Relic

I was wondering how to rate it because I think the amount of enjoyment you get from this game is heavily dependant on the circumstances in which it's played. For example, I think playing it on a GBA in 2002 must've been a phenomenal experience, as it was the closest thing to Symphony of the Night on a handheld. You would've probably understood that it's much inferior to SotN, but not think anything better was possible on the platform due to technical limitations. Of course Aria of Sorrow came out later and proved the opposite. But, ignoring the form factor, given the option between playing this and SotN, I bet everyone would choose SotN. So, where does that leave us now in 2026? If you're playing this on anything but the actual GBA, you most likely have equal access to Aria of Sorrow. For most people, if you're emulating this, you can emulate any number of other Castlevania games, including SotN and the later NDS titles. That by necessity makes evaluating HoD comparatively to the other titles most sensible. After all, most of these Metroidvania style Castlevanias are very similar games to begin with, so you're not exactly getting a radically different experience going from game to the next, which can cause a fatigue.

There are a number of things unique to this game, but I don't think most of them improve on the formula, but rather hinder it:

1. You only have one weapon: your whip. A downgrade from SotN for sure, but not a significant one. It does reduce variety, but the whip is a great weapon, so you never feel lacking.
2. Slots for equipment are meaningless. You can wear anything on any part of your body, which kinda defeats the point of having them in the first place. You might as well just standardize all items into the same type with various tiers, like say gems of different levels and colors, and make them stack bonuses.
3. The trader only spawns if you fulfill some cryptic requirements, and strangely you can't sell most of your items. Which makes your inventory cluttered and hard to navigate.
4. The room decoration thing feels weird and out of place in Castlevania game. Why are you decorating a room in the castle of your enemy that will get destroyed at the end? This kinda thing makes more sense in open-world RPGs with new game+ where you're able to retain your progress and possessions after beating the game.
5. One of the biggest changes of course is the dashing. It no longer has a cooldown and lets you move in both directions. This is cool and makes the battles more dynamic, but removing player friction is not necessarily a good thing. I mean, eventually you end up blasting through the rooms and robbing yourself of the habitation experience. In fact, it kinda feels like a compensation for the amoung of backtracking the game knows you're gonna do.
6. Which brings me to my biggest problem with this game. The map-design. I don't think I've ever done as much backtracking in a Metroidvania-style Castlevania game as I did here. And those games are filled with backtracking. The issue here is the dual-castle system and lack of teleports. 90% of the time to open a certain door you're gonna have to scour two castles, but then you can't easily traverse from one end of the castle to the other without transitioning into the parallel castle and then transitioning back, which both of those require traveling to the portals that are few and far between. When, having gone through all the circumnavigation and portals, you finally reach the corner you wanted to explore and realize there's nothing there, just the though of having to go all the way back fills you with dread because you know it's gonna be like another 20 minutes of the same corridors and the same enemies. Beyond just the dual-castle problem, I feel like the map design is pretty mazey in general.

The backtracking in Castlevania games never really felt like too much of a chore because the core gameplay was so good, and here the same principle applies in a way, but they just pushed it beyond my level of tolerance. I enjoy playing this game, the fundamental combat has enough depth, the movement is kinetically pleasing, the platforming can be very engaging. I also love the graphics, although this is something AoS would improve on, HoD was the first game in the series to feature this kind of aesthetic. But all of this is negated by the tedium to a large degree. It's also not helped by one of the worst soundtracks in the series. Music is what could've helped soothe the repetition of the backtracking, but here only a couple of compositions were genuinely enjoyable to me.

Ultimately it got me thinking: why play this at all? When I could be playing SotN or AoS or any of the NDS titles. After all, everything that is good about this game is very similar to those. Most of the things that make it unique are its worst aspects.