Despite loving both the Sci-Fi and the Fantasy Genres, Fantasy has always been the favoured child in my eyes, so it may come as no surprise. But when it comes to the Metroidvania genre, I have always felt more kinship with the Vania side of the equation.
This is mainly due to Symphony of the Night, a Playstation One classic that I fell in love with. In 2018, Konami released a port of the Dracula X Chronicles, called Castlevania Requiem, that had Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night in them, but with added trophies. Since then they have ported the Game Boy Advance games, in the Advanced collection, and now finally the DS games have been ported to the PS5 in the Dominus Collection.
This collection consists of Dawn of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin, and Order of Ecclesia and rounds out the last of the 2D Castlevania games being ported to modern consoles. So how well did games that came out 20 years ago on the Nintendo DS fare on modern gaming tech? Have they fared well in its transformation from two tiny screens into one? Have they held up despite their age, or are they all just miserable little piles of secrets? Let’s find out!
Firstly let’s talk about the Dominus Collection as a whole and what it offers and improves over the three games’ original releases. The main thing is how cleverly the game has translated what used to be 2 screens’ worth of information into one. The main screen takes up about two-thirds of the screen, whereas the remaining third shows your map and your status. You can shift the placement of these around a little, even opting for the old dual-screen set up if you want to. I really enjoyed this change, mostly as it meant I could always see where I was and where I had to go back to explore. The touchscreen functionality has been replicated by using the right stick and the right trigger button, or the Dual Sense’s touchpad, but I found I rarely needed to use these thankfully, apart from in a few parts of Dawn of Sorrow.
The games all look stunning, the pixel artwork still looks as beautiful and detailed as it did so long ago, and you can see the visuals become more refined as you play through them all, with Order of Ecclesia, in particular, being a visual treat showcasing some of the best sprite work the series has ever had to offer.
The games also offer some nice quality-of-life additions in the game, that you can bring up at any time with the Left shoulder button. In this menu, you can save or load the game wherever you are, and look through the game’s compendiums for enemy information or other things. You can also rewind time by about 30 seconds or so if you need to. This is actually really useful for farming enemies for their drops in all three games, as it seems like the drop is calculated when the enemy dies. However, I didn’t find abusing this too necessary for farming.
The main menu offers an array of cool extras too like concept art from each of the games and the ability to listen to any of the songs from each of the incredible soundtracks the trilogy has. There are also 2 other bonus games in the collection, Haunted Castle, an arcade game from 1988, and Haunted Castle Revisited, a much improved version of the same game. So with all these additions and improvements in mind, let’s get to the heart of the Dominus Collection, the three DS games themselves.
Dawn of Sorrow was originally released in 2005, and is the direct sequel to the Game Boy Advance title, Aria of Sorrow. Taking place a year later, you return to the role of Soma Cruz, a young man who has the ability to absorb the souls of monsters and command them. Threatened by a cult looking to resurrect Dracula, Soma must fight his way through a copy of the Dark Lords Castle to stop them. Aria of Sorrow is probably my 2nd favourite game in the series and although Dawn never reaches the same heights, it is still brilliant.
Soma’s Tactical Soul ability is still incredibly cool and fun to experiment with. Almost every enemy in the game can drop its soul for Soma to equip, and these all fall into different categories, Bullet souls which are Soma’s subweapons, like throwable bones or axes, Guardian Souls that drain MP while being used, and are used for things like transformation or summons, and Enchant Souls which are equipable buffs that don’t cost any MP. You can equip one of each type of Soul, and once you have unlocked the ability to, you can switch between two different sets of equipment, which lets you be a bit more prepared for whatever enemy weaknesses you come across or situations you need.
It’s an inventive and interesting system, and just like in Aria, I appreciated the amount of variety there is in the game for you to choose between. Different weapon combinations with different souls can lead to some really fun but broken combinations. The biggest issue with the system is how abysmally low the drop rate is for most of the souls, and even if all of the ones you need to progress are guaranteed drops, finding ones that are actually good to use can be a chore, and although the game isn’t particularly hard, if you want to have an easier time with many of the bosses you will want to farm some of the better souls. You can also use the Souls to upgrade weapons to more powerful versions, which would be a lot more fun and interesting if you didn’t have to farm so many souls.
Dawn of Sorrow is also the only game in the collection to actually try and utilise the touchscreen options. In the original, when defeating bosses you would need to trace a magical seal on the bottom screen with your stylus. Obviously, this isn’t possible now so instead the Seal can either be drawn with a QTE button sequence, or by using the right analogue stick, although why you would torture yourself with the second option is beyond me.
The second title, Portrait of Ruin, originally released in 2006, mixes things up in the gameplay department by letting you switch between two characters, the Vampire Hunter Jonathan Morris, and the spellcaster Charlotte Aulin, who travel to Dracula’s Castle in 1944 to stop a Vampire artist named Brauner from unleashing the Dark Power of the castle on the world. Jonathan, although not a Belmont, plays like one, but with access to a whole host of weapons and sub weapons that level up and become more effective with use. Charlotte on the other hand is a magic user who has access to many different elemental spells that can take advantage of enemy weaknesses.
Combat, with a few exceptions, never really capitalises on this mechanic though, with Jonathan being more versatile and more fun to use than Charlotte for the most part. You can have both characters active at the same time where the non-controlled character will do some basic attacks, or you can also briefly summon them in to use their sub weapon. You also unlock Dual Item Crushes which are huge powerful attacks that you can use and take a large chunk of your MP and are the quickest way to dish out huge damage at once. 90% of the time though, I just ran around as Jonathan and summoned Charlotte for the odd spell or Dual Crush when needed, rather than playing as her.
The puzzles and platforming segments use the mechanic to great effect though, with certain platforming sections requiring jumping on your partner’s shoulders to reach a high ledge, or having both characters push a large block. There are even a few cool segments where you have to switch between them on bikes to avoid different obstacles.
Lastly there is Order of Ecclesia, which in my opinion takes the ideas from the previous games and perfects them. You play as Shanoa, a member of the Order of Ecclesia, who can absorb Glyphs from enemies to use in combat. This is functionally similar to Dawn of Sorrow’s Souls but not every enemy has a glyph and glyphs also take the place of your main weapons. These all cost a small amount of mana to use, but Shanoa regenerates MP incredibly quickly. Rather than being a powerful but limited resource, Mana acts as a stamina bar, encouraging you to think about your actions and attacks. You can equip two main glyphs that you can combo between, as well as one utility glyph that provides you with some extra traversal abilities. You can also use a Union Glyph attack that combines the properties of your two equipped attack glyphs to perform a more powerful attack at the cost of Hearts.
The game also gives you three equipment sets that you can switch between on the fly, which is incredibly important because Ecclesia takes its enemy resistances and weaknesses far more seriously than any of the previous Castlevania games. You can’t just stick with one weapon type or spell type and expect to get very far. Out of all the games in this collection, Ecclesia is easily the hardest, and may potentially be the hardest of the RPG Castlevania games. Enemies hit hard and require knowledge of their weaknesses, as well as their moves to defeat. It is a lot of fun though, trying out new Glyphs and combinations to see what works and what doesn’t. It is a little frustrating then, that while not quite as bad as Dawn of Sorrow’s, the drop rate for these Glyphs can be really low and require a lot of repetitive farming, to obtain the rarer Glyphs. One thing I really enjoyed though was the Glyphs that were hidden behind small puzzles, like having to traverse a pitch-black room with spikes to get a Darkness spell, and I found most of these to be really clever ways of earning them.
While Ecclesia may be the best from a gameplay perspective, it is probably my least favourite of the trilogy from an exploration one. I love the titular Castle in Castlevania games, and I love exploring its different labyrinthine layouts that feel familiar but different in each title. Traversing meandering corridors to find a boss and a power-up before traipsing back to use that to get over an obstacle and do it all again, it’s so great. It is a shame that it’s not until two-thirds of the way through Ecclesia do you ever get this experience. The first two-thirds are full of short disconnected levels that you play through. These hearken back to the original games somewhat, linear maps with some secrets but these don’t feel fun to travel through. One of the maps is literally a straight line. When you finally get to the castle, it is so good too, a small maze of blocked pathways, interesting locales, and some really cool boss fights but it feels a little hollow after going through such a linear experience first.
Portrait of Ruin has a similar, albeit less expansive issue. Though you do start in Dracula’s castle, you don’t stay there for very long. Portrait of Ruin’s big gimmick is that you have to enter paintings to weaken the Vampire Brauner before you can defeat his hold on Dracula’s Castle. These Paintings all transport you to different locations, the streets of a town, some pyramids in the desert, and a twisted circus to name a few of them. While not quite as linear as some of Ecclesia’s maps, these paintings could have benefitted from being a bit more fleshed out with more secrets and backtracking to do. It also could have benefitted from more paintings, as the second set of four you have to enter in the path to the true ending, are just remixed versions of the first portraits you enter. Unlike Ecclesia though, I felt like these more linear stage experiences added to the game, because they were sandwiched in between sections of exploring the castle, rather than being in the way of it, even if the Castle itself was quite weak comparatively.
This leads me back to Dawn of Sorrow, which is solely contained in the Castle. It’s a huge map and such a well-crafted one at that. The areas you travel through are unique and exciting and full of things to find and farm. If it’s not obvious I think Dawn of Sorrow has the best exploration of the three games, despite actually being the smallest of the three games in total room number. I did enjoy what Portrait of Ruin and Ecclesia were trying to do by mixing it up with their exploration formula, and after 5 games following the same structure as Symphony of the Night I can definitely understand it, but the changes never felt like they were scratching the same itch the way Dawn of Sorrow does.
The last part of the Collection is the arcade game, Haunted Castle. The collection has the original from 1988 and it is incredibly tough and unfair to play. You play as Simon Belmont and must whip your way through Dracula’s castle, slowly and painfully to rescue your wife.
Haunted Castle Revisited, on the other hand, is much more fun. It looks incredible and feels so much smoother and easier to play than the original. While still being tough, it felt fairer and manageable and was actually quite a lot of fun to play through. I loved all the redesigned sprites for the monsters in it and would highly recommend it if you are a fan of classic Castlevania.
The Dominus collection is fantastic. Despite a few individual issues, the DS trilogy of Castlevania games is one of the series’ strongest showings and all three of the games are excellent. The only real issue I had with the whole collection was its absolutely boring Trophy List. All you have to do to earn the platinum trophy for this collection, “The Dominus of Trophies” is finish the games. Mostly.
Despite my complaining about Dawn and Ecclesia’s terrible drop rates, I was stunned that there was no trophy for collecting an amount of the Souls and Glyphs, or for levelling all of Jonathan’s subweapons or Charlotte’s spells in Portrait. It seems strange that for a series whose main draw is finding secrets, there are no trophies for finding them. But no, just finish the game and get the true endings in each one. Not only will doing the true endings get you all the boss trophies you need, but it will also unlock the other playable characters, which you will need to do in each game. Thankfully, these are all so much fun.
In Dawn of Sorrow, once you have beaten the boss inside the mirror, Aguni you will learn the 5th Magic Seal to let you into the last room inside the Garden of Madness. If you equip Mina’s Talisman before entering you will continue with the game and finish with the true ending. This will unlock Julius mode, a mode where you play as the last Belmont himself, Julius, as well as Yoko Belnades and Alucard. In this mode, you can switch between the three of them to do an extremely overpowered rush through the game but with its own secret end boss at the end. Completing this mode will get you the “A Promise fulfilled” trophy.
In Portrait of Ruin, you must get the good ending by finding the spell that can cure Vampirism and using it on the priest Vincent. This spell is hidden in the Sandy Graves portrait and can’t be obtained until you have learned the toad morph spell. When you have this, speak to Wind and then when you fight the Vampire Sisters you can cast the spell. It is easier to do this while controlling Jonathan and have Charlotte cast it with the Right shoulder button, and protect her while she casts. If you do this successfully, you will unlock the path to the true ending. Once you have finished this you will unlock Richter Mode and Sisters Mode. If you choose Richter Mode, you can blitz through the game as Richter Belmont and Maria Renard. Although to be honest, this game should be called Maria mode, as she is an absolute powerhouse and the best choice for almost every fight in the game. Richter is crazy fast though and makes sprinting through the castle an absolute joy.
Finally, in Order of Ecclesia, you must rescue all of the Villagers before defeating the boss in the Mystery Manor stage. If you have done this you will unlock the Castle part of the game and be on your way to the true ending. Once you have completed this you will unlock Albus mode, and again finishing the game with this overpowered character will earn you the “Wielder of the Magical Gun Agartha Trophy”
All of these second playthroughs are a breeze to go through as you start with all of your traversal abilities unlocked so you can skip bosses, or whole areas if you want to. I have always loved the unlockable modes the Castlevania games have as they make for such interesting remixes of the formula to be much more open to sequence breaking and challenges. There are no trophies related to the Haunted Castle games but considering how frustrating I found the Haunted Castle classic game, I won’t complain too much about their absence.
Overall, the Dominus collection is a fantastic port of some incredible games, and while I have a clear preference for Dawn of Sorrow, it doesn’t mean the other two games are lesser, in fact, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to say this collection makes up most of my top 5 Castlevania games. I just wish a bit more effort had been put into the trophy lists, but even without the trophies to spur me on, I still got 100% map completion in all of the games, and most of the Souls and Glyphs I could, because the act of filling in all those little squares is such a pleasure for me. I only wonder now what’s next for the series, will the PS2 games get brought to modern consoles, or will remasters of the Lords of Shadow trilogy be next? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
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