aria of sorrow

despite sounding like a metallica song title circa "...and justice for all", "castlevania: aria of sorrow" is a fantastic gameboy advance game i've been playing a lot lately. i'm not going to do a full-on review or anything, partially because i haven't finished it yet. but it's one of those excellent genre-bending games. it combines the usual awesomeness of castlevania platforming, whipping, and item collecting with an exploration mechanic very similar to the 2-D metroid games and then adds an icing made of a really simple but not so-simple-its-pointless RPG interface, which involves collecting enemy special moves by killing those enemies, buying weapons and armor at shops that boost certain skills and not others, and collecting special abilities throughout the game like being able to dodge backwards quickly and being able to jump again in mid-jump. there are two other castlevania games on the GBA that i haven't played yet. if they're half as good, my brain will explode.

i played "metroid: zero mission" and "metroid: fusion" last week, all the way through (about 3 hours each) and they were both fantastic, but now in retrospect castlevania blows them away. they both introduced an interesting new mechanic to the metroid formula though: "fusion" had the virus-storyline that had you exploring an abandoned space station mostly at the behest of a computer which could open and close certain parts of the ship when necessary and could give you certain weapons "downloads" throughout the game for performing certain tasks. it was very story-driven compared to other "metroid"s, but it was really good. "zero mission" was originally largely a rehash of the first metroid game, but then it introduced a bunch of story elements and moves, items, etc. from "fusion", and the third act especially had a lot of innovative (for metroid games) gameplay moments that made it almost as good as "fusion".

i'm going to try to finish "aria" this weekend. i finally tracked down a copy of "symphony of the night" too, which i've been hearing awesome things about since it came out in lik 1997 or whatever. so it'll be fun to play that.

i wish i had a guitar. i want to write a song.