on the Nintendo 64.

Who knows. Anyway, the game has problems, one being its avoidance of tickling that vital, intangible fuzz in the cranium: the imagination. Before I get mean – Circle of the Moon's castle is big. It's not the Curse of Darkness kind of scale. That isn't scale, so much as sheer, morbid obesity. No, Circle of the Moon makes players, curled up under their bed covers, hands gripping the sides of their GBA or DS, feel small. The protagonist Nathan Graves, a man who no longer exists within the (urgh) Castlevania canon, has a tiny sprite. His sound effects are followed by echoes. And the rooms themselves are a veritable reaction against the claustrophobia of any Metroid game. They are wide and tall and, sometimes, vaguely vertical even when horizontal. They are very deserving of being in a castle. The surface of floors are often accented by slopes, lending a pleasant, frictive momentum to Nathan's running up and down them, leaping at an apex, and flinging his whip out at an enemy.

Looking at the game's map and comparing it to Dawn of Sorrow's, anyone would be inclined to say that the scope in Dawn puts the former's to shame. Actually playing either drives home the point that cramming a map's space as much as possible won't magically result in weightier scale, because Dawn of Sorrow, at the end of the day, is dinky and stuffy, whereas Circle of the Moon can be completed multiple times and still leave the player with the notion that they haven't really conquered the monstrous building. If these games are going to be about putting me in a castle whose size is the equivalent of multiple castles being stacked on top of one another, why not, you know, reflect that? Let me be the blip in caverns of marble and onyx.

Level design itself, geometric boundaries notwithstanding, fluctuates between lame and solid. In the end, there's too much of the shameless, zig-zagging chamber deal, made more bothersome than usual by the designers' wish that you should double tap every time you want to run – and lord knows you won't want to walk around this castle, seeing how worthless Nathan Grave's default speed is. I'm getting ahead of myself; yes, level design. On its own, there doesn't seem to be much to remark upon – a nicely executed clock (machine) tower, chapel, and "final" hangout. It all certainly feels less "flat" than subsequent handheld followings, and enemy placement has touches of common sense, performing better with respect to your avatar's abilities than Igarashi's titles. Things can, however, get silly when the same monster combo repeats five times too many in a row in exactly the same manner, causing us to ask, "Didn't we just . . . ?" I don't know; it's hard to get excited about the game's places. There's an "Eternal Corridor" that is literally five hallways with not much going on; it's when you later return at higher levels that the place decides to get kind of threatening. There's a warehouse with box puzzles. One of its rooms gives you the option of pushing a box down a shaft to lend your double jump the extra inch to reach a power-up platform – even though pushing the box takes a million years. I guess it just goes back to what I said: there should be more crunch and spice. Most of Circle's level design is like an expired saltine. It tastes fine, but it bends, instead of snaps, when you bite into it, and the whole idea behind saltines is that you're probably eating them because there's nothing else in the house to eat. Of note is the wealth of hidden rooms, super-subtly indicated by an inconsistency in the tile, and how a couple spots let players faux-sequence break, provided you have the right magical abilities.

Said magical abilities come from cards that enemies drop. There's no explanation for this, though we can guess that, at a certain point during Circle's development, the head honcho called a meeting regarding the "attitude" of "today's youth," and how "cards" are "high in demand" because they "properly reflect" the "hot desire to gamble" in "modern children's souls." Actually, who knows! All we know is that monsters suddenly drop cards. Combine two in the status screen, exit, press the L button, and you might get an effect. Sometimes you won't, and that's because you need to get hit to show that it's a defense-based effect (strong against dark-based attacks, etc.), or because you need to enter a button combination that the game never so much as hints at. There is no bestiary to consult, so it's either a matter of visiting GameFAQs to get the down-low, or grinding on everything until you're blue in the face and have made your own list of card-dropping monsters on a notepad. While I want to commend Circle of the Moon for maintaining a slight mystery in its "system" by being so stupid about it, it's more sensible to conclude that is mostly stupid and could've been excluded. I, myself, just forgot about the whole thing when playing, and it was only near the end that I opened up the menu and realized I had three cards in my possession.

Believe it or not, an injection of difficulty factors in. You might die! Holy shit! Though, there are unfair bits, such as dark-purple enemy attacks (a real nightmare when playing on the original GBA) or arbitrary attacks (rocks falling wherever from the ceiling during a certain boss fight). Still, we can be thankful that someone out there had confidence in players to make the game have a sense of challenge. There's even a nice, sizeable arena wherein you can test your skill and endurance. Or, uh, number of collected potions. Which brings me to another element, that being that Circle of the Moon doesn't have a shop – an absence I halfheartedly applaud. Halfheartedly because, while it encourages skill, and makes the appearance of items all the more precious, it gets a little ridiculous when you have twenty, or fifty leather armors in your arsenal, just . . . sitting there (side point: note how Harmony of Dissonance brought the shop back because it could, and the only thing we ended up using it for was to sell that one jewel we found in the Wailing Way (later, we would watch the castle collapse on the merchant)).

The main problem that Circle of the Moon runs into is that it just ain't much to look at. The pool you're looking forward to soaking in is ankle-deep. It's at this point that the self-proclaimed Virtuous Gamers will break through my wall, screaming, "It's the gameplay that matters, retard!" without realizing that I actually haven't said that the gameplay doesn't matter. What I am saying is that I want to be interested in a game's world. I want some colorful visual language, and Circle of the Moon doesn't deliver. There are various possible reasons for why the thing is the way it is. One may be that the graphic artists believed, with all their being, that what they were producing was compelling, wonderful stuff (protip: they were wrong). Another could be that they couldn't care less for their craft, which would explain the generalized, get-it-done nature of the aesthetic that begs for something iconic to pop out and scream, "I. AM. ALIIIIVE." But it doesn't! Look: if asking for something that pleases my eyes and suggests a closer look in a video game (stare at those two words closely – notice how one of them is "video") is shallow, then God help this world.

A lot of the locales are dank variations on a brick motif. Details and flourishes are a sort of miracle. Not that I've no problem with a heavyset, gloomy take on the art; I could eat and drink Super Castlevania 4. But while SCV4 encourages a closer look at its oddities and architecture, Circle of the Moon just is. When it tries to escape from the bondage of boredom, it's usually by way of geometric abstractions harboring nothing for the player to really grab onto and remember. Some of the side-rooms in the catacombs have square, safe-like objects plastered on the wall with lines leading up the them. Uh, okay? There are highlights, sure: a big spot in the observatory tower allows a clean view of darkened spires, while some of the underground gallery's hallways exhibit unreachable doorways flooding with a curious light. Still, more often than not, the game appears as an unhealthy mishmash of tired application and detached decoration. If their hearts weren't in it, why should ours be?

There's also some strangeness going on with the ability-to-ability progression. It's disconcerting enough that the game makes you wait before you can learn to run, but even more worthy of questions is how one of the last techniques you learn is pushing a box. Really, these were the best ideas they could come up with? This is what players are supposed to work towards? Aha . . . At the least, the wall jumping is the start of an interesting idea (that never became expanded on (I'm thinking of having to deal with obstacles jutting out of the walls, so that planning jumps' trajectory and height becomes a factor). Leap up, press Nathan's body against a wall, and use the R button to have him push off the surface in the opposite direction. It's fun when a couple of the rooms allow you to figure out how to juggle jumping and rebounding in order to reach a power-up. Of course, you could always come back and use a moon leap.

When Circle's soundtrack, composed by Sotaro Tojima, wants to be masterful, it is. The catacombs' theme, "Awake," is one of the most well composed opener tracks Castlevania has ever been blessed with, and the track for the final battle, "Proof of Blood," is certainly interesting enough to be brought back in the future – and also to just remain as it is, forever unscathed by boring re-imaginings. The larger body of the soundtrack is built from a heap of literal remixes. "Vampire Killer" is "Vampire Killer," "Nightmare" is "Nightmare," "Requiem" is "Requiem." An expectation of raising of arms and pumping of fists is met with limp wrists and blinking eyes. "The Sinking Old Sanctuary", a Bloodlines classic, has a great bassline, but plays in too much of the castle for its own good, as does the (impressive) original, "Fate to Despair."

Circle of the Moon, as it is, is neither enough of a thing for me to love or to hate. I've pleasant memories of it, though they're the coincidental type, arriving more from time and place, rather than, uh, game: a thick snow storm swirling about, or fog settling over freshly rained on grass, both an atmospheric event connected to not-particularly-fun things done within Circle. While, say, Aria of Sorrow has only grown on me with the passing of time, Circle of the Moon has faded and refocused as a title performing on a mediocre level. It demands neither utter respect nor scorn. When it came out, back in 2001, people were handing out high 9's, literally and figuratively erupting in fits of joy. We can attribute this joy not so much to Circle itself, but to prior Castlevania history, and how that escalated its status. After Symphony of the Night, along came Legends, riding on the coattails of Alucard's newly established character in the hopes of faking quality. Then, two N64 entries, one a remake of the first, each not doing much in or out of the series in spite of their 3D nature. Castlevania had hit a "peak" in 1997, a highlight that was ignored by its three ancestors. So, Circle of the Moon's emergence as that "peak" – but handheld – was like a feast after eating buckets of hummus for a month. We can look at that feast, now, and see it as The Emperor's New Meal. Anyway, the game ain't bad when you need to run to the bathroom and don't have any other handheld carts lying around, so there you go!