Castlevania: Circle of the Moon

Not really the spectacle that Symphony of the Night was, and clearly designed around the assumption the typical player will spend an absurd amount of time grinding for levels or be hopelessly outclassed by enemy stats and hampered by a lack of the magical abilities gained by collecting the annoyingly rare cards dropped by enemies.Clever subweapon use can help quite a bit, though only so much.It might have been better if shorter, and not so stretched out by grind and deliberately slow platforming

Default movement speed is hella slow, making you double tap every time switching direction. Map is very empty and uncreative. Huge open empty maps with so much space.

The production quality is noticeably lower than in SotN, but the gameplay is significantly harder, which I appreciate. There should probably have been some kind of hints about where the most important cards drop, but I managed to find a good selection of them just through normal play.

Loved it back in 2001.

I liked it a lot.

The way this game does difficulty is utter bullshit at times. There are bosses that literally require you to grind and a lot of normal enemies feel needlessly damage spongey, not to mention you can unintentionally find yourself at dead ends where you'll have to backtrack towards the right path. On the other hand, I do find it funny the sort of bullshit this game loves to pull on you that no safer metroidvania would try and some of the boss fights had dumb, amusing gimmicks.