OS: Finished Gwen's Quest, then did the first chapter of Cornelius.
Ok, Gwen's story wasn't bad and Gwen herself was decent enough. HOWEVER, what was bad was making her the starting character. She's...not really a good person to introduce the system too. A bit awkward for playing as, clearly relies on some niches, what have you.
Why do I say this? Cause when I played as Cornelius, he plays MUCH smoother and is generally simpler. He really feels like a much better beginner character. I suppose starting with Gwen makes sense if its for some plot reasons (like they'll openly talk about events from Gwen's quest in spoiler fashion in Cornelius'...no, no one tell me if that's the case, I wanna find out on my own), but the point remains that from a gameplay standpoint, Cornelius is just generally much better starting character. I'm not saying "he's a better PC!", rather, he's just a lot more basic in terms of controlling.
ANYWAY, game has some serious polish issues still. I'll bring up one that no one can argue against, and hold off subjective complaints later:
Battle against the Queen of the Dead. Ok, so the idea behind the fight isn't too bad; she likes to summon swarms of OHKO bait enemies just to annoy you. Fine, sure, I'll accept that; bosses need a niche or something.
What they do NOT need is to OVERWHELM THE DAMN SYSTEM to the point where the game starts suffering from these massive slow downs. It made the fight a lot more annoying than it should have been. Its like the game went "Ok, here's a not pain in the ass fight...but we're going to make it hard and annoying just cause we hate you by resorting back to old NES Slow down issues! I hope you enjoy!"
ARGH! No, that's...just unforgivable in this day and age. I mean, it was pissing me off enough that Dr. Wily's Oilman attack in MMPU slowed the game down, but even then, that was just one attack in an entire fight (out of like 8 or so), and you could stop it prematurely before the Slow Downs started. OS, though, I was constantly killing the little creatures not cause they were actually getting in the way, but cause they were causing the massive slow down.
Anyway...
Castlevania Dracula X Chronicles: Yeah, bought this last week. Just finished one route, learning apparently there are multiple routes, so went back and started doing some of the alt stages...including actually unlocking Maria once I learned what that Key was for.
Also unlocked SotN too, played it a bit, but not really enough to comment on the game besides how it feels a lot more like a Vampire/Undead theme version of Metroid rather than a Castlevania. I mean this in a purely objective sense, mind.
I wanna comment on the game, though I feel my opinion might change a bit when I play more of it. So yeah, reserving my judgment for now.