The History of Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin

Produced by Koji Igarashi with the Dawn of Sorrow team, plus members of the Circle of the Moon team, over about 16 months and roughly 20 staff. The two character system, switching freely between Jonathan and Charlotte and combining them in Dual Crush attacks, was a deliberate homage to Castlevania III, the favorite Castlevania of both Igarashi and programmer Shutaro Iida.

The paintings exist because the designers were tired of indoor stages: Brauner's portraits open the castle into deserts, towns, and circuses. The team also corrected Dawn's most criticized feature, restricting the touch screen mostly to menus after deciding the seals and block breaking had broken the action's rhythm. The anime art style was retained from Dawn but toned down toward adult looking characters. Michiru Yamane composed, with Yuzo Koshiro recruited alongside her.

Portrait was a series of firsts: the first Castlevania with cooperative multiplayer, online Boss Rush and a player shop over Nintendo Wi-Fi, and the first handheld entry with English voice overs. North American pre-orders received a 20th anniversary bundle with a soundtrack CD, a timeline poster, an art book, a game case, and a stylus.

The majority praised the soundtrack, the story, and the cooperative play, and GamePro scored it 4.5 of 5 across the board, crediting Konami for marking the 20th anniversary with a new game rather than a compilation. Unlockables extended the cast backward through the series: Sisters Mode for Brauner's victims, and a Richter Mode pairing Richter and Maria from Rondo of Blood.

Portrait completes the Morris story Bloodlines began in 1917: the whip's cost to non Belmont wielders, Eric Lecarde's fate, and his daughters, all resolved in one game. Jonathan and Charlotte returned in the multiplayer Harmony of Despair (2010), and the game's own return in the Dominus Collection made the full DS trilogy playable together for the first time since the DS itself.