Order of Ecclesia

Order of Ecclesia is by far my favorite Castlevania game, and it took me a long time to really get a handle on what stood out about it compared to its immediate predecessors, in part because there's a lot to like. Its plot is good and interesting and clever, I like the art direction, the music is fantastic, the level design is good...

... but honestly, I could say essentially the same thing about Portrait of Ruin, just with some caveats. Dawn of Sorrow's plot is pretty terrible and there's some missteps in the game design, but it's still fun too. Aria of Sorrow has some flaws in its game design, but very little that's actually core. Why does Ecclessia grab me so?

Eventually I went back and replayed Aria of Sorrow and it finally clicked.

Diversity: real diversity

Aria of Sorrow has over a hundred' souls', each providing a distinct ability. So does Dawn of Sorrow. Portrait of Ruin has 42 spells for Charlotte, and 29 sub-weapons for Jonathan, for a total over over 70 distinct abilities not counting 'dual crushes'. (Which adds another 10 options)

Order of Ecclesia has 79 Glyphs and 29 'Glyph Unions', which isn't particularly far ahead of the prior games. Even if it were, a lot of Glyphs are lumped into sets that are reasonably straightforwardly basic/better/best versions of eg striking with a rapier.

Nonetheless, a distinct aspect of playing Order of Ecclesia is that nearly every option feels valid.

Aria of Sorrow, by contrast, has a rather small pool of souls that are really all that worthwhile. I could focus on stuff like how the stat-boosting souls in particular have clear-cut invalidation happening, but the actual difference that struck me is how few souls in Aria of Sorrow can really be justified using at all.

The thing is, in Aria of Sorrow all non-Passive souls burn a limited mana supply that regenerates very slowly. Swinging a regular weapon costs nothing. 'Bullet' souls cannot be used simultaneously to swinging a weapon, and so are constantly having to justify using them over simply whacking your enemies with your latest and greatest sword. 'Guardian' souls usually don't compete with basic attacks, but they have a bad habit of burning through your mana at an excessive pace, and so end up competing with what bullet souls are worth using. The net result is that if a soul doesn't do any of

-Actually accelerate your damage output relative to hitting things with your free weapon

-Allow you to fight a dangerous enemy from a safe distance

-Allow you to strike at an enemy from an unusual angle that provides safety

then it's worthless.

And then even if it does meet any of those criterion, it ends up directly competing with other souls. Some souls look pretty good if you compare them against your basic attacks, and then stop looking so good when you realize some other soul has better damage for less mana with any drawbacks too easily worked around to matter.

A lot of this comes back to mana. Too expensive to justify using, because you don't want to sit around and wait several minutes for your mana to regenerate. Too inefficient to justify using over some other soul. Not good enough to justify spending mana when you could achieve the same result without mana.

And this same issue crops up in Dawn of Sorrow and especially Portrait of Ruin; many of Charlotte's spells would be perhaps a bit niche if only they didn't cost so much mana. Several of Jonathan's sub-weapons are dubious because they're similar to some other sub-weapon that's more cost-efficient. And I personally tend to end up focusing on either Charlotte's spells or Jonathan's sub-weapons because you just don't have the mana supply to leverage both on a regular basis.

Order of Ecclesia cuts that off right at the source, and that's why I love it.

It's counter-intuitive; what it actually does is make everything cost mana. There's no basic, free attack. You'd expect this to make the problem worse, not better, but Order of Ecclesia also reworks how mana itself works. No longer do you have a slowly regenerating supply to be carefully rationed out with the occasional splurge on a particularly problematic enemy. No, your mana regenerates to full in a couple of seconds, with the caveat that spending mana freezes said regeneration for a second or so.

The overall result is that mana still factors into Glyph functionality, but now an expensive skill is simply one that forces you to back off and let your meter refill more often. Mana-to-damage efficiency is existent, and has some relevancy, but it's not a dominating concern. You'll never find yourself having difficulty justifying using any of your interesting options because a swing of Claimh Solais gets the job done without wasting mana.

The end result is that I played through the entire game several times, focusing on different Glyph options throughout my play. Just about all my options were valid, and yet they were distinct -there's plenty of games where you have a variety of options in a technical sense, yet your twenty different firearms end up boiling down to something a lot more limited like a binary of 'the weapons that fire in straight lines' vs 'the weapons that can fire over walls'. Order of Ecclesia's have only a few cases where I felt over-categories were overly-similar; the rapier and sickle Glyphs had essentially the same strike zone and behavior, yet I was surprised to find that none of the other 'I swing a conventional melee weapon at the enemy' Glyphs felt overly much like any other once you discounted that there's three different hammer Glyphs and those are (deliberately) very similar.

Only Glyph Unions end up suffering from the 'I have difficulty justifying using this' issue, and that never felt like much of a loss to me given most of them were just sort of 'burn hearts to hit a bunch of enemies for high damage'.

It'd be nice to see more games dodge the pitfalls of 'the game's resource model undermines its own diversity'. I really, really love Order of Ecclesia, and this is a massive part of it.

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