Switch · Classic Vidya Review
Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia
Completed 4 Oct 2025
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- A truly excellent port of a truly excellent game. Like several other retro games featured on this site, the Switch version is part of a larger pack (“The Dominus Collection”). The price of the entire pack is worth it just for the port of this game.
- I don’t want this entire review to just be about how good M2 is at porting software, but every affordance you could think to want is here; nothing about these games “doesn’t translate” just because they were originally DS games.
- By this point in the life of these Castlevania games, I think Konami had learned to avoid a lot of common problems. For example, in Order of Ecclesia, yes you can grind as much as you want, but it’s never really needed if you’re not hunting for rare item drops or something. By the same token, there is no Symphony-of-the-Night issue where you’re essentially invincible by the end of the game and there’s no challenge any more.
- This playthrough was just a normal run through Normal difficulty. I did not do the extra hidden areas just outside Dracula’s castle, or go for total side quest completion in Wygol village.
- The glyph and union system never ever gets old; learning new setups, cycling between them, figuring out the best combos for different bosses, all extremely rewarding.
- Some of the boss balancing it a little wack; there are definitely main-game bosses which took me way more tries to beat than Dracula himself. But you kinda forgive this because the balancing is so perfect in all other ways. Enemy weaknesses and resistances are also taken very seriously which means you’re always working the glyph system.
- And it’s a damn good thing the regular enemies in regular rooms are well-balanced, because the overworld of this game is HUGE. Yes you’re in Dracula’s Castle by the end, but you have to fight through several earlier levels, themselves each filled with several bosses, in order to get there.
- Everyone who likes metroidvanias even a little bit should absolutely play Order of Ecclesia. It is Mt Rushmore of the genre.