Curse of Darkness? More like Curse of Mediocrity.

I remember my first Castlevania game was back during the wonderful days of the NES. I remember seeing that first game's package, thinking how cool it would be to fight Dracula, and then I fell in love with the setting, characters, and gameplay. Castlevania was perfection to me. I didn't like the second game so much, but then came the third game and I was instantly in love again. I've never got to play a Castlevania game that wasn't on the NES, and so I was pleasantly thrilled when I got my first chance to play a 3D Castlevania; I left less than thrilled from my time with the game.

The preview thrusts you straight into the action with some suit of armor following you (I thought for several seconds that he was actually trying to kill me, but that was before I learned he was actually my pal). It turns out that in this game you've got little helper demons that you can use to do your biding. These demons can be used to act offensively, defensively, or however the hell they want to act. I took this suit of armor through a fraction of the demo before I was given a firebird that took over; I couldn't find anyway to switch between the two once one took over for the other. I typically set them to offensive or to act on their own since I hated trying to micromanage their moves and instead decided to focus all my attention on myself. Near the end of the demo I finally got a demon that basically looks like the mages from the Final Fantasy series. When I first saw my new demon I yelled out, "Vivi!" Vivi ended up being, as expected, a demon that specialized in magic spells. Surprise!

The game