So I got this yesterday. Figured I would just revive this thread instead of starting a new one :P
First off, it's a hell of a lot smaller than I thought it would be. Though going to pick it up, I sort of had a feeling it would end up being disappointing in that regard (the FF XII CE sure was.. "Collector's Tin" my ass.. it was a PS2 box made of metal!)
The art book was pretty disappointing. It's about the size of an SNES instruction manual, but thicker (but it's softcover, not hardcover despite how it looks in that picture). And it's not so much an art book as "a collection of box pictures (with *partial* cover art in the background) for each game. And by partial I mean, the three NES games were all on one page seperated into one third of the page each. It was rediculous. The only actual non-cover art was towards the back - they had *some* art for SotN and a few of the other PSX/GBA/DS titles. And by some I mean they tried to cram about 8 character pieces on one page so they were all tiny (if you go to Castlevania Dungeon they have the same art on their page, just not tiny :P).
The music CD is pretty decent, though it's all strait from the games. So you know, NES games sound like shit, etc. It has music from I think every game, but some games only have one or two tracks. Others have maybe four or five. Actually the PSX games sounded pretty shitty too which surprised me. They all had *way* too much percussion to the point it drowned out the actual theme (which was strangly low volume). I don't know if this is how it was in the original, as I don't own any of the PSX titles, but it seemed off. PSX should have the best audio of all of them. I was listening to this in my car so I didn't have track names, so I couldn't tell you which was which. I could generally just make out the game based on audio quality. Surprisingly the Super Castlevania track sounded extremely good - you could tell it was synthesizer crap but the audio quality seemed cleaner than most others, some of which were a bit scratchy or poppy.. also surprisingly, the one track for "The Castlevania Adventure" (aka the first Game Boy - that is ORIGINAL Game Boy - Castlevania) sounded *better* than the NES tracks. I couldn't figure that one out - did Game Boy actually have better audio than NES? I suspect it's just different music rippers, some decent, some lousy. Who knows. I've only gotten as far as I believe (again, in the car so no track lists) the GBA Castlevanias. I noticed a huge shift in quality so I'm assuming that's what it is. They didn't sound as good as the SNES track which was strange (I thought they shared at least *similar* hardware though I knew GBA was definately inferior - I just didn't think that much). They also has some bonus tracks - I forget what the first one is, but the second is Bloody Tears (which I listed to since that's my favorite). It sounded pretty good, but I think I actually prefered the NES version 😊 Too bad the NES ones were all extremely short (most less than 1 min long). They should have at least looped once. All in all, it has 27 tracks which is not bad.
Not much to say about the timeline sheet, it's pretty neat. I didn't read over it much, but in the blurb for I think Bloodlines there is a little note that says something like "Developer's Note: As for the explanation of why a 16th century vampire is in the 20th century, we are working on that in a future game". I thought that was interesting.
The other stuff is neat but nothing too fancy. There is a little case that can hold two DS games, and a stylus.
The game itself is pretty fun so far. Artistically it seems to reuse the exact same sprites from Dawn of Sorrow in many cases, but otherwise it's pretty good. The team function is actually pretty cool and you can do some neat combo stuff with it. For example, one ability allows you to jump off the other person's head for an extra boost. You can also tell one person to stay in one place, and then have the other manipulate a switch or something to reach new areas (for example, the first time has one character stand on a statue, while the other one pushes it, then you switch back to the other and you can reach a higher ledge). Another neat use was a boss who would charm the male character (so he attacked you), so it was beneficial to fight her just with the female character. There are other neat things like challenges (i.e. kill 10 ___" or "Perform this key sequence", etc) which grant new items, abilities, etc. So yeah, so far it's a lot of fun. Decently hard too (there seem to be fewer save rooms from what I've seen, maybe it's just my imagination).
