Castlevania: Chronicles of Sorrow/YMMV


 * Complete Monster: Graham and Dmitrii. Graham is a cold-blooded, narcissistic sociopath who is willing to do anything for power, while Dmitrii starts out as a mere Smug Snake, though his  throws him square into this territory.
 * Crowning Moment of Awesome:
 * Hacking the files reveals that
 * Crowning Moment of Funny: Every time Hammer is around, of course... especially when Mina gets scared upon her first sight of him, calling him "the man with thousands of weapons".
 * Making Dmitrii can be pretty entertaining as well, and turns the fight with him into a joke.
 * Even Better Sequel: Aria was far superior to both Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance.
 * Fan Nickname:
 * Game Breaker: The Chaos Ring, once you obtain it.
 * Not the only one. The Claimh Solais sword, Eversing armor, and souls such as Mantle are ridiculously supercharged.
 * In Aria of Sorrow, a number of souls have this effect at various points of the game:
 * The Giant Ghost is the most notorious. Its effect is to deflect incoming projectiles. While this may seem trivial (as it does not stop you from taking contact and melee damage), everything that has a solid marker will be deflected. This includes Manticore's fireballs and Death's mini sickles. Yes, it trivializes many of the enemies that you will face.
 * The Alura Une/Arc Demon combo allows you to "recycle" your health (instead of losing it) at a 110% percent efficiency, rendering you nearly invincible.
 * The Red Minotaur can singlehandedly devastate most armies in a single swoop. Yes, it can. Also, facing backwards makes it hit twice. Its MP cost is restrictive, but once you get the Chaos Ring...
 * Lightning Doll is the universally acknowledged weapon of doom. It is acquired midgame, and has awesome damage for a moderate price tag. And its range? Phenomenal.
 * The Mimic soul has no combat purposes... But it has the ability to allow you to jump into spikes and gain close to 1000 money in one hit. Do this for a while and you can purchase the Soul Eater ring with ease.
 * The Mandragora soul in Dawn allows you to throw a Mandragora. The explosion does tremendous damage and has a massive blast radius that deals slash-type damage, which a significant number of foes are vulnerable to, all for 30 MP. It can be acquired early on if you get lucky with the Mandragoras, and is useful from when you get it until the very end.
 * Medusa Head, as noted under Boring Yet Practical on the main page.
 * Abaddon's soul, in Dawn. Though you don't get it until very late of the game, absolutely trivializes any part of the boss rush with a large, slow enemy.
 * Hell Is That Noise: In Aria's catacombs, prior to fighting Legion, the background music is replaced with some nice torturous sounds.
 * It Was His Sled: The twist ending from the first game was a big deal. The second one starts right off with explaining what it was.
 * Scrappy Mechanic: The seal system in Dawn.
 * Arguably the weapon crafting as well, which is the only way to get halfway decent weapons (almost crucial in Hard mode due to the increased durability of enemies), and these require certain souls and weapons which randomly drop. Worse still, some require boss souls, which there are only one of, and therefore if you decide to craft the weapon, you'll be unable to get 100% souls for that playthrough. Thank god for New Game Plus...
 * Of course, said boss soul weapons are the best in the game, so it's a hard decision to make.
 * YMMV, it really depends on WHAT you are using. Some of them are crucial, like the Puppet Master, but others, like Paranoia and Balore, are borderline useless outside of plot purposes. Of course, neither are used for fusion, but there are some boss souls that are just plain unreliable, like Gergoth (looks cool, but low damage, renders you immobile, and eats through your MP like crazy). The limitation here is that you get only 1 per playthrough, so you have to either choose to make it or hold out for the Chaos ring.
 * That One Boss: in Aria. He's fast, he's unpredictable, and he laughs at your Infinity+1 Sword due to his resistance to holy. You basically need an alternate weapon and Flash Step to beat him.
 * Good thing the Infinity-1 Sword is super-effective against him. If you kept it.
 * Plus, after the fight, Soma states that was stronger than that, and he admits to not giving it his all. So the narrative is saying that you fought him when he was holding back!
 * The first part of the Final Boss in Aria, if only because it can turn the Chaos Ring from a Game Breaker to a useless piece of costume jewelry.
 * Gergoth in Dawn due to the fact that he takes up over 75% of the arena (making you need to duck, and unable to use most magic without standing).
 * Abbadon in Dawn summons swarms of locusts that you simply must deal with while occasionally hitting him, a complete reversal of the standard Castlevania strategy. He shows up as a Bonus Boss in Portrait of Ruin, and is still ridiculously hard.
 * The battle can be trivialized if you know the right ways to do it. A max level Buer is easily capable of rendering the locusts useless (they die to 1 damage and they always collide with the fireballs) and the Frost Maiden soul can give you a temporary wall to use while you whale on him. Others still, like the Zombie, can be used as a temporary shield (which can be summoned multiple times). The problem in this is that while Soma has plenty of options, Julius and his crew do not. The most you have is Julius's whip which does... yeah... Not very helpful against the U shaped mobs and the death from above. Really the only way to stop it is to use the awesome power of the Cross Item crash, and that eats up around half your MP when you use it (thus it pretty much means you get 2 shots of it and it probably won't be close to killing Abaddon).
 * Or you can hold the whip and flip it around, or even use Alucard's special attack, which gives you invulnerability frames.
 * The whip only works on the direct attack. The Whip isn't fast enough to stop the death from above attacks. Julius isn't Nathan Graves. Alucard's invincible move also doesn't completely work out because he still has to go back to his original position and certain attacks last longer than his animation.
 * When playing as Soma, the easiest (if not argubly the best) way to win the battle is to just use a low-level Persephone soul attack. You'll literally suck up almost all of the locusts (while healing yourself in the process) and you can wail on the otherwise harmless boss. But those other methods sound good too.
 * Yoko's kicks from a safe spot work wonders for restoring your life.
 * Death's second part in Dawn. The first part isn't too bad, but the in second part, he Turns Red, and gets a lot of new and difficult attacks that can do major damage (especially the skulls). In hard mode, he also has ridiculous longevity aside from the strongest of the game's weapons, which requires a lot of money/soul grinding.
 * They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Dawn was the first game to showcase the new anime character art style replacing the classic gothic work of Ayami Kojima. It wasn't received well by Americans.
 * Yet, many people tend to forget that both Rondo of Blood and Bloodlines used anime-styled artwork years before this game. As did Legends and the Nintendo 64 titles.
 * It's not so much the anime style as it is the characters becoming Bishonen.