Players: 1-2
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Konami
Genre: Action Adventure
Review By: Michael Fox

“Konami just doesn’t seem to get it.”

Oftentimes, I get this feeling of nostalgia in the pit of my stomach telling me to reach back to my childhood and play the video games that I cherished ever so much. With twenty years worth of Castlevania games before Portrait of Ruin, I thought it would be the perfect game to connect with my roots. However, I was very wrong. You’d think that spending all this time essentially making the same game over and over would have allowed for perfection, but Konami just doesn’t seem to get it. Portrait of Ruin blows.

To keep things simple, I’ll tell you that this game, like all other Castlevania games, takes place in… Castlevania (Dracula’s castle). The point of the game is to destroy all evil within the castle and be happy about it. Each game usually takes out one character and substitutes it with another, but really it’s all the same. One of the first things I wondered was how they incorporated the touch screen controls - then I realized they didn’t. At all. You go through the entire game playing as if you were on your GameBoy Advance. It’s not until after you beat the main game that you unlock a special prologue mode, that allows you to play as two other characters you met in the game, where you can swipe the stylus across the screen to control their attacks. It’s likely they didn’t do this for the main game because of how shitty it is.

You start the game playing as two characters; Jonathan Morris (who’s the one with all the melee moves) and Charlotte Aulin (who uses magic to do her bidding). You move throughout the castle discovering new areas, hoping you’ll find one of the portraits (where the portraits are the source of Brauner’s power, who happens to be the main boss - not Dracula). By killing the bosses in these portraits, you weaken Brauner. The map is always displayed on the upper screen, which is great since you don’t have to go into the menu or something silly to see it. The problem is that the whole map is shown at once. No zooming in or out to get a clearer picture of where you are and where you need to go. So what? No. The map shows the doorways, but they’re only one pixel wide, so a lot of the time it will simply look like one solid wall. This results in not knowing where to go half the time, since you think you’ve already discovered all there is.

The game is unnecessarily long, while being stale and repetitive, combined with a lacking storyline that you’ll be completely aware of within the first few minutes of gameplay. Not to mention that you’ve probably experienced the same story and gameplay for the past two decades. Portrait of Ruin does introduce co-op multiplayer to the series, but once you connect with someone online, you find out you’ll only be able to play the “boss rush” mode together, not the actual story mode.

After you beat the main game, you’ll be introduced to some new modes (more depending on the ending you get, which is determined by performing a certain action in the game). Personally, I found it to be a chore to finish the main game, let alone bothering with the additional modes. This all breaks down to the fact that Portrait of Ruin does nothing new for video games, clinging to the past. It isn’t all bad, but none of it is that good either. If you’re a diehard Castlevania fan, then you may have some interest in this game, but otherwise it’s a waste of DS potential and should be forgotten or ignored by anyone that crosses its path.