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General Gaming / Re: Shocktober 7: NWR 3D
« Last post by broodwars on October 11, 2026, 05:46:24 PM »Well, rolled credits on Castlevania: Lament of Innocence on my PS3.
Yeah, this game is a bit of a mess, and apparently it's not the Castlevania game I should have played in preparation for Belmont's Curse later this week because none of these characters reappear in that one. For that, I needed to play Curse of Darkness, a game that was never ported to anything. So much for that.
A 2003 PS2 game, LoI is still somehow canonically the first game in the official Castlevania timeline, taking place prior to the creation of Dracula and the rise of the Belmont clan and focusing on basically no one worth caring about. You play as Leon Belmont, pursuing a vampire lord who's kidnapped his...well, calling her "lover" is a bit of a stretch..."lady friend" Sara and spirited her away to his castle, pretty much just for kicks. You run into an old man running a merchant shop, he gives you a magic whip, and you're told you need to kill 5 boss monsters to gain access to the villain "Walter's" throne room.
It's surprisingly open-ended for a Castlevania game, as after a brief tutorial the game plants you in front of warp points leading to the 5 major areas of the game; strongly hints at one you should do first; and then just leaves you to your own devices. You run through each region, get stopped every other room with a gated door that only unlocks once you've killed every enemy in the room, wash , rinse, repeat until you fight the boss and take it down.
And that's basically all there is to this game. Very occasionally there's a lever to pull, a switch to stand on, or some platforms to awkwardly jump across, but for the most part this game is pure arena combat...for 10 hours...with absolutely no new weapons to add variety as you use the same 3-5 hit combos over...and over...and over again. Bizarrely, there is no RPG progression whatsoever. Your Leon at the end of the game is basically the same as the one at the start, just possibly with slightly better equipment and items. You do earn combo extensions and additional guard and evasion perks as you kill enemies and use those skills, but the game never explains how the skill unlock system works so unless you've looked it up online it just comes off as completely random and doesn't really feel like your combat arsenal expands that much.
While you can't level at all, there are HP; MP; and Heart expansions tucked away in secluded corners of the castle, but let me put it this way: your starter health is 200 and by the end of the game I had nearly 100%ed the map and I'd only expanded that health to 290. It doesn't really make that much of a difference. You have the usual series subweapons at your disposal and after defeating a boss you obtain an elemental orb that you can combine with your subweapons for different special attacks. This is basically the same system used in Harmony of Dissonance, and just like in that game I found it basically worthless. You'll quickly find the one useful subweapon; the one useful combination for it; and then that's basically all you'll use the entire game. For me, the Cross has never let me down in this series so I saw no reason to ever deviate from being able to throw up a shield at any moment, particularly with the way this game likes to gank you with rooms of annoying enemies.
Beyond the lack of variety and repetition, the biggest issue I found with the gameplay is that the game wants the player to be way more precise than the mechanics are really capable of accommodating. For instance, the only way to charge up your MP is to block an enemy's purple attack or (once you've unlocked the ability) perfectly parrying an enemy attack at the last second. However, this game at its heart is a button masher, and critically one that does NOT allow for attack cancels. So usually by the time an enemy's wound up one of those purple attacks, you're mid attack and there isn't a damn thing you can do to guard in time. You get hit and flung to the other side of the room. Unless you just stand and wait for the enemy to do their attack (and, again, why would you? This is a button masher), there's just no mechanical way to use the guard the way the game intends and this gets to be a major issue towards the end of the game with some of the End Game Boss attacks.
Then there's the camera, which is completely out of the player's control ala the PS2 God of War games and has an absolute fascination with making sure you get the best view of the floor at all times. I know why the devs designed the camera this way, because the few times the game does have the player do platforming it's absolutely atrocious in the same way that isometric platforming has ALWAYS been (with the added twist of occasionally requiring the player to do a series of timed button presses to "flick" Leon in the air off a bar or railing with his whip), and the devs want to make sure the player can always see where they're going to land. The downside, of course, is that it makes doing anything in the air obnoxious and you have basically no field of vision around you since the camera is fixated on showing off the floor tiles.
Not helping the repetition problem, by the way, is that it's clear this game was basically done on the budget of a ham sandwich. Each of the 5 regions has...maybe 3 different room templates and 2 different hallways? You're going to be seeing the same rooms constantly. The game's also really fond of presenting the player with a choice of 2 paths to go, and they'll either loop back around to the same point or one will blatantly be the wrong route so you have to backtrack back through all the rooms again to get back to where you were. Yes, the 2D games do this as well, but you just fly through those maps at warp speed in the 2D games, whereas it's so much slower and more tedious in 3D. You also have a leveling system in the 2D games so there's more of a point in engaging in combat. I'd frequently run into situations where I just happened to take the wrong route that didn't have a save room, so I'd be spending over an hour looking for the *first* save room of the area just so I could bank my progress.
Finally, there's the story, which is just worthless. Without spoiling too much, you're here to save a character the player doesn't know from an enemy the player doesn't see until 3/4 of the way through the game. Then in response to a "tragedy", a character the player has known for .5 seconds has to die in order to awaken the Vampire Killer so the player can kill that villain they don't know...who it turns out was being orchestrated by ANOTHER character the player has NEVER SEEN and who has barely even been mentioned in the opening narration. And THAT character is doing what they're doing in response to the death of ANOTHER character the player has ALSO NEVER SEEN. WHO WROTE THIS ****?
Still, I know I've been hard on the game, but there is a solid foundation here for what would be better Castlevania games in the future. It's actually kind of shocking how similar the combat in this game is to what would be the far superior Lords of Shadow games from Mercury Steam (right down to them ALSO using the guard as a way to build MP). The music is certainly passable, the game looks pretty decent for its time, the combat is mindless but still perfectly functional, the boss fights are generally pretty good (outside the final one, where the camera and the lack of attack cancelling really betray you), and there are a ton of secrets to seek out. It's a bare-bones but perfectly competent 3D Castlevania game, though I have to admit I prefer even the N64 CV games over this. They at least had ambition and variety.
As an aside, casting Crispin Freeman as proto-Dracula? A bit on the nose, don't you think?
Yeah, this game is a bit of a mess, and apparently it's not the Castlevania game I should have played in preparation for Belmont's Curse later this week because none of these characters reappear in that one. For that, I needed to play Curse of Darkness, a game that was never ported to anything. So much for that.
A 2003 PS2 game, LoI is still somehow canonically the first game in the official Castlevania timeline, taking place prior to the creation of Dracula and the rise of the Belmont clan and focusing on basically no one worth caring about. You play as Leon Belmont, pursuing a vampire lord who's kidnapped his...well, calling her "lover" is a bit of a stretch..."lady friend" Sara and spirited her away to his castle, pretty much just for kicks. You run into an old man running a merchant shop, he gives you a magic whip, and you're told you need to kill 5 boss monsters to gain access to the villain "Walter's" throne room.
It's surprisingly open-ended for a Castlevania game, as after a brief tutorial the game plants you in front of warp points leading to the 5 major areas of the game; strongly hints at one you should do first; and then just leaves you to your own devices. You run through each region, get stopped every other room with a gated door that only unlocks once you've killed every enemy in the room, wash , rinse, repeat until you fight the boss and take it down.
And that's basically all there is to this game. Very occasionally there's a lever to pull, a switch to stand on, or some platforms to awkwardly jump across, but for the most part this game is pure arena combat...for 10 hours...with absolutely no new weapons to add variety as you use the same 3-5 hit combos over...and over...and over again. Bizarrely, there is no RPG progression whatsoever. Your Leon at the end of the game is basically the same as the one at the start, just possibly with slightly better equipment and items. You do earn combo extensions and additional guard and evasion perks as you kill enemies and use those skills, but the game never explains how the skill unlock system works so unless you've looked it up online it just comes off as completely random and doesn't really feel like your combat arsenal expands that much.
While you can't level at all, there are HP; MP; and Heart expansions tucked away in secluded corners of the castle, but let me put it this way: your starter health is 200 and by the end of the game I had nearly 100%ed the map and I'd only expanded that health to 290. It doesn't really make that much of a difference. You have the usual series subweapons at your disposal and after defeating a boss you obtain an elemental orb that you can combine with your subweapons for different special attacks. This is basically the same system used in Harmony of Dissonance, and just like in that game I found it basically worthless. You'll quickly find the one useful subweapon; the one useful combination for it; and then that's basically all you'll use the entire game. For me, the Cross has never let me down in this series so I saw no reason to ever deviate from being able to throw up a shield at any moment, particularly with the way this game likes to gank you with rooms of annoying enemies.
Beyond the lack of variety and repetition, the biggest issue I found with the gameplay is that the game wants the player to be way more precise than the mechanics are really capable of accommodating. For instance, the only way to charge up your MP is to block an enemy's purple attack or (once you've unlocked the ability) perfectly parrying an enemy attack at the last second. However, this game at its heart is a button masher, and critically one that does NOT allow for attack cancels. So usually by the time an enemy's wound up one of those purple attacks, you're mid attack and there isn't a damn thing you can do to guard in time. You get hit and flung to the other side of the room. Unless you just stand and wait for the enemy to do their attack (and, again, why would you? This is a button masher), there's just no mechanical way to use the guard the way the game intends and this gets to be a major issue towards the end of the game with some of the End Game Boss attacks.
Then there's the camera, which is completely out of the player's control ala the PS2 God of War games and has an absolute fascination with making sure you get the best view of the floor at all times. I know why the devs designed the camera this way, because the few times the game does have the player do platforming it's absolutely atrocious in the same way that isometric platforming has ALWAYS been (with the added twist of occasionally requiring the player to do a series of timed button presses to "flick" Leon in the air off a bar or railing with his whip), and the devs want to make sure the player can always see where they're going to land. The downside, of course, is that it makes doing anything in the air obnoxious and you have basically no field of vision around you since the camera is fixated on showing off the floor tiles.
Not helping the repetition problem, by the way, is that it's clear this game was basically done on the budget of a ham sandwich. Each of the 5 regions has...maybe 3 different room templates and 2 different hallways? You're going to be seeing the same rooms constantly. The game's also really fond of presenting the player with a choice of 2 paths to go, and they'll either loop back around to the same point or one will blatantly be the wrong route so you have to backtrack back through all the rooms again to get back to where you were. Yes, the 2D games do this as well, but you just fly through those maps at warp speed in the 2D games, whereas it's so much slower and more tedious in 3D. You also have a leveling system in the 2D games so there's more of a point in engaging in combat. I'd frequently run into situations where I just happened to take the wrong route that didn't have a save room, so I'd be spending over an hour looking for the *first* save room of the area just so I could bank my progress.
Finally, there's the story, which is just worthless. Without spoiling too much, you're here to save a character the player doesn't know from an enemy the player doesn't see until 3/4 of the way through the game. Then in response to a "tragedy", a character the player has known for .5 seconds has to die in order to awaken the Vampire Killer so the player can kill that villain they don't know...who it turns out was being orchestrated by ANOTHER character the player has NEVER SEEN and who has barely even been mentioned in the opening narration. And THAT character is doing what they're doing in response to the death of ANOTHER character the player has ALSO NEVER SEEN. WHO WROTE THIS ****?
Still, I know I've been hard on the game, but there is a solid foundation here for what would be better Castlevania games in the future. It's actually kind of shocking how similar the combat in this game is to what would be the far superior Lords of Shadow games from Mercury Steam (right down to them ALSO using the guard as a way to build MP). The music is certainly passable, the game looks pretty decent for its time, the combat is mindless but still perfectly functional, the boss fights are generally pretty good (outside the final one, where the camera and the lack of attack cancelling really betray you), and there are a ton of secrets to seek out. It's a bare-bones but perfectly competent 3D Castlevania game, though I have to admit I prefer even the N64 CV games over this. They at least had ambition and variety.
As an aside, casting Crispin Freeman as proto-Dracula? A bit on the nose, don't you think?
We might finally be getting to the root of my problems. I think I need to go back and read what the game said about these as I was definitely conflating them.
