Dawn of Sorrow: Mini-Analysis

I feel like Dawn of Sorrow is an overall worse game than Aria of Sorrow.

Unfortunately, I think this is actually a product of the admirable goal of trying to fix dubious design decisions from Aria of Sorrow.

First, the good news: one of the aggravating aspects of Aria of Sorrow is that you can collect multiple copies of a given soul up to a total of 9 copies, but there's really no point to doing so for most purposes. Aria of Sorrow has a feature for trading souls with other players, but in practice it's of dubious utility because the souls you most want to trade for are the souls it is least likely somebody will have a duplicate to part with. The one real reason to care about collecting more than one copy of a given soul is the Headhunter soul, which itself is wince-worthy on a design level because it ultimately invalidates all the other souls that increase stats, excepting ones that increase Luck. (Headhunter increases every stat except Luck, with the amount going up for every 16 souls you have in total, though there's also an overall cap of +32 to its increase. This is still twice as much as you would get in a single stat from the best individual booster)

Speaking of, Aria of Sorrow also has the obnoxious aspect that the stat-boosting "Enchant" souls have chains of flatly invalidating each other -if you collect the soul that provides +8 Strength (Minotaur) before you collect the soul that provides +4 Strength (Skeleton Knight), the latter soul is useless. The only reason such cases don't render individual stat-souls completely pointless is because there's a hidden goody you can only acquire if you have at least one of every soul in the game, demanding you collect even useless-to-you souls.

Dawn of Sorrow tackles this flawed dynamic in two main ways.

Firstly, the majority of souls now improve when you collect more copies of them, with every soul that scales in this way scaling all the way up to the limit of 9 copies of a given soul type. Tying into this, the game reduces the various plus-to-stat souls down to a single soul per stat that instead provides more stats for each copy you collect, rather than having souls that are direct improvements over other souls. Crucially, there's also no Headhunter soul to invalidate them.

Secondly, Dawn of Sorrow has a "weapon synthesis" system, which allows you to transform weapons you have on hand into other, generally better weapons by combining a soul with a weapon. This allows even some of the souls that don't scale to number of copies to have it useful to collect multiple of them, and also means that collecting 9 copies is not automatically the limit of you caring -for some souls, you can potentially use up one or more souls on synthesizing a weapon and then collect further copies that are useful in their own right.

Unfortunately, the latter system ties into an ill-conceived change in the approach to the game as a whole -in Aria of Sorrow, there are tons of weapons to find over the course of the game, a number of them hidden away, and these hidden weapons in particular are one of the main ways the game rewards exploration, because the hidden weapons are usually stronger than whatever non-hidden weapon would expect to have collected by that point. You quite literally become stronger by exploring the castle, incentivizing exploration. Is there some part of the map not filled in, that could be filled in? Quick, see if there's an awesome piece of gear hidden there!

In Dawn of Sorrow, instead the vast majority of the weapons in the game are acquired exclusively through the weapon synthesis system, with the game providing a few basic weapons for you to synthesize into the actually good weapons. There's a handful of low-to-mid-end weapons you'll find over the course of the game on pure exploration, and that's about it. All the endgame and post-endgame weaponry is locked behind the Weapon Synthesis system.

Put another way: in Aria of Sorrow upgrading your weaponry is Exploration: The Game, while in Dawn of Sorrow upgrading your weaponry is some mix of Luck: The Game and Grinding: The Game.

So in Dawn of Sorrow there isn't much worth finding in terms of hidden goodies, period, and especially when contrasted against Aria of Sorrow. To a large extent, the game world is a big, empty place, with little to find in the first place, and what there is to be found being rarely worthwhile.

Exacerbating this is that Dawn of Sorrow has a bigger world. Since Dawn of Sorrow decreases how many useful, findable goodies there are by shifting the majority of them onto the "Weapon Synthesis" system, the game is hit twice over: there's more dead space to comb through because there's more space, period, and more of that space is dead because there's less to find in the first place so even if the world was the same size it would still have had more dead space.

The overall result is that, in trying to refine the somewhat clunky soul system from Aria of Sorrow, Dawn of Sorrow has struck a major blow to one of the core appeals of it: exploring an interesting world.

A sub-problem in this whole thing is boss souls. In Aria of Sorrow you are -bar a glitch with Legion- guaranteed to get a given boss' soul when you kill it, unless it's one of a handful of early-game bosses that can appear later in the game as regular enemies and thus is grindable. This is fine, but it leads to a minor irritation where New Game+ will proceed to get an additional copy of every soul, consistently, which is useless to you bar the ability to boost Headhunter. It's not actually a big deal, but it is kind of distracting.

Dawn of Sorrow decided to 'fix' this, too, by making more or less every boss soul necessary to Weapon Synthesis ultimate weaponry. Unfortunately, the 'fix' is arguably worse than the problem, as you may screw yourself out of a boss' powerful soul and, in the process, also screw yourself out of getting the 'all souls collected' reward on your first run. Or on future runs, if you're particularly aggressive about Weapon Synthesis, and eventually you end up stacking up pointless boss souls anyway if you play the game through enough runs because there's not any reason to have more than one copy of any given ultimate weapon.

So it doesn't even really fix the 'problem', which was more a minor irritation than an actual flaw with the game, and it provides new ways to make the game less enjoyable.

On top of all that, Dawn of Sorrow's puzzles are also poorly designed. The UMA "puzzles" each have a fairly specific soul as the answer, but it's very difficult to figure out which one you need, as the game doesn't really provide clues. On the other hand, once you know what you're doing the majority of the time you'll spend won't be going into solving the puzzles per se, but rather into grinding for the soul required to spawn the UMA -and then into grinding the UMA for its soul to make the whole experience worth anything.

The "roulette" golden statue door puzzles are actually vaguely satisfying to figure out what's going on, but the actual implementation of getting through each individual door is pointlessly tedious.

One "puzzle" involves hitting something with hammers, and the biggest problem a player is likely to run into is that they may have sold their hammer and thus can't complete it at all. (For some reason no hammer of any sort can be purchased. I've always found this particularly puzzling given that the character who sells you items is named Hammer. You will have to wait for New Game+ if you are so foolish as to sell your hammer. Or Synthesis it into something better too soon!) 

This is all a fairly stark contrast to Aria of Sorrow's puzzles, which were generally somewhat difficult to figure out, not particularly difficult to complete, and were fairly interesting in implementation. The waterfall puzzle is the only puzzle in Aria of Sorrow I had to turn to looking up the answer, and it's still better than almost all of Dawn of Sorrow's puzzles.

-------------

It's rather bizarre for me to feel a sequel was inferior because it tried to fix actual flaws with the previous game, but that's exactly how I feel about Dawn of Sorrow.

Still better than Banjo-Tooie, though.

Comments

Popular Posts