Like last year's Dawn of Sorrow, Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin's DS implementation and online play are underwhelming. But the cores of exploration, combat, and gothic atmosphere are as nearly perfect as ever, impressing even while being overwhelmingly familiar. It says a lot for how good the core systems of the series are that even when they're so depressingly rehashed, they're still a lot more fun than most any other action title on the DS.

Portrait of Ruin's primary new feature is the interplay of Jonathan Morris and Charlotte Aulin, both of whom operate under the player's control during play. Jonathan is the muscle, a spirited hunter who is haunted by the death of his father and his own inability to use the famous whip, the Vampire Killer. Charlotte is a young but gifted sorceress, picking up various spells and books to use in battle. In the story scenes, both characters actually manage to be someone worth caring about. Their trust in each other in particular manages to make them more than simply a font of generic rage and a low hit-dice caster. This keeps each character from simply seeming like a different subweapon list, which is good.


For the obsessive-compulsive Castlevania fan, the departure of the soul system is a bit of a bummer. Enemies still drop, say, weapons or gear occasionally, but the replacement system lacks the same pseudo-RPG depth. Subweapons -- many, many subweapons -- are available, and if you use a subweapon in a kill, you'll start leveling up your skill in it. Any given subweapon skill takes a lot of points, so if you're interested in every inch of power you can get a character, you'll still find yourself staking out a handy hunting ground near a save point, just like in games with the soul system. And, admittedly, the subweapons make more sense for the down-to-earth Jonathan than a soul-trapping system. But the subweapon system still lacks the sheer collector's pleasure and RPG quality of the previous game's soul collection.

While Jonathan's weapons can seem a bit bland (even the ninja ones!), Charlotte's abilities are consistently entertaining. Initially swinging a simple textbook at foes, she gains items which will have blades or even mounted knights erupting from her books as she swings them. Her "subweapon" list, her spells, is mostly familiar fair, but by separating the magic and the mundane attack lists, the two types of damage interplay more entertainingly. Rather than having to pull up a menu to swap out abilities mid-combat, you can simply tap the X button to switch from directly controlling one character to the other. It becomes very easy to see the blue flash of an "ineffective attack" and hot-swap to the other character to clean house.