CORRECTION:
The villagers in this game DO lie. A good portion of them say they intend to reward you for rescuing them...after you collect resources for them. And then instead of giving you an item when you do this dirty work for them most of them tell you that they will send the items they make to the store and you will have to pay for them. Some reward.
Oh...anyway, since I am responding to this article I may as well review the game...
The Good Points:
After playing the game for a few hours, I must say this game is quite addictive. It has new enemies and more NPCs to interact with than previous Castlevania games on the Nintendo DS. The difficulty has also been cranked up a little bit in this game, which makes it more challenging. The fact that there are multiple areas to explore makes the game a bit more attractive since the last few Castlevania games took place inside Dracula's Castle (with the exception of Portrait Of Ruin, which also took place inside magical portraits inside Dracula's castle). The boss characters look pretty good and the story is not too bad. There are also a number of side quests you can perform after rescuing the villagers, which allows you to deviate from the main story occasionally and do something else.
The Bad Points:
All you have available for selecting an area is a map with a cursor, and several of the areas are a bit small, which leads to less of a sense of exploration than in previous Castlevania games. The glyph system could be a bit better at the beginning, you do get some actual magic glyphs later on in the game but you start off finding glyphs that look like and act as nothing more than physical weapons which led me to wonder, "Why is this character conjuring swords and hammers with her MP instead of wielding them? Is this all that I will get in the game?" Needless to say, this is a slight turn off. I preferred the other systems where magic and weapons were completely separate. The boss characters are a bit easier than some of the regular enemies in the game. Sure, they have plenty of hit points, but there are always "safe spots". I have on a couple of occasions beaten a boss with little effort only to get my arse handed to me by one of the next few new regular enemies. There does not seem to be any switches or other things to manipulate in the maps, adding them would have added more depth to the game. Oh, and the villagers' attitudes piss me off.
Conclusion: This game does have more of what people have come to love about the Castlevania series and proves to be enjoyable and quite addictive, and fans of the series would like it. However, if you have not played a Castlevania game on the Nintendo DS yet (You didn't? Shame on you!), I would recommend picking up a copy of Portrait Of Ruin, the last Castlevania game before this one, instead. That game is a bit better in several ways.
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