*39. Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (GBA - Adventure) *
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i have always been a halfway Castlevania fan - On one hand, i can tell the games are quality stuff. You only have to play for ten minutes to know it - On the other hand, I've never been quite as good at them as other games - i just can't beat them like I would with others - i need to read up a bit on a guide, use save states (on emulated versions), whatever - I have to hate them just a little bit because they aren't as easy for me.
Despite the small bit of hate, there's a whole lot of love - this is the first of the so far three entires in the series on the Game Boy Advance - and in my opinion the best - the quest is simple modern Castlevania fare; you start at the entrance of the castle - and your job is to explore the entire thing en route to defeating Dracula. Along the way you find new equipment - fight bosses like Medusa and Death, build up hearts to use your secondary weapons - and all the rest of the standard fare. The twist this one throws is DSS Cards - there are ten attribute cards and ten action cards you'll find during your adventure; the former add an element such as fire or ice to the action while the latter determines what the that element is applied to such as your whip or your defenses - you could do things as simple as changing your leather whip into a fire one or as fancy as increasing your strength by the percentage of the map you have explored. Of course, by the end of the game only about five of the total combinations are all that great, but it sure is fun trying to find out which ones those are.
This game is extremely difficult, especially if you want to find every last card and 100% everything. Near the end you encounter regular enemies powerful enough that you have to treat them as bosses - and healing items are not exactly common - It could get frustrating, except for things never feel impossible. No matter where or how you die, you always feel like you could pass the situation if you did something just a bit different - showed a bit more patience. That's one of the marks of a really great game for me: high difficulty, yet few if any bouts of system throwing frustration. This game has it in spades.