Grargar: What part of "PLEASE DON'T POST YET!" did you not understand?

Grargar: Sigh...
What part of "PLEASE DON'T POST YET!" did you not understand?

thebream: Sorry, the convenience of being on the first page was too tempting. I only found out afterwards there wasn't a delete option after I tried to delete the post.

Grargar: The Games Finished in 2016 thread has now officially began.

tinyE: I'm picturing some poor soul pounding away at his/her keyboard, glancing up at the clock, trying to squeeze one more 'finished' into 2015. :P

misteryo: All year long I've been playing this game called "2015."

Klumpen0815: Castlevania - Portrait of Ruin (NDS on 3DS-XL)

To me, this is by far the worst of all the Metroidstyle Castelvania games.
Massive ruse of assets in this series is one problem, this title has some specific flaws though.
The worst fail is, that if you try to keep your inventory clean in order to not have to scroll through it an endless amounf ot time, you'll sell some seemingly unimportant items like "Long Sword" or "Thick Glasses" because you often have already found better equipment. The problem is, that later you need those items to be able to finish the "quests" and if you can't finish them, they block a "quest slot" forever, preventing you from getting new/other quests.
Since the last quests need the result of those, you'll end up with a lot of unbeatable quests because you lack simple unimportant items which are not sold at the store. This is just really bad game design.
The game is extremely grindy, most time of the game is grinding and if you want to be able to play with other teams than the standard one and the two you get for really finishing the game, you have to play it in ridiculous difficulty over and over again. So few people seem to have actually done this, that I couldn't even find Youtube videos or images in the net of someone actually playing with those characters.

The multiplayer co-op is said to be good, but since I don't know anyone with a DS in my circles, I can't say anything about it. The team mechanic seemed to just be a gimmick in single-player mode, since there are only very few events in the game that actually use it for solving a puzzle.

It's not made clear how the leveling system of the subweapons works either and I had to look it up.
Unlike in Secret of Evermore for example, where a skill is trained by using it often, in Portrait of Ruin, you have to touch an enemy with the weapon once, and kill him (doesn't matter how) in order to level up the weapon. Using it as often as possible on enemies just drains your "mana" and is no way to really level it up.

I could go on a while, but in the end I can only call it an uninspired and illogical grindfest and the worst part of the series I've played (which are all of them besides "Symphony of the Night" but it's on my list).

I've played through "Richter mode" until the very end but in order to stand a chance against Darcula, I'd have to grind a lot again and it's no fun after all the grinding I've already done in the main game. I don't know if I'll pick it up later again for the sisters-mode, probably not. In order to play as an "Old Axe Armour" I'd have to kill 1000 of this enemy type and don't see this happening either, even less beating the game with a level 1 cap on hard to get the other three character sets.

Conclusion: Play "Aria of Sorrow", "Dawn of Sorrow" and "Order of Ecclesia" instead.

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