My thoughts exactly. I’ll never understand. I also felt that the overall environment wasn’t very dark and mysterious, it seemed to follow the art style in the that same generic direction. And of course DS touch screen gimmicks and poor pattern recognition are painful during big battles.

Really appreciate your opinion here. What an incredible game, I have been meaning to replay it and this post is inspiring me to do so sooner than later.

Aria of Sorrow and this game have the best Castlevania art style. I thought the cartoon-y shift with the other 2 DS games was a big mistake, it just made the series fall into visual obscurity with anime styles. And a series like this benefits from the dark weight of the art style, especially when the low-poly pixels in game don’t convey the same amount of detail the drawings can. They really nailed these two games, they’re works of art in many ways.

Look at the price of the NES when it launched. $180. Then you had games averaging about $40 in price, up to $60. Adjust for inflation, development expenses, and the fact that games offer many more hours of replay these days…it’s not priced that badly. Relative to Steam it will look high, but PC games change pricing to grab different customer groups that wouldn’t ever buy the game otherwise as a last-ditch attempt to find revenue.