Hehe, so I beat it.. sort of. You can get the "bad ending" incredibly early in the game I guess.
I have to say though, so far this game is really good. I almost want to say better than Dawn of Sorrow (once you get into it). The different subweapons and spells makes up for the lack of Soma's soul powers, and they really do a decent job of making the two characters work well together. It requires a bit of strategy too, as while you can have that second character there to do some extra damage, there are also areas where it's a bad idea, since any damage they take lowers your MP. In particular, the circus-themed painting is absolutely full of swinging pendulums and other such traps that make it much easier to just do solo.
I also like that they added a lot of digital voice to this - more than Dawn of Sorrow. Even some of the enemies have speech. Also nifty, I tried out boss rush mode - the first level features all bosses from Dawn of Sorrow! Neat!
I am currently about 80% of the way through the game judging from my enemy completion and punishing myself hard by not progressing further until I've received every drop from every enemy I've visited so far to be sure I'm not missing a quest item. I figure by the time I'm done with that my levels will be uber and I won't need as many potions anymore. Either that or I'll have torn my hair out.
I'm mastering all of the weapons I have while I'm at it; it's kind of aggravating that as you master them they grow in both power and MP consumption. At the low levels you can pretty much throw infinite items but by the time it's mastered it drains a lot of MP.
All in all it's the same kind of fun as all of the other Castlevania games I've played recently; at least there's no "I win" button like the Thunderbird summon from CoTM anymore.
Yeah I'm in about the same position. I tried out the Nest of Evil tonight - it's basically this game's version of the Battle Arena from CotM (but without the gay mana drain). It's pretty neat - one of the nice things about it being it throws in a buttload of enemies from Dawn of Sorrow that don't appear anywhere else in this game, including several of the bosses. I got decently far down it, but the area I'm at now is insane. First room is basically two of one of the later bosses you fight (not to spoil anything, but it's the boss of the "second version" of the forest painting). I've gotten past that room but then there are a ton of rooms after that. Did fairly decent but didn't quite make it. I died on the boss - that wierd guy from DoS who summons the swarms of locusts 😞 I probably could have beaten him but I screwed up on the one where the locusts rain down (I think Soma had a good attack for hitting stuff above him.. I gotta figure out a better option for Jonathan).
But yeah, this is a great game. I honestly think it's better than Dawn of Sorrow, but that will all depend on how good the "extra" mode is, given that Dawn of Sorrow had *the best* extra mode of any Castlevania (or at least any modern Castlevania that usually just throws the secondary character as playable). So we'll see.
Also, I'd say other than the clock tower, this one probably has the "most different" version of the castle out of any of them, which is great given every friggin' game features the exact same friggin' castle layout. Add the fact that the paintings add some extra variety to that, and it's pretty great to finally visit some new areas.
Though, I still want to see them do something similar to Simon's Quest. I want to run around the Romania countryside again 😃 Adding in all the RPGish features of recent games and it could be quite awesome.
P.S. - the second versions of the four paintings were also great. At least two of them feature extremely classic boss battles, and I'd have to look but I'm sure the third was a classic battle as well.. I honestly can't remember what the forth was now :P
Edit: Looked it up and yeah, I'm pretty sure all four are classic (i.e. NES) Castlevania battles.
They are:
[spoiler]The Creature (aka Frankenstein's Monster), The Mummy, Medusa, and the Werewolf.. I wasn't sure about the Werewolf so I looked him up and I guess he's in Dracula X which is why I didn't recognize him as "classic". That's still pretty good though.[/spoiler]