The History of Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

Directed by Akihiro Minakata, produced by Igarashi, and made by the Portrait of Ruin team, Ecclesia drops the anime look of the two previous DS games for a gothic style under character designer Masaki Hirooka, a newcomer to the series. Shanoa is the first woman to lead a canonical Castlevania, and the game is the first canonical entry in which the Vampire Killer whip does not appear in any form.

Her weapons are Glyphs, over 100 of them, absorbed from enemies and bound to her arms and back, every attack spending magic that recharges only when she stops attacking. Glyph Unions combine them into larger attacks at the cost of hearts. The structure also breaks the one castle habit: 20 locations, villages, forests, mountains, and ocean, crossed on an overworld map, with the castle held back for the end, and a village of Belmont descendants whose rescue quests run the length of the game. Michiru Yamane and Yasuhiro Ichihashi composed, and the game connects to the Wii's Castlevania Judgment to unlock content in both.

Shane Bettenhausen, awarding an A minus at 1Up, called it a cross between Symphony of the Night and Simon's Quest and action RPG Castlevania at its best, its high difficulty balanced by its systems. GameTrailers named it Best Nintendo DS Game of 2008. The commercial footnote is the sobering one: 19,000 copies in its first week in Japan, the softest launch of the DS trilogy, in a market reviewers already described as saturated with the series.

Ecclesia was the last original 2D Castlevania of the classic era: after it, the series rebooted with Lords of Shadow, and the Symphony line went quiet until the collections. Shanoa's reception outlasted the sales, praised as a lead with agency whose design avoided the obvious, and compared ever since to Miriam of Bloodstained, the spiritual successor her game's own producer later made. The Dominus Collection of 2024 finally shelved her game beside its two DS predecessors.