Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin feels like desperation. It is Konami’s attempt at reinventing the portable Castlevania series and expand it beyond the walls of Dracula’s castle. Where Dawn of Sorrow was more of a refinement of Aria of Sorrow with the features of the DS clumsily added in, Portrait of Ruin is content to step backwards into what could be considered a more traditional Castlevania experience. For someone who prefers the shift towards the fighter/mage character class that Soma has become, playing Portrait of Ruin is like reverting to Harmony of Dissonance. The Metroidvania formula and item collect-a-thon established by Symphony of the Night is untouched, and the addition of another playable character creates an unnecessary dimension to the game that can mostly be ignored. Instead of creating a fighter/mage character, you use two characters – one for brute force, the other for fireballs. Except that for the most part, this only serves to benefit the player in solving the occasional puzzle or overpowering a boss monster with horribly unbalanced combo attacks. Upon close inspection, Portrait of Ruin turns into a mediocre action game, an unfinished experiment in trying to make this series more interesting.

In the game’s introduction, you learn that the game takes place during World War 2, but aside from the vaguely German-sounding “bad guy” that must be defeated at the end of the game there isn’t much of an indication that you are fighting in this time period. This was also true in the introduction to Aria of Sorrow, which was set some time in the future but contained no evidence to support the statement. Which means that either someone not involved with the game is writing these introductions, or Konami figures we won’t notice. In either case it’s a real shame, because if someone was paying attention during the development of this game they could actually use this information to change the game’s appearance, and stop relying on shameless fanboyism to justify the reuse of the same old level design we’ve been living with for the past five years of 2D Castlevania.

Portrait of Ruin gets its name from the collection of paintings that can be found around the castle, which must be entered to gain the requisite powers to proceed through the remainder of the castle. In theory, this allowed the level designers a hell of a lot more freedom in the way they can present each few area instead of relying on the limited tilesets of creepy dungeon, chapel, disused laboratory, gore-soaked dungeon, sewers, etc. Instead, we simply get stand-alone levels that might as well have been designed around this exact collection of artwork. Sandy Grave is an Egyptian-like setting, but that’s as exotic as it gets. And for some reason, the level artists decided to use 3D elements for the backgrounds in these worlds within the paintings. It looks out of place, and doesn’t add anything to the level’s appearance. So what was the point? The Forest of Doom sounds ominous, but as it stands it’s merely a collection of barren trees before you enter some generic building with a lot of pointless, empty rooms. The most inspired design was the Nation of Fools, which is a Circus-like setting in a kind of gravity-defying pinwheel structure that must be navigated around by jumping on walls that become ceilings that become floors. It comes together nicely, though it is the shortest of all the Painting sub-levels.

With these new avenues available to change the game’s settings, Portrait of Ruin tries to distance itself further from the other Castlevania titles by introducing a second playable character that is set up to be an integral part of the adventure to come. Charlotte, the girl spellcaster, tags along with Jonathan “I Hate My Dad” Morris to explore Dracula’s castle and bring down the vampire Brauner. There are puzzles that require the use of both characters, but they are spread too far apart to make it feel like this mechanic is actually necessary for success. Sure, you gain the ability to jump off of the shoulders of your partner early on, but once you get the double-jump the shoulder-jump becomes completely useless. I spent most of my time using Jonathan in the game, dragging Charlotte out whenever I needed to complete one of these tedious puzzles.

Of course, Portrait of Ruin finds another use for this two-character dynamic: combo attacks. These spells are hidden in the Castle and in the Paintings, and can often be obtained after gaining some new special ability like the double jump or the spell that can change you into a frog to work your way through some tiny passage. With both characters on-screen, casting the combo attack spell results in a flashy animation and massive damage output. This turns out to be really handy in a boss fight. So handy, in fact, that the only tactic you need to beat them is to spam Tonics and wait for your mana to recharge to unleash another combo attack.

Portrait of Ruin also offers some minor variations in the subweapons and spell system from its predecessors, though it feels like a mismanaged jumble of Harmony of Dissonanceand the Sorrow games. Monsters will randomly drop special abilities that can be used by Jonathan as a subweapon, which is similar to the way Souls were collected. Levelling up these abilities is through use instead of collecting more instances of it. Charlotte will collect new spells scattered throughout the castle, but they are often more powerful than the subweapons, so your mana pool will almost always be used for those. There isn’t much of an incentive for Jonathan to actively pursue levelling his subweapons – once they are obtained, that’s good enough to do any required ranged damage. When compared with the spells and even some of the base melee weapons, the secondary attacks don’t add much depth or variety to the overall system. Spells will be given to you as long as you can find them in the castle, so acquiring new subweapons can almost be entirely ignored.

Which prompts the essential question: is having the control of two characters really necessary in this game? Both characters share a health and mana pool, and hearts replenish mana – mana does not automaically regenerate. There is no separate heart pool like the Sorrow games. This forces you to conserve spells and combo attacks for boss encounters, because there’s really no point in using Charlotte for melee. So, in effect, you are summoning Charlotte simply to cast a spell or a combo attack, then putting her back in your pocket for future use. In boss fights, Charlotte was often used as a distraction while I pummelled them from behind. If both characters are on screen during a fight, and one of them “dies”, they will simply disappear and can be summoned again. There is no penalty, which makes the disposable nature of this secondary character all the more apparent. Charlotte becomes Jonathan’s special attack.

Castlevania: Bloodlines is a curiosity in the Castlevania canon. It starred two characters that had no immediate relationship to the Belmont family, yet one of them wielded Vampire Killer. How was this possible? Portrait of Ruin’s storyline explains this anomaly. At the beginning of the game Jonathan has Vampire Killer in his possession but can’t use it’s “full power” right away. Different whips in the game are obtained, but this is no better than the whip add-ons that were available in Harmony of Dissonance. Why not level up Vampire Killer like the subweapons, through use? The “potential” of the whip isn’t actually unlocked until a seemingly arbitrary battle with Richter Belmont at the end of the game. But by then, you will have picked your favorite weapon, and the extra effort hardly seems worth it.

Portrait of Ruin is criminally short, but tries to make up for it by adding in a new Quest system to provide some additional incentive to backtrack through the castle and the Painting worlds. Except you don’t really get to see the game world, because there are enough portal stones scattered around the castle that make it so easy to get around, you won’t want to backtrack. Completed quests will unlock some new ability, but they aren’t needed to finish the game. I completed maybe five of the 1st tier quests, because after that the locations became too vague and there was no indication of the reward I would receive. I doubt any of them could have made the game any easier than it already was. Gold is readily available, so building up a stockpile of health and mana tonics is extremely easy to do. This makes beating the game’s bosses easier than past Castlevania games, which actually took a bit of skill. There is also a surplus of save points. When there’s no worry of dying after acquiring that exciting new ability, it takes away the feeling of urgency in exploration.

Though the ultimate indignity in this game’s design is the endgame sequence. After getting past Brauner’s vampire daughters you enter a room with five paintings – four of them must be completed to unlock the final painting to face Brauner. However, these four paintings simply re-use previous worlds and give them a different color scheme or bad weather. When taken alongside the overall shortness of the game, it just feels incredibly lazy and uninspired. The endgame is hastily compiled, like the designers didn’t know what to do with it. The final boss is some mutant Death/Dracula creature that puts a face to the designer’s lack of creativity in creating something new. It all makes the castle itself – the buildup to this encounter – seem all the more inadequate, as if the designers thought these Portraits to new worlds were perfectly sufficient in making the game world larger than it really is. But they aren’t.

Portrait of Ruin shows no evidence of wasted potential, because in most respects it falls in line with the rest of the portable Castlevania series up to this point: reproductions of past successes decorated in some new gimmick to apparent blind praise from the gaming media. There is just too much going on this game with no real direction and no incentive for the player to continue to play this game apart from some obsessive need to collect everything in sight. The story is laughable, the artwork shows a marked decrease in quality, and the sprite design is suprisingly bad for the fifth game in this portable series. Once you take out all of the unnecessary complications behind the two-player system and inconsequential item acquisition, Portrait of Ruin is actually pretty dull. There is nothing in this game that hasn’t been done before – and better – by its predecessors. For some fans of the series, this may be enough. However, the shortcomings of this game allow the shortcomings of the current state of the series to be readily apparent, and hearken the time for Castlevania to head in a new direction.

Afterword

Even though I’ve had almost two years (!) to write this review, I made sure I was not influenced by my impressions of the recent Order of Ecclesia. Believe me, it was hard – Ecclesia is exactly the new direction I was hoping for, and is shaping up to be one of my favorite releases of 2008.