Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

Oh how the DS needs a good RPG. What a coincidence! Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow is a good RPG on the DS! For some odd reason, it made me reminisce of Metroid Zero Mission. Anyway, the main adventure is based in 2035, a year after Soma (the main character) supposedly defeated Dracula. He thinks his troubles are over, but there is a cult trying to kill him or something like that. So much for no more troubles. The point of the main story mode is to defeat the cult obviously. You do this by poking stuff with your weapon. If you poke them hard enough, you might get a soul which gives you a special ability! You can equip 3 souls: an enchant, a guardian, and a bullet. Every monster has a different soul, and trust me, there are a lot of monsters. So you can use the souls for special abilities, but wait, that's not all! You can a soul with a weapon to make it better! Each weapon has a certain soul that will upgrade it to the next level. This is the best way to make money in the game. Speaking of weapons, there is a weapon for whatever your attack style is. The controls a little while to learn, but you'll get them after a while. There are bosses once in a while, the first few are easy, but the later ones get rather hard. Once you get the boss's HP to 0, you have to draw a "Magic Seal" that you found earlier to kill it. If you screw up, the boss will get some more HP and you have to bring down the boss again, and draw the symbol. So if you draw like a drunk penguin, you will be fighting for hours and hours. Then, there is enemy set mode. If you have the soul of a monster, you can put it in the rooms, for the cost of a number of points. After you set them, you can run through the rooms and kill all the monsters. You can also use the wifi and go through the other person's track and they can go through yours, the first one through wins. That is the only wifi mode apart from soul trade, which makes multiplayer the weakness of DoS. Also, there is a Boss something mode that you can get to if you beat the game. In it you have to kill all of the bosses in a row. If you win in under 5 minutes (how?!?!?), you get a rocket launcher (w00t). The graphics in this game are rather good for a 2d game. The enviroments are awesome, for example, if you jump on a snow-covered car, it will tilt to whatever side you are standing on and snow will fall off. The sound is pretty good, good for halloween. There isn't much bad about this game. The few bad things are that it can get talkative, but you can skip that. Also, if you change your armor, you look the same. The last thing is the use of the touch screen. All you need it for is breaking ice blocks and drawing symbols, but hey, it's something. This game is a GM2 first, it gets 4.5 big swords out of 5.