Castlevania: Lament of Innocence

Aside from the sub-weapons, combat is all about performing combo attacks with your whip. Interestingly unlike other Igavania titles, you do not level up in this game, but instead at a seemingly random pace you unlock new whip skills. These whip skills are button combinations that chain regular strikes into special abilities. Spamming heavy attacks is still pretty effective throughout the game, but trying out whip skills is generally more powerful and helps to keep the combat interesting. Knocking regular enemies into the air and then slamming them down has a satisfying crunch to it, and it’s the part of the game – aside from the music – that I recommend the most. It’s a system that works well for enemies susceptible to stun, which unfortunately doesn’t include the game’s bosses. Most of the bosses either have some kind of gimmick you have to address, or just aren’t affected by stun at all. With the agility at which they move around the stage, trying to chain together a combo while the boss is open to attack is basically a foolhardy practice, so it was back to heavy attacks for me. There is of course the high chance that I’m not skilled enough to unlock the true potential of Lament of Innocence’s battle system, but I am fairly confident that similar ideas had been done better even in the era that the game was released.

Even if the combat was perfect in every other way, the fixed and uncontrollable camera would surely have been your greatest enemy. Any time I tried to strafe around a boss to get a better angle, I found myself often running off screen, or running the boss off screen, so that I couldn’t properly see attacks to dodge them. This camera is especially frustrating during the game’s few platforming sections when it would whip around in just the right way to throw me off from my target. Add in a gimmick where you use your whip to awkwardly “swing” between poles and I’m forced to say the game would have been better off omitting platforming entirely. Even the exploration is marred by the camera, as you might expect, since you can’t get a better angle on what is in the game’s rooms. This is exacerbated by the game’s copy-pasted level design, which makes rooms very samey and unmemorable – although the map system helps a lot with this. All that said, discovering secrets is still quite rewarding. While jumping everywhere just to see the tops of ledges is a rather poor way of executing exploration-based gameplay, obtaining a special whip or new accessory is still a lot of fun. In fact, even though I’m portraying most of the game as an awkward mess – because it is – it was still a mostly enjoyable experience.

The story could have made up for my gripes about the gameplay, but the awkwardness pervades that aspect as well. I don’t usually complain about graphics, but the attempt to translate Ayami Kojima’s amazing art style into 3D resulted in some very strange looking characters – specifically Leon Belmont’s lover. Combine that with some expected forced-sounding voice localization and it’s hard to take anything in the story seriously. Even ignoring the presentation values, they really lost a lot of opportunity to add emotional impact to the narrative. Most of the exposition is done in the game’s intro and then is dumped on you only once you finish the fifth boss. Had they actually built up who the characters were, establishing their motives, and giving Leon more personality overall, Castlevania: Lament of Innocence could have been the best Castlevania story of them all.

Lament of Innocence for me is a lamentation about what could have been. I wish that such an important part of the Castlevania ethos wasn’t used as a game to experiment with new ideas. It would have been better if they had saved it until after they had a more experienced team, after learning from the mistakes of other projects. At the very least, I wish they had spent a little more time with the game’s story presentation. I can only speculate about what went wrong, but taking the game on its merits alone rather than trying to judge it for what it’s not, it’s not the worst thing you can spend your time on. Combat is fun at times, and exploration is still fairly addictive. Castlevania fans might still get a lot of enjoyment out of this one.