YMMV / Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

• Alternative Character Interpretation: At what point did Barlowe truly become a pawn trying to resurrect Dracula? The game seems to lean firmly into him always having been a liar and a worshiper, but should the player speak to him about the true nature of Dominus, he reveals that Ecclesia's glyphs, which had made her stand out among the many organizations researching alternative methods of defeating Dracula, proved ineffective and he researched using Dracula's own power in a desperate attempt to prevent Ecclesia sinking like a rock in water should the other organizations watching them find out. Was he always a Dracula worshiper? Or, like the later boss fight with Albus reveals, did his desperation to keep Ecclesia afloat and research into Dominus prove to be an opening for Dracula to manipulate and warp his motives from the original goal of destroying him?
• Ass Pull: Barlowe being a Dracula worshiper could easily become this since there's absolutely no warning that he's actually going to resurrect Dracula instead of killing him, until you forget to rescue a villager and he starts putting his Psychotic Smirk on. The few subtle clues of his true nature in-game is that he doesn't do much in-game until The Reveal, he looks at Shanoa's direction just like a typical enemy, and Ecclesia is shaped like a boss room instead of a hub, with the save point located out of Barlowe's room and the door of his room resembling a boss door instead of a normal door. These, however, are not at all obvious unless you are very familiar with DS-Metroidvania gameplay and he could otherwise have been passed off as a seemingly non-conspicuous mentor figure since you aren't forced to interact with him often, and he doesn't do or say anything overtly suspicious in his few non-hostile encounters.
• Awesome Music:
  • Sorrow's Distortion, which plays for the fight with Albus. It really gets across the point of a fight that shouldn't be happening.
  • An Empty Tome, the theme for Castle Entrance, which also doubles as Shanoa's theme, is now considered one of the most iconic songs of the entire series.
• Breather Boss: Wallman. He comes after the fairly tricky Albus and Barlowe fights and before the actually difficult bosses of Dracula's Castle, such as Blackmore and Death. Despite this, he's very easy to kill by simply absorbing a glyph while he's using it, resulting in him either getting blown up by his own bombs or stuck in a wall after losing the glyph that let him enter it depending on your timing. The fight could be over in less than 30 seconds.
• Common Knowledge: No, the game doesn't end with Albus killing Dracula instead of Shanoa. It ends with Shanoa killing Dracula with the Dominus Glyphs, which kill the user, and Albus sacrificing his own existence to keep Shanoa alive. The former interpretation was mostly an outgrowth of the "IGA is a misogynist" crowd that was popular for a while (even showing up on this wiki a couple of times!), but is a misreading of the situation.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Double Hammers and Weapon Masters in the bonus areas are most notable. They move fast, hit hard, and can hit you from across the screen. Your first fight with them will probably lead to death from offscreen.
  • Tin Men are an example encountered in the course of normal gameplay. You can summon one in the last part of Minera Prison Island by stepping into a spotlight (at this point, it's pretty much a Boss in Mook Clothing, and only a very skilled — or overleveled — player will be able to defeat it). When you encounter them again in Dracula's castle, they're still a major threat.
  • Cave Trolls. You can first encounter them in the second part of the Tymeo Mountains, which is fairly early in the game. They're still dangerous when you encounter them in the castle.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Before the game was released, Brachyura was known as Blacula due to a fan's mistranslation.
  • This game gets the moniker of being the Metroid Fusion of the series, due to the linearity. Both games are divided into several small areas which are visited in a specific order according to objectives given to by a male NPC (Samus's AI partner and Barlowe) rather than being one large, interconnected world, the main characters start out far weaker than usual for their respective series, making bosses and enemies considerably tough, and both Fusion Samus and Shanoa gain new abilities by absorbing something taken from their fallen enemies (X-parasites and glyphs).
  • "The Samuel L. Jackson Attack" — Shanoa's Nitesco + Weapon Glyph union from Order of Ecclesia that resembles a giant purple lightsaber, just like Master Windu's weapon of choice in Star Wars.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Nitesco combined with any weapon creates a giant sword that can hit nearly anything on the screen. Its light elemental makes it extremely strong against most enemies (and its fire elemental does at least decent damage to most enemies that resist light), and it gets stronger every time you use it. Add on the Death ring (or two), plus Dominus Agony, and you can destroy ANYTHING that doesn't absorb light or fire elemental attacks.
  • Nitesco itself. Think the Crissaegrim, except you can just steal it off a regular enemy trying to cast it, no incredibly rare random drops needed. You can't get it until partway through the castle proper, though, which at least limits the amount of time you can abuse it on your first playthrough. Conveniently, however, your first opportunity to get it comes right before Blackmore, and it just so happens that he is weak against Light attacks.
  • The Queen of Hearts helmet. Not only does it offer some of the best stats of any helmet in the game, it halves the heart-consumption of all special attacks. Normally, you'd have to complete Hard Mode with a level cap of either 50 or 1 to get it... or you could just get a copy of Castlevania: Judgment on the Wii and sync with it, giving you the helmet right from the start.
  • To a lesser extent, the food items unlocked through Aeon's quests. In previous entries, the only healing items available to buy were potions (and the occasional Powdered Milk), which meant the player would have to farm for food items if they wanted more healing. In this game, the food items are plentiful and can be unlocked early (Aeon can be rescued immediately after you acquire the double jump, in fact — and the first two quests can be done at that time too). Some of the food items you can unlock are quite powerful, and all of the unlockable food items are much cheaper than potions of equivalent power would be^note For example, both the Ramen Noodles and the High Potion heal 200 HP, but the Ramen Noodles cost 800 gold while the High Potion costs 2000. A less-than-stellar player can potentially tank their way through difficult encounters by using their massive supply of store-bought food to heal up.
• Goddamned Boss: Brachyura on a New Game Plus, as he's the only boss you can't just speed through with your previous-playthrough Glyphs and stats; unless you use a glitch, you're still forced to tough out the entire fixed-pace tower climb. He escalates into That One Boss territory if you're trying to get his medal.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • It's possible to load Albus into Boss Rush mode, turning into his gun into a laser that shoots Nitesco and giving him the ability to fly; combining flight with his fire kicks turns him into a deadly helicopter.
  • It's possible to skip the Brachyura fight in New Game Plus by using Ignis to trigger the elevator cutscene.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The soundtrack takes on a different mood knowing that this is the final Metroidvania-era Castlevania game, not helped by the boss themes all being named after games from that era culminating with "Order of the Demon."
  • The fact that the end of the game states that Shanoa and the Order were forgotten after all they had done feels extra bittersweet knowing this was the last Castlevania game produced by IGA and Konami rebooted the franchise afterward before putting it on hiatus.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: A common complaint is that Order of Ecclesia is significantly more difficult than every other post-Symphony game. The bosses are tough, enemies are plentiful and hit hard, and Shanoa is unable to attack without spending her magic meter (and once she bottoms out it takes a few seconds for it to refill), putting a dent in the player's ability to dish out damage.
• Magnificent Bastard: Albus is a member of the Order of Ecclesia who, in an effort to protect his beloved adoptive sister Shanoa, sabotages her efforts to absorb the Dominus glyph and steals it for himself. Knowing how powerful and dangerous Dominus is, Albus kidnaps a group of villagers who have descended from the Belmont clan, using their powerful blood to mitigate Dominus' horrible side effects. Aware that he can't absorb glyphs the same way Shanoa can, Albus deliberately lets her follow him across the land, willingly giving up two of the three pieces of Dominus to watch how she does it so he can replicate it for the final piece himself. While ultimately driven to madness and slain by Shanoa, Albus' machinations end up saving Shanoa and trigger the downfall of both Dracula and their evil master Barlowe, surviving as a spirit long enough to sacrifice himself at the last minute to save Shanoa's life.
• Narm Charm: Barlowe's boss fight has him go full ham, complete with him going cartoonishly Laughing Mad as he bounces around the walls pinball-style with the Tonitrus glyph. That said, Barlowe's VA is giving easily the most enthusiastic performance in the game the whole fight, which ends up making an already awesome fight even more memorable.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: Shanoa and Albus are adoptive siblings, but some of Albus' dialogue sounds more like what a lover would say. It doesn't help that we don't see much of Shanoa prior to her memory loss, which could've helped clear the confusion a bit. That they are Author Avatars of IGA and his wife further muddles the issue.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Order of Ecclesia is shades harder than its predecessor Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. Unlike Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and most of its successors, the game is more restricted with giving out Game-Breaker right away, and enemies can easily curb stomp you if you're not careful about their patterns.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Ebony Wings sounds vaguely like a church organ rendition of Moonlight Densetsu of Sailor Moon fame. Expect to see Sailor Moon references in the comments for this track.
• Tear Jerker: The ending. Albus, who has given up his own soul in order to spare Shanoa from making the same sacrifice, takes off for the afterlife after seeing Dracula's end. Before his death, he begs Shanoa to let him see her smile one last time, which she does while tears stream down her face.
• That One Attack: Dracula's bat swarm in his second phase. It ignores Mercy Invincibility, it takes fairly precise positioning to avoid, and it can shred away your entire health bar almost before you can react. It only takes a few seconds of this to go from full health to Game Over.
• That One Boss:
  • Blackmore fills the screen with projectiles and attacks that will kill you in about 4 hits. Unless you bring enough dark resistance and light glyphs, you better hope you're good at dodging... itself a tall order, given that you spend the entire fight trapped in the corner of the room. There is a very good reason why you're provided the opportunity to grab the Nitesco glyph literally just before you confront him.
  • Eligor, a giant mecha centaur knight which you have to be very used to its patterns to beat easily, especially when you're on its back.
  • Gravedorcus. There's barely any room to maneuver in and, due to the boss's movement patterns through the floor and his resilience to everything but ice, you'll be stuck with Vol Grando the entire fight, making him surprisingly durable.
• That One Level:
  • Ruvas Forest, one of the game's "straight line from point A to point B" sections. On normal, it won't be too bad... on hard, with a level cap of 1, however, it will absolutely destroy you because of all the flying enemies flooding the screen. Observe. You'll need a lot of jumping, a lot of health items, and a lot of luck. Bonus points must go to the rightmost room right before the end room of that particular section, where the Medusa Heads encountered there do so much damage that you may as well not have HP at all in that section.
  • The Hard Mode version of the Skeleton Cave contains a Blade Master, which is a very fast enemy that is hard to kill unless the player abuses glyph unions; and drastically buffed Bone Pillars that can shoot fire at an unreasonable rate and can't be blocked with the only Scutum glyph you have at this point. Also, the only save point is at the boss door.
• That One Sidequest
  • If you're trying to do it earlier, Monica's final quest that requires 5 Cashmere can be a bear as it's a 4 star rarity dropped by White Fomors you'll meet first in the Mystery Manor, right before fighting the Posessed Albus. White Fomors aren't hard to kill, but their teleporting around can be annoying, and the rarity of getting the drop makes it likely that this one will take a significant amount of time to even complete. Fortunately, White Fomors cast the Vol Luminatio glyph, allowing you to stockpile that to increase your Light attribute rating, and they're worth relatively decent experience at 99 per kill. They're also pretty weak to the Darkness attribute, which the Vol Umbra in the room adjacent to the best farming spot for them happens to be.
  • Abram's final quest, which requires you to find Merman Meat, which the player is likely to assume is dropped by the Merman enemies...and is proven incorrect once a quick look at the bestiary reveals they have no drops whatsoever. The correct enemy is in fact the Lorelai monster, found in Somnus Reef, but the connection between the monster and them dropping Merman Meat isn't clear whatsoever. And to top it all off, it's a 5-star rarity item, the highest rarity of all, so you're likely to be farming for quite some time.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Quite a few people were upset with the shift from exploration to combat. Even when the fanbase warmed up to it, the most common criticism is the linear level design.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Albus Mode could've been an entirely alternate stoyline a la Julius Mode, wherein Albus decides that he'll take on Dracula instead of Shanoa (since that seems to have been his driving motivation to begin with), and the battle with possessed Albus is fought against Shanoa instead, but all it amounts to is a Challenge Run.
• Underused Game Mechanic: You eventually unlock the option to raise the Hard difficulty level cap from 1 to 255. Problem is, the game can be beaten around level 70, and about ten levels after that the expontential EXP curve rises in such a way that multiple playthrough are needed to level up once. It makes one wonder why the developers even offer a triple-digit level cap in the first place.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • This game includes many linear, enemy-dense areas with distinct patterns, high damage, and a variety of weapons to appeal to Classicvania fans. It largely worked, while still providing enough secrets, backtracking, and exploration in the latter half to satisfy the metroidvania crowd.
  • The artstyle goes back to the gothic watercolor look associated with most of the Metroidvania games after the Lighter and Softer anime look of the previous two Nintendo DS games was criticized.
• The Woobie: Shanoa. She got manipulated into resurrecting Dracula by none other than the man who raised her, who also stole her memories and emotions.