Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

Poor Dracula. He can never get two minutes peace. Admittedly he’s become known as a desperately evil blood sucker, preying on the innocent and lusting after those of an enduring virginity, but you’d think after this long he’d have learnt to keep his head down.

There’s always someone looking to resurrect and worship him or, more peculiarly, resurrect then kill him (why they don’t just leave him dead in the first place is anyone’s guess).

Anyway, as almost every DS owner in the world already knows, the characters of the Castlevania series pretty much fall into that latter category, and it’s Drac’s beleaguered offspring, Soma Cruz, who’s to bear the brunt of that ancient wrath.

It’s probably worth pointing out, before we go too much further, that this is a very close approximation of the DS game, featuring smaller graphics and pretty much identical gameplay. This isn’t a criticism, of course, as squeezing a pixel-perfect adaptation of a DS game into a mobile is no small feat, though it does mean that pocket gamers who already own the Nintendo version probably need not buy.

The game assumes some knowledge of the Castlevania series for its laboured backstory, in which our hero apparently lost his vampyric powers. A sudden and mostly unexplained attack kicks his magic back into action and a new quest begins.

One problem with Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow - and this extends from the DS version - is that the story is a moderately important factor in the game’s enjoyment, but it's immensely difficult to follow.

It doesn’t really affect the gameplay, but knowing what’s happening helps you decide on a course of action. Figuring out what’s going on is damn tricky, however, if you don’t necessarily know anything about the series’ history and the English translation is broken and stilted at best.

The Japanese do love to add RPG elements to games, and this one’s no different. At its heart, though, this is very much an action platformer, and that’s how it should be approached. In this capacity it's about as beautiful and intelligent as any member of the genre.

The scenery is outstanding, with minute attention to detail bringing Soma’s world to life. The fighting action is tame yet accessible, requiring a quick hit to kill the enemies rather than a protracted battle.

The dead begin to rise all around you, and Soma’s ability to absorb the powers of those you kills gradually increases your arsenal of fighting moves. You can also harvest their magical abilities, which offer a kind of secondary weapons range that requires your magic meter to build up before use. These form much of the minor RPG elements, and undeniably enrich the platform gameplay.

But there’s quite a lot of back and forth, which again requires you to understand what’s going on so you know where to go next.

This is mostly achieved through dialogue between the characters, which is rambling and often nonsensical. It’s a real shame that the same amount of effort wasn’t put into scripting the game as the original developers put into the visuals.

With a good editor and a proper localisation, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow could have been a genre leader on the mobile platform. As it is, this is still a vaguely damaged, yet very playable platformer.

Purely as a mobile conversion, this is first rate evidence that J2ME is definitely not (un)dead.