Order’s very much a game about learning enemy attack patterns and weaknesses, and how to exploit them. It’s about knowing when to evade, how to alternate button presses to rack up hits quickly, when to hold back and give your magic a chance to regenerate, when to teleport back to town when things get too rough.

It’s not for everybody, but it can be pretty fun if you play it without thinking of it as a Castlevania. That’s…really not too hard to do, since the only connections are Dracula, many of the monsters, and the music. Game’s probably the only one not to have a Belmont or some other whip user as a playable character, too.

Actually, it’s kinda disappointing there’s no whip guy. Actually, you only get Not Balthier-I mean, Albus. Compared to Dawn’s Julius/Yoko/Alucard trio and Portrait’s Richter/Maria, Sisters, and Old Axe Armor, that’s kinda disappointing.

I could put up with the same-y nature of the countryside and the lying townspeople if the mansions or bosses had more variety or purpose behind them. After going through the intricately designed stages of CVI (as Parish detailed) where everything felt like it had a PURPOSE for being there and the boss battles were big encounters that took lots of practice to get through, it’s pretty disappointing to go through several mansions with identical tile sets, floating platforms, hidden blocks, and bosses you can SKIP!

The same sense of architecture and progression just isn’t there in this game (in the mansions or the overworld), which oddly enough, makes it feel smaller and less epic even though its game “world” is much larger than the one in CVI.

Then again, I typically didn’t grind, anyway…

Anyway, I love this game, and would love to see a remake… or something which goes across the Transylvanian countryside the way this does, but in a SotN style.

I remember as a kid designing my own “Super Simon’s Quest”-style Castlevania game in a middle school notebook sometime after Dragon Quest came out – I listed all the extra tools and weapons Simon could pick up (which, inspired by DQ, all that stuff had RPG-style stats and could be equipped to different parts of the body). I eventually forgot about this half-baked game idea until a decade later when I sat down to play SOTN and nearly crapped myself when I saw that concept implemented in a real Castlevania game.

(My idea also had Simon running around Castlevania after the Nazis had taken over Europe in WWII. Yeesh.)

Dang it, you got me to play through the original Castlevania with the last set of posts. Now I’m going to have to play through Simon’s Quest as well, aren’t I?

A particularly neat thing is that you can tell the Vampire Killer hadn’t been set in stone as the de facto Belmont whip yet, because Simon can actually buy new whips. Most of them even have different sprites, too.