1- Shanoa is based af
2- Reading Jonathan and Charlotte's dialogue was like nails on chalkboard
3- they ruined the art style for the character portraits in Portrait of Ruin and Dawn of Sorrow. Ayami Kojima my beloved
4- All three are great games though

The Castlevania games released for the Nintendo DS are compiled here and I'd argue they play better here than on an emulator* , their startup intros are now in full HD instead of the low res mess you saw when emulating. Some game mechanics are also modified to play better on the non-native hardware these games are being ported to. These 3 games have 2 windows (As they were designed for the dual screen Nintendo DS) which this collection allows you to customise the sizes of to fit your preference.

This collection also seems to not have any graphical bugs like was common to see in emulation, which is another huge boon.

Apart from this, the infamous arcade game Haunted Castle (Japanese ver.) is also included in this collection, and to add onto this is the Collection's greatest surprise, a remake of said game; Haunted Castle Revisited.

This collection comes with QOL and fixes of the Advance Colelction so it doesn't have much to improve on. Yet it still fails to address the last issue we've had since 2019; inability to rebind keyboard keys, so keyboard play is as usual limited.

*Technically this Collection is still emulation but here I'm referring specifically to community emulators like melonDS for brevity's sake.

Continues the story of Aria of Sorrow (AoS). A great game, but in some ways a disappointing sequel.

The first to show what the improved DS hardware can achieve compared to the GBA. The visuals are closer to what we saw on PS1 with background buildings showing off that cool 3D effect we saw in Symphony of the Night. We also get to hear the superior audio hardware, with the soundtrack now featuring melodies that sound closer to real instruments than the limited music of the GBA games - No ear piercing Harmony of Dissonance chip tunes anymore!

DoS has a mechanic where you draw a magical seal for every boss you defeat. The Dominus Collection updates this so you can now draw the seals with your left analog stick which displays a stylish cursor when drawing, or you can change the settings to make it a series of button inputs that will display on screen. You can also draw the seals using your actual mouse cursor, but for some reason the mouse cursor does not get the same custom graphic that the analog stick's cursor does, Konami has a bias for gamepads, that's for sure.

There's a crafting mechanic, where you sacrifice collected enemy souls to upgrade weapons. It's okay but has an adverse effect on exploration with less interesting weapons to find than in AoS' castle, and the crafting system is not nearly as deep as in Curse of Darkness.

DoS should resonate with me more but it feels like it reinvents the wheel a bit and adds some odd mechanics, some to showcase the Nintendo DS' unique features. So it has that first game for the system awkwardness to it like Circle of the Moon.

The defining feature is the 2 character system with Charlotte and Jonathan, which is fun, but admittedly feels skewed towards Jonathan gameplay-wise. Jonathan is a typical vampire hunter, but is also able to wield other weapons like Alucard or Soma could. Charlotte is a magician, so playing as her is centered more around casting powerful spells, with some standard combat mixed in.

Puzzles and environmental obstacles are often solved by mechanics that consists of the 2 playable characters working together e.g. jumping on one's shoulders or pushing a heavy object together.

As a sequel to Bloodlines, this felt a bit loose, it's exclusively due to the character connection in the story that you can call this a sequel (There's one song from Bloodlines that is reused in this, but that doesn't count for much since The Adventure Rebirth also reused a song from Bloodlines and they're only connected by being part of the official timeline).

That said the story is a nice step up from DoS, mostly cause it feels like it's actually trying somewhat.

PoR's castle is more of a hub this time around, with it containing paintings that serve as different worlds (Like Mario 64). It's a fun idea, but falls short with us revisiting a harder version of these paintings
later on, with the only major difference being some cool new bosses to fight. So these cause repetition in the late game.

PoR is probably the most well rounded of the DS games, but the repeated paintings stop it from being as memorable as one might hope.

From the DS games, I liked OoE the most due to it trying something more original than the others. That said, as the final Castlevania game for the DS, I think OoE failed to avoid some pitfalls, and does not feel like the perfect culmination that Aria of Sorrow(AoS) was.

The combat is overhauled. Gameplay feels more challenging and fresh. The boss fights are great, you must learn their patterns to succeed, it can take multiple attempts to be successful. You collect glyphs from enemies and the environment and they either serve as weapons or magic abilities that can be combined for more powerful attacks and spells. Enemies also have different weaknesses so you have to try out different combinations if you don't want a bad time. One thing that's a slight let down is that all melee weapons attacks are the same forward thrust, with the main differences being weapon hitboxes and range. In previous games, you would have axes and swords swing in an arc differing them from spear weapons which felt a bit better at feeling varied.

The glyph system also suffers from a big problem, you will find higher level versions of your old weapons the further you get into the game, but the old and weak glyphs still take up space in your inventory, which harkens back to the inventory woes we had in Symphony of the Night.
The inventory system regresses from what was fixed with the GBA games.

Starts off less like a metroidvania, its' first half is split up into linear environments that you visit by selecting on a map. It is in these environments that we get to see some of the great new enemy designs. Stuff like this makes OoE's bold direction feel worth it. That said, when the game reuses the same exact environments but recolored as new locations is when things fall apart somewhat. This is probably the biggest tell of how limited in budget these DS games were.

Probably the best story we've seen from the Metroidvania style of this series. It rivals AoS as being a great ending to this long running series.

The Arcade game frequently called one of the worst in the series, but it's actually okay, there's just some cheap tricks it pulls. Tip: Make sure to hold onto the stopwatch for as long as you can once it drops from a certain bat enemy, it will be the key to your success.

Once you know that, it plays similarly to the Classicvanias of its' era with slightly more movement tech than the NES games, and this actually comes in handy in certain sections e.g. when SImon jumps straight up, you can move him while he's airborne in the direction he is facing, which is useful for some precise jumps.

Challenging and fast paced, so you have to stay vigilant. You have a limited amount of continues which you can sacrifice for a longer health bar but this is a rookie mistake. What you want to do is instead become good enough at stages where you can pass them in one regular life bar. If you do this then any remaining hearts you have at the end of a stage will be used up to heal whatever health Simon is missing, saving your limited continues instead for more dire situations when you're low on hearts and health.

This game is very short with it lasting less than 20 minutes but this combined with its' unique design quirks frankly made it enjoyable to replay.

The only glaring omissions: This Collection does not track your previous runs' scores and the American version (Known as being harder) of the game are not included.

Great collection of some of the best Castlevania games with more content and options than the Advance Collection.
They all run great and have great QoL additions. Really appreciate that they kept the DS feel by having multiple screens available, as well as the "touch" capabilities, other remasters or ports from that console don't do that.