Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls

The gothic fantasy series available on multiple consoles is back!

Beta Release: 18th September 2019 (Canada Only)
NA release: 17th September 2021
EU release: 17th September 2021
JP release: 17th September 2021
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
DReager1 Review: 6/10
Platforms: iOS
Version Played: iOS

Grimoire of Souls is a mobile game that had a beta release on Android and iOS before vanishing for a few years until it returned as an Apple Arcade exclusive – so only on one phone platform and locked behind a subscription. This game marks a return to the original Castlevania timeline after Lords of Shadows, bringing a bunch of games together.

In some ways, this is sort of a sequel to Harmony of Despair, taking the concept of the heroes from the Grimoires taking part in new adventures. Here, the magic in the Grimoires is being altered, so the secret group working on them asks Alucard to help, as monsters are appearing in the real world as a result. He needs to enter the books and restore the original events.

Lucy, the one that requested Alucard’s aid, can also pull out other heroes from the books, letting you play as Simon Belmont, Maria from Rondo of Blood version, Charlotte from Portrait of Ruin and Shanoa from Order of Ecclesia. Other heroes will also be pulled from the books, but with reduced power, meaning they’re just a power up you can use, although they all have dialogue.

The gameplay is a 2D sidescroller with a heavy focus on combat , although later chapters also have lots of challenging platforming, with each character having their own style as play. Using the touch screen is horrible, so a controller is highly recommended. By default, you automatically attack, but you can turn this off. Each character also has a special ability they can use with Y, a sub weapon, a slide and you can use shoulder buttons to dodge left and right. It feels surprisingly great to play.

Your weapon of choice (plus up to three support weapons) will also grab you an ability with a cooldown, and you can push the right stick in any direction to activate one of them, with some of them also useful to reach higher platforms to find hidden treasure. The levels themselves also look nice, if a bit generic, and feature new takes on some classic areas, and each one has three options objectives.

Now, with this originally designed as a free to play mobile game, this has Gacha elements, just with no way to buy new currency. This means you’ll quite often reach a level where you just do no damage to the enemies and will need to grind to improve stats in various ways, and it’s all extremely time consuming. Thankfully, Grimoire of Souls works offline and uses your phone’s time and date for daily events, so you can just change the day to be able to do a bunch of levelling up at once.

These daily events include a free random item, dispatched (send characters on missions for resources), trails to level up and earn weapon upgrades and simple searches. Simple searches can be performed on any level you have fully completed (with objectives) and instantly simulate the rewards form if you had played the level, with you able to do 60 a day (and all at once). When you’re on an item, the game will show you what you need to upgrade and pressing it will show the levels they’re available on, which is quite handy.

But, ultimately, this is all just busywork that gets in the way of actually enjoying the game, and any game that lets you have the game play itself to help level up is one that just wants to waste people’s time, which is a shame as the gameplay is a lot of fun and the story is interesting, with a lot of fun interactions between characters. While Dracula is defeated and the castle locked in an eclipse, there’s still people who want to find a way to bring him back – but there’s always heroes to stop it.

Fun

Summoning is expensive and searches are limited to 60 times per day so the rest of the time you will need to actually go out there and just keep on completing the levels. That part is limitless at least but you can see how this would take a while right? The levels keep jumping up in terms of difficulty level so you have to try and stay close to compete.
DReager1

Remake or remaster?

A re-release on multiple platforms with better balancing would turn it into a really good game.

Official Ways to get the game

It’s only available on subscription via Apple Arcade.