The Castlevania portable collection has finally been set free! After being initially released on the Nintendo DS almost 20 years ago, the famous trilogy is now available on modern platforms.
The Castlevania Dominus Collection includes Dawn of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin, and Order of Ecclesia as its three main titles, as well as Haunted Castle and its remake as extras.
So, how did Konami manage to adapt these DS titles into modern consoles? Do I have to touch my TV to draw seals in Dawn of Sorrow? Is this a barely-functioning emulator trying to pass as a retro collection? Find out the answer to these and more in our full port report for the Castlevania Dominus Collection.
Being originally Nintendo DS games, the three main titles in the Dominus Collection have a secondary display with auxiliary info, which by default have been neatly arranged into two different sections. Unfortunately, ultrawide displays don’t benefit from this layout, as the collection has been designed with 16:9 aspect ratios in mind.
The actual game screen is displayed to the left, taking up half of the display area, while the map and enemy information screens are stacked to the right. The player can switch the orientation of these screens, with the possibility of going back to the original top and bottom layout for pixel perfect resolution.
The other two games included, Haunted Castle and Haunted Castle Revisited don’t have multiple screens to deal with, instead offering extra features like smoothing and scanlines. Haunted Castle Revisited runs natively at 16:9, while the original game can be played in stretched 4:3, 1024×896 pixel perfect thanks to integer scaling, and an atrocious 16:9 stretched resolution.
One interesting thing is that the in-game prompts for the three main titles have been changed to match Xbox, PlayStation and Switch controllers, meaning that you’ll see the correct buttons for your platform or controller of choice in both the overlay menus and the actual games.
When it comes to the touch screen controls, which are required for drawing seals in Dawn of Sorrow or to use your powers in Portrait of Ruin‘s sister mode, the player can use the right joystick to move a virtual cursor around and hold the right trigger to simulate touching the screen. The cursor is pretty slow by default, but features three different speed options that can be changed on the fly.
Players can also choose to use their mouse to touch the screen, which is a nifty extra, and even though it is recommended that you play with a controller, the game does allow keyboard controls, although there is no way to remap them and they don’t have associated prompts on the overlay or in-game.
When it comes to its quality-of-life settings, the Dominus Collection features save states and a reasonably in-depth rewind system, which holds a pretty long timeline and lets you move frame by frame to pick where you want to return to.
The game also lets you switch between the American, Japanese, and European versions of the three main games, as well as the Korean version exclusive to Order of Ecclesia. The audio language can also be changed in the settings between English and Japanese regardless of what version of the game is being played.
Minor things like being able to change the background color, as well as balance the volume between BGM, sound effects, and dialogue are welcome additions to the collection, and help show that a lot of thought was put into these quality-of-life features.
As far as its extras go, the Dominus Collection is packed with goodies, featuring not only the two extra Haunted Castle games, but also loads of artwork; including concept art, character portraits, manuals in every language for the three DS games, and the official 4koma comic strips posted to Konami’s official site, which unfortunately come untranslated, but are still an incredibly deep cut.
On top of that, the game also features a jukebox with the entire soundtrack for all games, including the extra Haunted Castle titles. The music player has a good bit of options, and lets you loop or shuffle the soundtracks, with the option of adding your favorite tracks to a playlist for ease of listening.
The three main Nintendo DS games also feature a Compendium, which can be accessed from the pause menu and gives you detailed information on every enemy, item, equipment, sub-weapon, tactical soul and glyph, saving you from the trouble of playing the game with a wiki page open on your browser.
Overall, the Castlevania Dominus Collection is what a retro game port should look like. It does a great job at adapting the awkward Nintendo DS layout into modern screens, and comes with about every feature you could want, even if it neglects certain aspects of PC gaming, like wider resolutions or higher frame rates.
The addition of not only a forgotten arcade classic but also a full exclusive remake of it is what going above and beyond looks like, and shows just how much care that was put into this package.
It usually feels redundant to buy a classic games collection when emulation will almost always give you a better experience, but the amount of extras and features that Konami has packed into the Dominus Collection genuinely make it worth it, creating a gold standard as far as classic releases go, and raising the bar to where fans have always wanted it to be.
The Castlevania Dominus Collection is available on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and Microsoft Windows (through Steam). If you want to know more about the actual game, check out our full review right here.
