YMMV / Castlevania: Circle of the Moon

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Death is pathetically easy in this game, especially when compared to the previous boss, the pair of Zombie Dragons. Oddly enough, he turns into a turtle after the first form, but he's even easier now.
  • The final room of the Battle Arena contains just a Devil enemy. While it's a very strong enemy, it's still only one foe, with attacks that can be avoided, in contrast to the many other rooms in the Arena that feature upwards of half a dozen enemies at once that saturate the area with attacks. Which may be a relief for completionists, since it makes it easier to use the backtrack exploit to farm for the Unicorn and Black Dog cards (the White Armors dropping the Unicorn are also relatively easy to beat following the Demonic Spiders that are the Devil Armors which have Black Dog).
  • Compared to the level preceding her, Camilla is a walk in the park. Her attacks and projectiles are very easy to avoid/break and her body is a very easy target.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Evil Pillars, a stronger version of an enemy encountered earlier in the game that can trap you in stone. If you get petrified, you have to shake around to break free before you get hit by another attack, otherwise you'll take triple the damage. And given that they tend to be placed near very fast and damaging enemies, you might not have enough time to break free before taking a hefty chunk of damage.
  • Pretty much every Demon. The Earth Demon gets an honorable mention for being in the fourth screen of the game, and with attacks far more damaging than anything you have yet encountered, or even anything you will encounter up until the first boss. Tough to dodge, too. But the one that is by far the worst is the Ice Demon. It spams an attack that gives next to no warning, requires I Wanna Be the Guy level platforming skills to dodge even if you know where it's coming from, and if it hits, you're as good as dead. It freezes you in place, which works similar to being petrified, except you can't shake yourself free and have to either wait a few seconds or get hit in order to move again, the latter resulting, again, in triple damage. And because of the large amount of projectiles, you will be hit again. Think you can just whip the attack away like you could with the Fire Demon? Yeah, that'll cause it to shatter, all right. Into shards that are equally as deadly as the original attack, only even harder to dodge. The above-mentioned Devil's entire array of heavy-hitting attacks isn't half as deadly as this one attack of the Ice Demon's. ^Well...The trick to it, in fact, is simply to stand under the Ice Demon as he starts his attack, face the same direction as him, and walk along as the ice balls descend. You can then jump over those behind you, and have a bit of time to swat him in return. Another way to completely neuter it is to use the Neptune+Serpent combo, rendering him more or less helpless against you, so long as your MP holds out.
  • The Armors have very annoying attacks and appear more frequently than the demons. Most of their attacks cannot be countered with the whip, they hit very hard with varying effects, and their HP is often very high, more than making up for their slow speed. Worst of all, if you revisit an earlier area in the game, the weaker armors get replaced with more powerful variants. A few examples of their attacks:
    • Flame Armors have a simple sword swing, but the hit range is way larger than what you'd expect.
    • Stone Armors throw three boulders that get progressively closer and do splash damage, though they fortunately can be blocked.
    • Thunder Armors fire unblockable orbs that home in on you.
    • Ice Armors throw two spears, one high and one low, both of which freeze you (see the Ice Demon above for all the fun being frozen gets you).
    • Poison Armors shoot tall, unblockable clouds of gas that are difficult to jump over, and unsurprisingly, poison you on contact. At least the gas has no effect until it fully forms, so if you're in front of it as it launches it, it'll pass by you harmlessly.
    • The worst armours are probably the Dark ones, mostly because they fire dark orbs at you. They look easy enough to avoid, except for the fact they're always places where you're trying to get up, and you'll end up constantly getting hit. It doesn't help that they tend to lurk in the same areas as the aforementioned Evil Pillars and their petrifying attacks. And yes, they also appear in the Bonus Dungeon.
  • The Devil, who appears near the end of the game, can be nigh impossible to kill without sustaining heavy damage as he uses a large variety of difficult-to-avoid attacks. It's tough to even get by him, much less kill him. Making matters worse, he also appears at the end of the Bonus Dungeon, with even stronger stats!
• Difficulty Spike: The boss battle against Adramelech is much harder than the previous ones, there is another one with the infamous Zombie Dragons, the latter emphasized by the boss music from then on becoming Big Battle, the final boss theme of Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse.
• Fanon: Trying to slot in the Baldwins or the Graves or both as branch families of the Belmonts is popular among the fans.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Hugh's antagonism towards Nathan can be interpreted as sexual tension. Nathan, on the other hand, doesn't react aggressively at Hugh's actions and taunts, but is rather worried about his change in behavior, making it Ho Yay on his side.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Crosses. They deal about as much damage as your whip, but can actually hit up to five times if you measure the distance properly, since they stay in the air for a while once they reach their maximum range. They're very hard to find, though, and it's easy to get one replaced with another subweapon by accident, though if you're quick, you can simply pick it back up from the ground before it vanishes. And Pluto+Manticore lets you fire them off almost for free by making them consume MP instead of hearts.
  • The Jupiter+Manticore combination forms a poisonous mist around you, which instantly destroys most of the projectiles caught on it, making bosses like Adramelech, Camilla, Death, and Dracula's second form easier. It is also handy in discovering hidden rooms.
  • The Uranus DSS card, too, which can summon creatures to deal massive damage to everything on the screen, and one of them is the only healing spell in the entire game. (Other than Jupiter+Mandragora, although that only works via slow regeneration.) You'll only find it late in the game, though, and even then, only if you have a guide.
  • Having the Serpent and Neptune cards before the notoriously brutal Underground Waterway turns it into one of the easiest levels in the game thanks to total ice resistance the pair grants. Hilariously, the latter card can be easily farmed almost at the entrance of said level.
  • Magician Mode, where your intelligence stat is so high that you fully restore MP in a matter of seconds. By level 33, your MP recovery rate is so high that even your healing magic doesn't drain your MP at all. There is also the Pluto+Unicorn combo, which grants you full invulnerability at a cost of not being able to damage enemies, which is hardly an issue. In other modes, you only get the Unicorn card after the Battle Arena, so it doesn't really get used much; however, in Magician mode, you have access to it from the very start of the game. This mode does penalize your strength and HP to compensate, but you have so many ways around that such as Diana combos that can one-shot the first boss and still do disproportionately huge damage until late-game.
  • Fighter Mode puts your attack, strength, and defenses through the roof at the cost of not being able to use magic. But who needs magic when your enemies are about as effective at hitting you as a blind man is at driving, and you can kill any of them in at most 3 lashes of the whip?
  • Thief Mode, which turns the frustratingly low Random Drops back into your favor pretty fast. Although it bumps down your other stats, making the beginning of the game harder.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Japanese magazine Famitsu gave it 27/40 and even IGA criticized it. Overseas, the game received a Metacritic score of 91/100, the same as Aria of Sorrow.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Medusa Heads make their return in the Machine Tower, where they spawn infinitely and can trap you in stone.
  • Bloody Swords, small targets in the Chapel Tower which alternate between hovering in place and lunging at Nathan full-stop. There are also stronger ones in the Battle Arena that can poison him.
  • The Marionettes in the same area as the Bloody Swords with similar (though slower) movement traits, who can also curse you, preventing you from attacking. And when you have 3 of each tailing you thirsting for blood...
  • The Shade enemies. They will often attack from off-screen, and you won't even know it until you see a projectile heading your way. Heat Shades attack with a homing fireball, while Frozen Shades shoot two aimed ice projectiles that can freeze you. Thankfully, both attacks can be countered with the whip.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Through a glitch, you can use any DSS Card combination after you get your first one. After casting the spell but before the effect kicks in, change the DSS combo to whatever and you'll be able to use that combo. You can also change your card combination to something that boosts your strength while in the middle of a summon spell to greatly boost its damage.
    • One notable TAS managed to abuse this glitch to the point where Nathan managed to end up in the ceiling of Dracula's room, and defeated his first form with a few attacks that took him out before Dracula could begin his cutscene, levelling up 24 times!
  • The Bonus Dungeon is supposed to prevent you from casting magic. They implemented this with an insane Mana Burn effect, but you can still chug a mana potion or two and quickly cast something before your MP runs out.
    • On the Arena's matter, if you finish the run but slide through the hole that leads back to the entrance without fully crossing it, you can slide back to the area where you get the Shining Armor and find the door to the Devil fight open. From there, you can do the whole Arena in reverse order. Players mainly use this to farm for the Unicorn and Black Dog cards, or just plain farm the Devil, as it's the biggest source of experience on the game.
  • Though you are prevented from attacking enemies while cursed, you may still damage them by sliding into them, as the curse status only locks your attack button out. This doesn't completely alleviate the problems with the areas with curse-inducing enemies, but it does help some.
  • The Mars+Griffin combo (Sword Draw) is normally an attack that is more powerful the longer it's charged. However, if the attack's animation is interrupted (such as falling off of a crumbling platform), Nathan never exits the "charging" state. Meanwhile, Saturn+Black Dog (Imp Familiar) has an attack that lasts longer the longer it's charged. Sword Draw charge and Imp Familiar charge use the same variable to calculate their accumulated charge. If you interrupt Sword Draw's charge and then charge up Imp Familiar, an Overflow Error occurs. Nathan gains a disjointed hitbox that does whip damage constantly. Not only that, if you charge Imp Familiar's attack for a very specific amount of time, you can make the hitbox do 9999 damage. But where it gets REALLY broken is when you introduce some frame-perfect fiddling with loading zones: you can make a glitched full-screen hitbox that does 9999 damage constantly. Nathan now has a constant death aura that instantly destroys everything — enemies, bosses, candles, hidden walls, EVERYTHING — in the room the second he enters. The speedrunning community has lovingly dubbed the glitch "Nuclear Fusion".
• Ho Yay: As said above, Nathan really cares about Hugh and becomes livid when Camilla reveals how she and Dracula corrupted Hugh. Dracula's rant about bringing out Hugh's dark side makes Nathan very angry, arguably even more than kidnapping his and Hugh's mentor.
• Improved by the Re-Cut: The re-releases are better received than the original Advance version. Due to being developed on the first-gen GBA devkits that displayed colors differently than the original Game Boy Advance hardware, the graphics were infamously muddy and hard to discern on the original hardware. When played on the Game Boy Player and later versions of the Game Boy Advance (as well as the DS, Wii U, and Castlevania Advance Collection), the graphics become much more crisp and the game consequently becomes easier to play. In addition, Advance Collection fixes the DSS card system by showing which enemy drops them.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Combine tons of annoying and/or brutally powerful enemies with an especially confusing castle with save points few and far between each other and you have by far the most frustratingly hard of the GBA Castlevania games. Not helping matters is the game's refusal to tell you where to go, the occasionally clunky controls, and the lack of a suspend feature, which was especially rough at release. The following game would go out of its way to be easier and more approachable, for better and for worse.
• Memetic Mutation: Level ups are credited individually rather than all at once if you level up multiple times; while this isn't very noticeable in a regular play through, it's a recurring feature of tool-assisted speedruns, especially the one where Nathan skips the entire game to fight Dracula directly, after which the player is forced to sit there and watch the level up animation play twenty-four times.
• Misblamed: Iga is often criticized for removing the game out of canon, and is frequently accused of doing that out of spite for the game being made by a different development team. In fact, KCEK made it as a side game that was never intended to be canon in the first place.
• Narm: Dracula is twice as big as his own coffin when Camilla wakes him up at the beginning.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • Unlike Symphony, Harmony, and Aria, this game is far harder and has less forgiving control physics. (You can still steer your jumps, but don't expect to be pulling Mario-esque acrobatics and mid-air dodging.)
  • Spread-out save points, lack of an item shop, no After Boss Recovery that's been there in practically every other game in the series, and excess of low-contrast projectiles on dark backgrounds really ups the difficulty. The game itself is also pretty hard even with lighting.
  • In addition to the aforementioned lack of shops and high difficulty, items are only found as drops from enemies, from every piece of armor (bar the Shining Armor) to the simplest potion. Unfortunately, items are all pretty rare themselves, so unless one takes time to farm for them, healing is a major issue especially with all the damage you'll be taking in some of the bonus modes. Unless you've farmed plenty of items for a while, a tedious task itself, or have a DSS combo that allows for it, your only reliable source of healing is visiting a save room, requiring you to gauge your ability at all times to know when to retreat and try to heal or push on, and there's no guarantee you'll survive either venture, especially given how far apart each save room is.
• Polished Port: The port of the game on Castlevania Advance Collection (which also includes Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow) by M2 for PC, Switch, PS4/5, and Xbox One / Series S/X has been met with wide praise for not only being a faithful recreation of the original, but fixing some of the bigger issues with the game by featuring an encyclopedia of game information (including how every DSS combination works), a gadget to inform the player when attacking an enemy that may carry a DSS card, save states, and a rewind feature. The latter two are a boon especially for handheld Switch players, as they fix the problems that made the original a very un-portable title, including the lack of save points or a Suspend Save feature.
• Quicksand Box: This is a general trope with Metroidvania games; you pretty much need a guide or to religiously check the map or else you'll get lost. It's probably most prevalent in this game because you don't get much of a hint on where to go; only a couple times do you get a boss giving you a goal. What's worse is that sometimes, looking at the map might reveal areas you've never been to but it looks like you have because of the dark colours.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The cards being random drops from specific enemies that are never hinted to in game. It is entirely possible to complete the game with a large majority of your card collection incomplete if you don't use a guide. Advance Collection again takes care of this problem, with an optional gadget that lets you know if you're attacking an enemy that can drop a DSS card as well as if you've got it already.
  • The Battle Arena has a Mana Burn mechanic that stops you from using the DSS system. While this stops the player from waltzing through the Bonus Dungeon with Summon Magic, it also locks the player out of the very core system of the game. While there are ways to get around it if you have plenty of MP-restoring items, being locked out of anything but your subweapon is frustrating, even more in Magician Mode, where the Arena becomes nigh impossible to clear because of Nathan's dependence on magic in this mode.
  • You have to double tap to run. While pressing backwards, then forwards is easier and still works, this leads to multiple frustrating situations where you move unexpectedly slow at a critical moment because your reflexes didn't register the second tap, leading to multiple cheap hits or deaths.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Clearing the Underground Waterway before defeating Death, meaning no purification for poisonous waters.
• That One Attack: Dracula's One-Winged Angel form will start spamming a Dash Attack at low HP which takes up half the screen, will deal over 100 damage even at 1000 Defense, and is virtually impossible to anticipate the first time (though his glowing might be an invitation to get the hell away, you need to go up specifically). At low enough health, he will use nothing else.
  • Things get when he summons tons of horrible leech-like bats which sweep around him and make it nigh impossible for you to get close to and whip him.
  • His meteor attack at high HP is hair-tearingly difficult to dodge, as the meteors come down at a pattern that is seemingly completely random. It can be completely avoided, but don't expect to be able to avoid it all the time. If you have Neptune and Cockatrice, however... well... turns out those falling meteors are rock type...
• That One Boss:
  • Adramelech, the boss atop the chapel, is a static goat demon that has a lot of HP, heavy-hitting attacks that are hard to avoid, and respawning bubbles that will leave you as a sitting duck for either fireballs or skulls. And even worse is that this is just the start of the game's most difficult point.
  • The Zombie Dragons. You don't have a lot of room, they like to swing wildly and drop random debris from the ceiling, and when you kill one, the other literally devours the dead one to gain back 300 HP. They're also below you, making attacking them awkward. The Axe is your friend (for once).
    • And this is all in addition to the horrendous frame-rate drops that affect this boss in particular in the original version.
  • Not a boss per se, but the minotaur room in the Arena is just downright brutal. Seven of them, each with 700 HP and a ridiculously powerful attack that reaches halfway through the screen, both horizontally and vertically. Worse yet, it's located halfway into the dungeon, far away from the save point, and you have no magic and nowhere to run. Expect to have your ass knocked around like a ragdoll if you don't start spamming crosses the microsecond you enter the room.
  • Dracula's second form is infamous for being far and away one of the toughest ever, as noted with his two That One Attack entries above. He is huge, his attacks are extremely powerful and take most of the screen, and his only weak point is small and only accessible after he teleports, leaving Nathan little space to react. And then he starts the second stage with the dreaded dashes and eye transformation.
• That One Level:
  • The Machine Tower. What happens you combine a level that's heavy on the jumping with Medusa Heads? This trope.
  • And the goddamn Chapel with the Marionettes EVERYWHERE that curse you, making you unable to attack, and worse still, Bloody Swords which move in an erratic pattern and are hard to hit even when you can attack. Both enemies are spammed like hell.
  • There's also the Gallery; a segment that's filled with enemies that can poison you with little room to maneuver past them all.
  • And then there's the Underground Waterway. Absolutely filled with ice-based monsters that just love to inflict the "frozen" status, and although there's a DSS combo that nerfs that severely by allowing you to absorb ice attacks, one of the cards necessary for it is only dropped by one of those previously mentioned ice-based monsters exclusive to this area. Then there's the annoying switch-and-bridges puzzle, where the game makes you wait for nearly 10 seconds every single one of the dozen-plus times you hit a switch while the blocks sloooowly slide into place to form either a bridge or stairway so you can proceed. And the cherry on top of it all is that for some reason, this is the only area in the castle with NO candles, so good luck trying to reach the boss with any hearts left so you can use your sub-weapon.
  • While the Battle Arena is hard throughout, three rooms stand out as difficult even by the Arena's standards — one is wall to wall Minotaurs, another is filled with Poison Armors and poisonous Bloody Swords, and the third contains Dark Armors and Evil Pillars. All with heavy stat buffs. As for the Arena's final room? It contains an equally heavily buffed Devil.