(Originally published to Glitchwave on 6/14/2025)
[Image from glitchwave.com]
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Genre(s): Metroidvania
Platforms: DS
Release Date: November 16, 2006
*receives cue card* Um, *ahem* it seems to me that I’ve been foolishly making outstanding assumptions on the content of this particular Castlevania release. In reality, Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin is not the second continuation of Soma Cruz’s arc of scorning his predetermined destiny, taking place in an outlandish setting in an outlandish time period that extends far beyond its predecessors. It is a wholly original entry with its own distinct characters, setting, premise, and plot that revolves around the conflict of Dracula’s presence or influence as a definitive thematic motif. When entertainment industries always feel inclined to round out their IPs into a trilogy, and Castlevania has never confidently continued its entries in sequential order since Simon’s Quest shit the bed, can you blame me for jumping the gun and deduce that I’d see Soma again for a third time? Actually, I’m quite relieved that Soma’s ongoing arc has been extinguished, for Dawn of Sorrow’s lack of distinctive identity that most, if not all, Castlevania can proudly flaunt, even when they’re not exemplary, was sadly lost when it decided to gallivant around in Aria’s skin. The awkward attempts at innovation with things like the DS touchpad seals only resulted in the uncanniness of it all setting in a greater sense of indifference-latent deja vu. For a moment, I thought that Dawn of Sorrow didn’t pick up Aria’s threads to further capitalize on its critical success, but the inherent conceptual continuation of a sequel could’ve masked the fact that Konami had finally exhausted the Castlevania idea well. Fortunately, Portrait of Ruin assuages my perturbed concerns of franchise fatigue that Dawn of Sorrow instilled, for it's one of the most distinctively innovative entries that has ever bestowed the Castlevania name.
Whereas Dawn of Sorrow was a direct sequel in the Castlevania timeline, Portrait of Ruin can be categorized as a “spiritual successor,” arguably the most overt case of this label that the series has seen thus far. The previous Castlevania title that Portrait of Ruin had decided to loosely carry the mantle of is Castlevania: Bloodlines, a Super Castlevania IV alternative on the Sega Genesis that has become underrated over time due to being overshadowed by the now-accessible Rondo of Blood that is deemed as the 16-bit franchise heavyweight. An interesting choice of an established chunk of the Castlevania timeline to resurrect and resume, but perhaps it helps that the plot backdrop of WW1 had its own spiritual successor in the broadest of terms possible. Because it’s canon that Dracula’s noxious imminence caused the tragic events of the First World War, one would assume that the evil lordship’s presence is ushering in a new slew of monumental human suffering in the early 1940s. However, the “Howling Man” cycle is being proactively perpetuated by an artist turned vampire named Brauner, who has resurrected Dracula’s castle with the rampant human suffering caused by the atrocities of WWII. As with the case of Bloodlines, the Belmonts are no longer the world’s prominent family of vampire killers, although the notion that they’ve gone extinct in the distant reaches of the Castlevania timeline has now been retconned due to the existence of Julius Belmont. Before the turn of the millennium, when Julius would reignite relevance to the Belmont clan and engender a sense of pride with his ancestors, the passionate, wartime vampire hunter, gutsy enough to look pure evil in its horrid face, is Jonathan Morris, the son of John Morris from Bloodlines. Portrait of Ruin habitually reminds the player that Jonathan’s whip, which he wields, is subpar compared to the almighty “Vampire Killer,” a righteous heirloom passed on to several generations of Belmonts. This trivial factoid sets a misleading precedent that we’re playing an inferior Castlevania title, and the fact that the main antagonist is but a pretender to Dracula’s prodigious throne only compounds its inadequacies. Personally, throwing a wrench into conventions is never an inherent handicap, and a series with such a storied history of repeating the same conflict between the same forces of abject good and evil needed some tweaking to preserve its freshness. With a cast exhibiting more flaws than usual, Portrait of Ruin can prove with humanistic subversion that the pen is mightier than the sword (or whip in this case, I suppose).
With the cheap, knock-off whip at his disposal, I suppose it’s a blessing that Jonathan isn’t forced to brave the daunting journey to the apex of Brauner’s imposter estate on his lonesome. Throughout the game, Jonathan is accompanied by Charlotte Aulin, a witch who is apparently the great-grandmother of Yoko Benaldes if my calculations are correct. Their character relationship from a narrative standpoint is that they are two (strictly platonic) friends from childhood with a shared obligation to intervene in supernatural malfeasances and bring the perpetrators to their knees. From a gameplay perspective, the dynamic between these two plucky youths is Portrait of Ruin’s most distinctive characteristic. Castlevania III was famously the first of its kind to incorporate the ambitious mechanic of playing as multiple characters simultaneously, and its execution of this radical notion was admittedly as smooth and convenient as a head-on car collision. That, and the characters that Trevor befriended on his quest to slay The Count, were ultimately still bit players that were eclipsed in the shadow of that era’s Belmont. In Portrait of Ruin, not only are the character transitions between Jonathan and Charlotte more effortlessly smooth than Barry White, but the vampire slayer and his female companion are of equal precedence in terms of both gameplay and narrative significance. Jonathan and Charlotte are tied to the hip like they are Siamese, if you please.
Essentially, the conjoined duo functions by splitting the two basic components of Castlevania’s combat in half, with Jonathan distinctly pronouncing one while Charlotte emphasizes the other. Conforming to the gender formalities of gaming, Jonathan is the blunt, militant melee user as the male, primarily using an assortment of weapons that include, but are not limited to, a selection of the series' staple whips. Conversely, Charlotte conjures up magic spells recited from a spellbook that run the gamut of elements and summonings, taking a less confrontational approach to combat. These core differences might illustrate some stark weaknesses for either character, but both still have a secondary array of attacks and abilities like any other Castlevania protagonist. Jonathan can fling the standard roulette of Castlevania subweapons like daggers and crosses, plus pocket a bounty of shockingly deadly cream pies like he’s a goddamn circus clown. Meanwhile, Charlotte can whack enemies with the book she normally flips the pages of for some modest physical damage output, and the book can be swapped for ones that feature fantastical perks when they’re used as a blunt object. Still, while these characters are well-rounded, it’ll be obvious to the player that the two exhibit a clear-cut contrast between the melee and magic combat classes from testing their respective strengths on the field. Oftentimes, the two will collaborate in certain scenarios, mostly involving reaching platforms that are slightly too elevated by hopping off of each other’s shoulders for an additional boost and pushing an object too heavy for one character to manipulate in its sitting position. The physical strength of every Castlevania protagonist put together couldn’t possibly halt the thunderous track of a moving train, but I digress. Jonathan and Charlotte can also combine their offensive properties together to perform an extravagant special attack, executing two flashy offensive moves simultaneously that amount to the same screen-spanning damage output as when Richter executed a screen-spanning super move in Rondo of Blood. The developers have evidently incorporated enough collaborative aspects to hone this gimmick to the forefront of Portrait of Ruin’s identity, and it is unlike anything the series has seen before.
Ultimately, the two characters still offer completely dissimilar styles of offense despite how well they gel as partners, so which character did I tend to gravitate towards for the duration of playing Portrait of Ruin? You’ll excuse me for feeling inclined to primarily pick Jonathan as the vessel for my interactive window into Portrait of Ruin, and it has nothing to do with my gender orientation because I hardly share commonalities with a hairless, Fabio-esque, pretty boy with glistening pectorals. Magic has always played a tangential role in Castlevania’s combat, and committing to a character that finally majors in its varied elemental possibilities feels discomforting. Playing as Charlotte is like taking up the oboe and going on tour with one’s new ambitions when they’ve played nothing but the saxophone since they were picking their noses in grade school. Sticking with the familiar instrument in Jonathan sustains my confidence as a Castlevania player, so I can virtuosically slay any unholy creature I might come across on the gothic grounds of the foreboding estate. Hell, having both characters on the field together practically displays an argument made by the developers to always feature Jonathan front and center, for the other character’s health bar becomes linked to the magic meter that drains with damage taken. What is Charlotte intended to do after CPU Jonathan carelessly bumrushes every combat scenario and depletes all of her mana? Hope that the enemies are small enough to squish like bugs? Still, when either protagonist is running solo, it’s impressive how Charlotte’s mode of gameplay is as refined, balanced, and capable as Jonathan’s is, despite it being the backend portion of the series’ combat for so long. Personally, cracking a whip with Jonathan makes me more comfortable because of the familiarity, but for those who are more adventurous than I, Charlotte is still a perfectly viable option.
Then again, I can confidently state that swapping to Charlotte from time to time had less to do with my guilt-ridden disparities that most would just attribute to sexism and more with the fact that the game will often prompt the player to utilize Charlotte’s peculiar talents to hurdle over obstacles. A Castlevania character's magic tricks often serve as keys that unlock the hindered passageways in a Metroidvania’s distinguishing ability-gated progression snags. Because Jonathan is a meathead muggle, it is Charlotte who must proactively transform into a frog to crawl through tight corridors and an owl to soar to lofty heights on the map, and so far and so forth. Some enemies like the blobs will quickly disintegrate with Charlotte’s magic, while Johanthan can hardly penetrate their gooey hides with his whip, and any distinctly female enemy, like the liliths and the succubi, will only react to the stinging lacerations of Jonathan’s whip. Pertaining to how each character’s differences both affect and maneuver through the castle’s obstacles, I feel slightly conflicted. On one hand, it would be a shame to neglect giving one character any attention when the two protagonists are such a tightly-knit pairing. On the other hand, the fluid balance between either character’s unique attributes should ideally allow the player to soar over a designated skill ceiling by prioritizing one character like an RPG class. When the game features character-specific enemies and obstacles, the element of player choice that the character selection should cultivate starts to unveil some compulsory transparencies.
A mandatory swapping between Jonathan and Charlotte occurs most prevalently during the encounters with Portrait of Ruin’s bosses. When the duo enters the domain of one of these formidable foes, having to use one character’s assets in order to vanquish them doesn’t bother me as much as standard combat while traversing, for finding which one of them beats the barrier of their defenses is delightfully puzzle-oriented. For example, in the engaging fight against the Cleopatra-esque Astarte, she will likely seduce Jonathan with her beguiling, feminine charms by shooting a lightning-fast line of heart darts. Charlotte’s spells won’t even slightly bruise this seductress, so it’s essential to prevent Jonathan from becoming hypnotized and twidderpated at all costs. Keremet can be obliterated in under a minute if the player summons the NPC protagonist to keep hitting the massive cauldron he’s housed in, which will expose the head of the giant, possessed pool of mucus enough for the player to whack at it like a piñata. The requisite Death fight itself is as hectic as always, but having the esteemed reaper change his color to signify which character he’s vulnerable to is a lazier, condescending form of the alternating character scheme that was implemented far more cleverly for the fights beforehand. Furthermore, Keremet is the only example of a competent collaborative boss battle between Jonathan and Charlotte, or at least if the final boss of the game is meant to fit this categorization. In the first phase of Dracula’s fight once the Count is fully resurrected, Death will fight alongside his master for the first time in series history. Imagine if they did this during the NES days (I would fucking kill myself)! I believe that the NPC protagonist is intended to join the player in this kerfuffle of icons to equalize the number of combatants, but the NPC won’t have the same sentient alertness to dodge the plethora of hazards that clutter the screen as one would expect from a duet between Dracula and Death. The developers should’ve stuck with the stance of playing smarter, not harder, as they seemed to have expressed earlier on.
So how does the design of Dracula’s castle fare when it’s been manufactured by a lesser vampire? Adequately enough, I guess. Really, it’s arguably the most apparent recurring aspect stripped from previous Metroidvania Castlevanias since Aria of Sorrow designed the template. The castle comprises areas that exhibit a cavalcade of Castlevania-level motifs, such as a clock tower, a sewer, and other spacious, opulent setpieces galore. The entrance still houses a hub of sorts where our heroic duo can purchase wares from a merchant held up in a remote, inconspicuous corner of the castle so he isn’t ransacked by monsters. This time, due to the circumstances of the timeline, the merchant is mild-mannered Vincent with monk garb and an awful bowl cut instead of Hammer. Reinvigorating the castle’s design was not a focal priority of the developers for Portrait of Ruin, and this is not conjecture based on my observations. The reason why the castle is rather formulaic is that it’s now sharing the space with a series of sublevels that branch from different parts of the castle at appropriate progression lengths away. When the player finds a floating painting sizable enough to fit the decor of an extravagant mansion such as Dracula’s domain, they can warp inside the framed piece of artwork and explore its vast and intricate landscape within. The locales of the paintings vary, but they all share a similar theme of deviating from the cohesive, architectural rationale of what’s appropriate for Dracula’s castle. “City of Haze” adopts the quaint, modestly industrialized aesthetic of a late Victorian period town square, while “Sandy Grave” consists of the typical iconography associated with ancient Egypt. “Nation of Fools” is symmetrical in its map design, but the foreground is anything but orderly in this twisted carnival. Lastly, the “Forest of Doom’ is the grounds of an abandoned educational facility surrounded by a spooky, feculent swamp. While none of these areas could be feasibly squeezed into the architectural borders of a castle, they all exude a horror-adjacent mystique that is more than fitting for the series’ aesthetic and atmosphere. Some may believe that attaching these protruding areas onto the host body of Dracula’s castle is a sensible way to refurbish the typical series setting, while others may bemoan that these portraits ruin the contained cohesion of a Metroidvania setting (this isn’t seriously what the title is alluding to, is it?). I verge towards the more optimistic former category, although there are some genuine grievances I have regarding these subsidiary areas. Naturally, due to their smaller significance, they aren’t as sprawling as Dracula’s castle, but this isn’t the issue. The progression for each of the sublevels is a fairly straightforward trek from the entrance to its boss, failing to facilitate the revisitation ingredient of the Metroidvania design philosophy with obscured health and magic upgrades or spells. As a result of neglecting to capture the richness of exploration and backtracking to a lesser extent, Portrait of Ruin has an incredibly hasty sense of pacing.
The sole exception to this constant rule of jumping from one place to the next with little to no overlap is transforming Charlotte into a toad so she can dig through the sands of “Sandy Grave” to find a spell needed to unlock the game’s “true ending.” At certain progression points, Jonathan and Charlotte will meet Stella and Loretta, Brauner’s vampiric daughters, who confront our protagonists to halt the ascent to their dad’s domain. Due to contextual evidence discovered through their encounters, it’s heavily implied that Jonathan and Charlotte shouldn’t smite them when they are fought together near the towering peak of Dracula’s castle. After managing to accomplish the painstaking, luck-intensive task of protecting Charlotte while she generates the “sanctuary spell,” unleashing the blast of purification reverts the sisters back to their conscious human forms. In preparation to confront their patriarchal guardian, Jonathan and Charlotte must first visit four new portraits, which practically doubles the length of the experience. While the unsatiated feeling left by the first half’s penchant to rush through progress is quelled, there is an uncanny parallel between these portraits and the previous four. The nocturnal, peyote-laced glow of “Forgotten City” isn’t enough to distract from the fact that it shares the same sand-drenched setpieces as the similar area beforehand, nor does the “Dark Academy” feature too much discernibility from “Forest of Doom.” Then it hit me: this section is Portrait of Ruin’s “inverted half,” the extension period of the late game that occurs after the player solves the riddle of the “final boss” ruse. Because this prolonged period of the game is segmented by four individual levels, it doesn’t exude the same magnitude as playing through Symphony’s castle in reverse does, nor does it allow the player to explore the settings at their own pace without the utility-gated obstructions that protracted the game’s first half. At least this section is not as nauseatingly convoluted as when Harmony of Dissonance previously tried to capture Symphony’s second half for itself, and the duels against the classic Castlevania monsters, such as Medusa and Frankenstein’s creature, are the most multifaceted and exhilarating iterations of these mythical beasts.
Flunking the test the game gives the player when they fight the sisters is especially unfortunate this time around because it shows that the player wasn’t paying attention to the game’s admirably-written characters and the unfolding story events that surround them. When I proposed that Portrait of Ruin’s “deficient” characters would add some human substance to the narrative, it was really a rhetorical precedent to set up how personable they are across the board. For starters, Jonathan and Charlotte’s dynamic involves more than just their contrasting offensive attributes. Where Jonathan is the bullheaded, determined hero who acts on a whim, Charlotte is the logical, pragmatic type who keeps her friend from getting hurt or worse from his rash decisions. Brauner may be a disappointment compared to the frightening eminence of Dracula, but he’s still worthy to momentarily sit in his proverbial throne because he’s a villain with intriguing motivations. We learn from the contents of a locket that Brauner’s daughters are actually the pride and joys of the dearly departed Bloodlines protagonist, Eric Lecarde, who has been monitoring the operation to retrieve them from the damning grasp of Brauner in his transparent, purgatorial form under the pseudonym “Wind.” The reason why Brauner has brainwashed the girls into thinking that he’s their father is that Brauner lost his own two daughters in the violent midst of the First World War, finding convenient surrogates to remedy the immense pain of their tragic loss. Not since Dracula’s backstory was divulged in Symphony has Castlevania’s main antagonist elicited a shred of sympathy from the player, and he’s an example that people tend to gravitate towards darkness and evil when they are consumed by intense feelings of anger and grief, rather than a postulated prophecy like with Soma. Another highlight of Portrait’s nuanced character writing is its depiction of Death. Brauner, taking the mantle of his master, Dracula, greatly irks the king of the dead. Therefore, he slices the perceived fraud in half with his monumental scythe at the first chance, which ushers in the new reign of the castle’s true king in Dracula. I’d always assumed that Death was just Dracula’s messenger in the caste of dark executives in the supernatural world, but the zealotry he exudes here makes him more vile than usual.
No Soma, no souls, no godforsaken seals, no problem! Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin deviates from the series trajectory that Dawn of Sorrow continued in the neo-Castlevania zone that was once revolutionary when Aria of Sorrow established it. Because Dawn of Sorrow proved that even the most radical of Castlevania evolutions can quickly burn out on the player with repetition, Portrait of Ruin is the realization that the series excels when the developers are experimenting with the series formula and thematic properties as they did for several entries in the past, which was deeply diminished when Dawn of Sorrow treaded on territory that was too familiar for its own good. The innovations that Portrait of Ruin contributes to the seasoned Castlevania series are equally as comprehensive as they are commendatory, even though some of them, such as the portrait levels, could use some further reconsideration. With its story and characters as zestful and complex as those from Aria, we’re reminded that Castlevania has hit its cerebral peak of excellence, and Portrait continues this trend without question. Now, all that every subsequent entry needs to do is carve out its own methodology of executing a high-quality Castlevania game to keep the series standing, lest they make the same mistakes as Dawn of Sorrow. No pressure!
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