Beware of unmarked spoilers further down the page.
Breather Boss: If you know what you're doing, Dmitrii. The gist of his battle is that he copies the last soul you use to attack him and will use that nonstop until you hit him with something else, so once you hit him with a weak soul, just keep your distance and smack him with your weapon. Additionally he will only ever copy a soul at rank one meaning several souls that might be strong for Soma are terrible for him. note Another trick to know is that he never copies a given soul twice in the same battle. Hit him with a strong soul, follow up with a weak one, then keep spamming back the strong soul and he'll just get himself killed handily
Contested Sequel: Both Aria and Dawn are well regarded, but which game is better is up for debate. Dawn of Sorrow brings improved graphics and sound thanks to the upgrade to Nintendo DS, along with an expanded Julius Mode and several other little bonuses. However, it also faces criticism for the shift to an Animesque art style, and the Magic Seals and weapon crafting systems are widely seen as Scrappy Mechanics.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Hammer gets some of this, mostly due to not being playable in Julius Mode. Many were hoping for Harmony of Despair to change this, especially since some sound files buried in the game came to light. Unfortunately, he didn't make the cut.
The Mandragora soul 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.
The Persephone soul absorbs and nullifies projectiles, including Death's sickles and Abaddon's locusts. If used against an enemy, it will also restore Soma's HP for a trivial MP cost.
The Devil soul lets you enter a contract with the devil to massively increase the damage output of your physical attacks at the cost of draining your HP over time. It's capable of letting Joke Weapons deal way above respectable damage and making the best weapons even better. The loss of HP doesn't mean much when you have HP-restoring items, and it can't even directly kill you.
The Malacoda soul that is obtained very late into the game makes Soma attack with a tail. It has good range and costs an unproportionally low amount of MP for just how strong it is. It's already at its full power with just a single soul, so it can make short work of the rest of the game.
Low-Tier Letdown: The final weapon of the rapier/whip sword line, Nebula. To get it, you need to give up a Malacoda soul, which is only found late into the game and is incredibly powerful. In return you will get a shiny new whip sword with very disappointing damage output in comparison to most other endgame weapons. Even moreso for those who have played Portrait of Ruin where the Nebula was a whip that homed in on enemies, unlike here.
The seal system, which was obviously just shoehorned in to use the system's touch screen capabilities. The Balore soul has the same problem, and is only used in six rooms, one of which is the room you find it in. Fortunately, Julius doesn't use the former and instead whips bosses so hard they have no chance to regenerate.
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. It's technically possible to get a Chaos Ring and still forge a boss soul weapon in one playthrough, but the player has to fight all the bosses except the final one without a boss soul weapon (and of course collect and possess 100% of all possible souls) in order to do so.
Gergoth 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).
Death's second part. 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.
Abaddon 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 Superboss in Portrait of Ruin, and is still ridiculously hard.
Dawn of Sorrow 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 the West.
Not too many people were happy with the changes to souls in Dawn compared to Aria, especially when it came to item crafting.
