Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin Review

I'm not the biggest fan of the Symphony of the Night style of metroidvania, I'm more on the Metroid side but I do get some casual fun out of the former, I remember trying to play the DS Castlevania games on emulator almost a decade ago and I couldn't get very far, I only managed to finish Dawn of Sorrow but to much of my surprise the Castlevania Dominus Collection dropped out of nowhere and I decided to jump into Portrait of Ruin.

It's about as good as an SOTN style metroidvania can get, but it also has the stuff I am lukewarm on more on that later.

New to PoR is the dual character system and the fact that instead of exploring a large castle, it's basically a hub world with enemies and you progress the game by completing standalone "portrait" levels. These innovations are mostly fine, and I welcome them since there was already multiple games in this style of CV game.

The dual character system where you control Johnathan and Charlotte is interesting, you get two characters for the price of one and there is cool team up attacks you can do. Early game has the player using their pushing ability, using one of the characters as boost up and solving some coop puzzles here and there but this starts to go away the more the game goes on which is a shame. I also mainly stuck to one character whenever they had a high damage melee weapon and I started to use Charlotte with her Tomb of Arms 2 being a switch blade where I can hit in all 3 directions in front of me.

The Portraits levels are fine and the level progression do a good enough job at being long but not overly so that it makes going back to the castle with all the upgrades pretty rewarding.

However like I said PoR carries over what I liked and disliked about this style of CV and Metroidvania, what I like is that I rarely if ever felt like I got lost, which is nice since there are times in Metroid games and games like where I'm not sure where to go and look up a guide. I also love how the requirement to get the "true" ending is relatively simple, find the spell called "Sanctuary", make sure Charlotte is equipped with it and commander her to do it while Johnathan have taunt equipped and have him do it to the the Vampire Sisters boss and bam, it's done, now continue on with the game, it's nothing as padded as the Inverted Castle from SOTN.

There are the things I dislike, for example being that exploration isn't even always worth it since you can spend minutes in certain corridors and rooms to find a weapon and item with stats lower than the weapons and items that you are already carrying. Making me felt like I wasted my time and it wasn't even worth it.

The extra moves and abilties that you don't even need to use to beat the game. PoR has these techniques you can learn but I never needed to learn any of them since all you really need is a high damage weapon and magic attacks to be effective. I also used the Rolling Thunder attack and rarely if ever used any other special team up move.

The final negative is that the Vampire Killer once it's potential is unlocked becomes the most powerful and dominant weapon in the game, there is no downsides to using it. Sure, yes, Richter Belmont is a very challenging boss for sure but once you beat him, no other boss outside of maybe Dracula gets hard as him again and the latter is hard because he has a 2nd phase meaning you might need to have more healing items stocked in order to beat him. I'll admit I did use rewind that comes with the Dominus Collection during Dracula but once it's again, it's more so that he has a 2nd phase and meaning it takes longer for him to go down.

Overall, Portrait of Ruin was lived up to my expectations, a decently made SOTN styled metroidvania back in a time where CV games were primarily making their money off the portable scene. It didn't do much to change my mind on this style of game but it is nice that I finally got to beat a game I started around 10 years ago.