In a bit of a metroidvania mood and played this new-to-me GBA game with Jonta Guitar's and sorrow's color hack. This is a fairly mid game more on the metroid side with dual castles and a few quirks. At one point, Juste stumbles across an empty room and decides, "This room needs decorating." The enemies pretty standard but there's a legitimately creepy "Scarecrow" that are bouncing impaled dudes.
I lost about an hour of progress in HoD (boooo) so I had to replay this part of the castle, but that gave me a chance to revisit the room Juste feels compelled to decorate. Most of the level design and enemies aren't memorable, but some of the skeleton creatures have interesting designs. The skeleton spiders are pretty cool, but they never attack--they only retreat. Another oddity is the floating eyeballs... they won't hurt you if you walk right through them.
Continuing to whip my way through HoD. I found these White Dragons particularly cool. They wrap around the columns and jump from one to the other. They are described as "are the fossilized remains of a long-necked dinosaur animated by a demonic force" which is kinda goofy but whatever.
The castle layout in this game is not great, as I've mentioned before, and sometimes there are long lulls between save points. The game sort of gets around this by having a quicksave feature that saves all stats/progress, but respawns the player at the last save room on shutdown/restart. So if you do some crazy backtracking for an item (hint: you will) you could utilize this feature to avoid having to trek alllll the way back. The GameBoy Advance had a software-based sleep system, but it's not utilized by this title.
Spent some time backtracking in HoD, and finding empty rooms I have no idea wtf to do with. Some sections of the castle have elevators, which helps. I beat the Minotaur, who looks badass but has a pretty basic attack pattern, and came across those creepy impaled guys again (if you stand still, they don't hurt you).
Maxim admits that when Juste was chosen to be the vampire slayer, he went on an expedition to find Dracula's remains so he could take Juste's place. He gathered the remains, but lost them "somehow" and has amnesia. Obviously we know what happened THE DRACULAS GOT HIM
I came across the eye in a high tower, but I need some sort of flying or wall jump ability to get it. According to the game I've discovered 50% of the map. I assume the second half of the game is collecting Dracula parts and then putting them together an elaborate cosplay. Here for it.
Hanging out in bloody rooms in Castlevania, and also thoroughly lost. I've doubled back over what feels like the entire castle and I'm at 71% but I'm not sure where to go next, as I keep encountering locked doors. Next time I play one of these, I'm going to take notes so I can remember why the various dead-ends are not traverseable.
I figured out I missed this bastard, so I went back for him. The bosses have been straightforward to this point, but Devil has a few extra moves and is spongier. He wasn't particularly difficult to beat, but the battle took a while. Beating him leads to the night goggles, which means I can now explore pitch-black areas.
Juste's adventure continues. The Merman boss is pretty straightforward. I was killing the mermen he summons until I realized if you back off, they will attack and move offscreen. The Max Slimer is truly the most boring boss I have ever encountered in my entire life. It is basically, "Here, hit a sponge for three minutes."
I'm at 82% and have met Death again, but I've also completely finished exploring the area I opened up after beating the Devil. I keep teetering on the edge of shelving this game. I want to play a Castlevania game but this one is pretty damn mid, so I may switch over to one of the other handheld games for a bit.