I started the Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - Mirror of Fate (just Mirror of Fate from here on out) waaaay back on January 9th, 2017 (being almost four years after the game's initial release in March 2013 and having bought the game in September 2013 according to Amazon). I know that I did not immediately start playing because I found out that the game was a sequel to the first Lords of Shadow and it was not released on PC until August 2013, although my computer at the time, I was sure, could not handle it, so I waited until after I got my MSI in 2015 to pick up the game on Steam. By the time I finished Lords of Shadow, I got caught up replaying Chrono Trigger, starting Ultimate NES Remix, Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS, and restarting Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Reverie for the second time. Then by December of 2017, the B-Button on my 3DS stopped working and we all know where that story has taken us.
So once I acquired the 3DS from Mjku, I knew that the first game I wanted to start from my collection was Mirror of Fate, if only so I could wait (again) for Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 to go on sale and eventually play that game. Having already played the first 1h30m of Mirror of Fate, I knew that I was going to be exploring Dracula's castle as Simon Belmont, but what I was not expecting was to play as three different characters over two different time periods in what MercurySteam turned what could have been three separate games into a tightly told story in a single game.
You know, it was not until I was nearly completed with this article that recalled that there was a prologue where you play as Gabriel Belmont, one year before the events in Lords of Shadow. It is here that you learn a lot of the basic game mechanics that translate the fighting from Lords of Shadow 3D space to the sidescrolling 2D space on the 3DS; at least it felt like a transition for me having already played Lords of Shadow.
From here on out, there will be spoilers of sorts.
You start the game as Simon Belmont going to Dracula's castle to avenge the murder of your father, who went missing when you were a child when he went to Dracula's castle. Pretty typical Castlevania stuff and it felt like to me that MercurySteam was somewhat feeding off of the old NES Castlevania games mentality of, going to Dracula's castle to kill him because that is what you do when you are a Belmont. Similar to Lords of Shadow, Mirror of Fate starts you off outside of the castle and you fight your way up to the castle but then are forced to take a detour and come up through the catacombs. Now it has been some time since I first played Lords of Shadow and it had only been 25 in-games years since the end of that game and the start of Mirror of Fate, but I could not recall how much of the castle that Dracula inherited from the first game was used as a guideline for the overall layout of the castle in this game. You could argue that Dracula has had 25 years to alter the castle, and/or that the move from the first game being playable in a 3D world to this game which is solely a 2D platformer with background and foreground elements means that a lot of environments had to be reimagined and I am perfectly okay with that approach, just something that I thought about.
Along the way to facing Dracula, you level up Simon as he automatically learns new attacks that visually and act similar to a lot of the combo attacks you learn and purchase in Lords of Shadow, but instead here you only learn one move at-a-time, which I was pretty thankful for as I tend to spam one-to-three of the same moves over and over. You also find additional health and magic upgrades throughout the castle as well as an additional use of sub-weapons such as the axe and a fire flask (essentially the holy water from the NES games) as well as magical abilities. The gameplay was pretty straightforward during this part of the game where you would travel to a new room, explore like you would any Metroidvania by trying to uncover as much of the explorable map as possible, kill a handful of enemies, then move on to the next room where you would eventually fight a boss.
One criticism about the game design which ended up holding true for the entire game was that there were frequently large swaths of the castle that were not populated by enemies. Maybe it was because most monsters took 5+ swings of the whip to kill, so having more enemies either on screen or in a particular area would have ended up with the player experiencing burn out but there were times where it was running and platforming without being distracted by enemies flying at you trying to knock you down a pit to your death. Which is actually kind of nice now that I really think about it.
Throughout Simon's act in the game, you are trailed by a character who shows up periodically and then disappears, not unheard of in Castlevania games and it was pretty easy to determine early on that this character was Alucard, whose design was similar but different enough to his appearance in Symphony of the Night. Alucard's official reveal is made right at the end of Simon's quest with Dracula calling his son out by name when he Aragorn's his way through the main chamber door. Simon's Act ends there and you then begin Act II, playing as Alucard waking up from his coffin apparently suffering from amnesia until the truth is revealed to him (off-screen) and he begins his journey to hunt down and kill Dracula, again, because this is a Castlevania game.
Alucard's exploring of the castle is similar to Simon's journey, exploring all explorable areas on each map, killing enemies for experience points, gaining new combos, increasing health and magic, backtracking, learning magic, and gaining sub-weapons. The formula is the same, but the trappings are a bit different which could be used to describe nearly every Konami Castlevania game. Something that initially threw me was that Alucard's weapon here, like Simon's, is a whip. I think this might be the first time Alucard uses a whip as his primary weapons in Symphony of the Night were all blades, axes, and maces/clubs/hammers. This weapon of choice does make sense later in the game, and from a gameplay perspective it might be difficult for the player, one-third through the game to be given a new character and expected to learn a new attack and combo set; although that might have worked with the in-game amnesia.
Eventually, you realize that the events in Alucard's Act are happening concurrently with Simon's Act, which does not happen after too long when you help Simon with one of the puzzle traps in the castle somewhat unbeknownst to him at the time. This puzzle in particular was pretty confusing, possibly made more so by the small 3DS screen, but that might have just been me. I did end up having to look at a walkthrough as I read that even the hints given by the dead knight scroll were vague and unhelpful. There were some game mechanic differences between Simon and Alucard's Act such as skills, but it was essentially a similar experience. There was one boss fight that I had to turn down the difficulty from Normal to Easy because the checkpoints were either too far apart during the battle or there just were not any and I after my third attempt and not getting any further, I decided to take the easier way out and continue on with the story.
Eventually, Alucard reaches Dracula's throne room which is where it picks up again with Simon's Act. During this encounter with Dracula, the computer takes control of Simon who felt acted more like a distraction to Dracula than doing significant damage to him. Alucard's chapter comes to a close as both characters successfully defeat Dracula. Alucard's Act ends with a scene between them and the mysterious Lost Soul (who first appears during Simon's Act and I will get to at the end of the article) which then transitions into the third and final act.
Act III is all about Trevor Belmont and his assault of Dracula's castle 30 years before the events with Simon and Alucard. There is not a whole lot to discuss here as the gameplay is nearly identical to that of Simon and Alucard's Acts as Trevor explores the castle, fights monsters, bosses, and learns skills, magic, and access to new sub-weapons. There were several encounters that I thought were wonderfully designed. One had Trevor fighting against two groups of Hunchback Troops who fought him in the foreground while a Possessed Armor attacked from the background, who then moves into the foreground after the Hunchbacks are taken care of. In another event involving the Hunchbacks, they cut loose a massive iron bell as you reached the top of a tower and then have to quickly make your way down the tower (which thankfully has a couple checkpoints because I did die a lot). There were also two QTE (Quick Time Event) battles that were handled in a way that did not make me hate the developers like I did with Resident Evil 4. I actually enjoyed the fact that all I had to do was hit one button at the correct time during some sequences rather than a long drawn-out fight, plus it made it a lot more cinematic.
I do not know if this was on purpose or if it was just my perception, but playing as Trevor, I really felt like a bad-ass demon hunter. The attacks felt more powerful (possibly because I was building off of all of the levels I had gained with Simon and Alucard), the weapons felt more effective and I just really felt like a better player. That was until I got to the final battle against Dracula. Similar to Gabriel's battle against Satan in Lords of Shadow, there were some elements in the fight that required you to switch to different types of magic to counter Draculas attacks then switch back, plus Dracula was a very proficient fighter who could move very quickly and perform powerful attacks. One powerful attack, in particular, would have the ground burst up, which you could anticipate, but I found that if I got clipped by one and it knocked me to the ground, I could not get Trevor up fast enough to evade/dodge/jump out of the way of the remaining four or five subsequent attacks. Had I not moved the difficulty down from Normal to Easy for this battle, I genuinely do not know if I would have been able to beat the game.
Not that the difficulty of the game is criticism from me as there were some other elements that I did take issue with. Two issues that I did find lacking in the game was the Mirror of Fate, you know, from the title of the game. I would have thought that it would have featured more prominently in the story than the few times that it cropped up. For Simon, a fragment was treated as an heirloom that only came up maybe twice, for Alucard, it was only at the beginning of his Act, and for Trevor, there were two (I think cut scenes where it was featured) and never by name. Presumably, it was an object that showed a person their fate? Maybe? You never saw what the characters saw when they looked in the mirror but if you were following the story at all, it did seem pretty obvious. The other element was the Lost Soul character, who was never fully explained and only showed up to each character throughout each story to point the way for them to proceed, which was also pointed out to the player in the form of a red dot on the map at the exit that would take them to the next required area to proceed with the story. Maybe a bit redundant? My thought was that it was somehow a manifestation of Gabriel's wife Marie Belmont, but the Internet tells me that it is more likely a physical manifestation of the concept of Fate guiding Simon, Alucard, and Trevor to their inevitable fates. 
Once I finished Trevor's story and all three of the main characters' stories came full circle, I was greeted with a screen saying that I had completed 93% of the game and in order to see a special "Separate Ways" cut scene, I would need to 100% the game. I knew that I did not collect all of the hidden Beastiary Scrolls, possibly found all of the fallen Knights of the Brotherhood of Light, or all of the health and magic upgrades, but since some areas of the castle were in the past with Simon and Alucard's Acts, the only way to make sure that I did not miss anything if I was able to confirm that I had found everything in Trevor's Act (which I know that I did not) would be to start the game over from the beginning and that was something that I was not ready to set out to do. So instead I just looked up the video on YouTube and watched it there. What I found interesting as I played through Mirror of Fate was that I felt like I had played three different Castlevania games and I mean that in a good way. Had this story been told in the Konami years (1986 - 2008), this story would have been broken up into three separate games. The first game would consist of the prologue and Simon's Act, assaulting the castle and fighting Dracula along with Alucard. Game II would be Alucard's Act, possibly reliving the fight with Dracula at the end, maybe from a different point of view. And Game III would be the prequel told from Trevor's point of view. But instead, MercurySteam told multiple stories in a single game which, for the most part, came off fairly well. I rarely felt like there was unnecessary padding to draw out the game length and they managed to avoid the pitfalls of Konami creating multiple games where you explore different versions of the same castle only to kill Dracula in the end. Each and every time. Over and over again. I am very much intrigued to see how Dracula is brought back in Lords of Shadow 2 considering his own fate at the hands of Simon and Alucard and the end-credits scene at the end of Lords of Shadow.
I thought that MercurySteam did a great job using the 3D effect on the 3DS and when the 3D effect was turned all the way up, which I did not do a lot because I did not want to drain the battery, I felt that it increased the scale of the castle, making rooms larger and grander than what could come across on a 2D screen. Sure the game was pixelated when the camera was pulled back to show wide shots of the castle and emphasizing how small Simon, Alucard, and Trevor all were, but that is something you have to accept when playing on the 3DS. There was really so much I enjoyed about this game, from the story to the 2D platforming, to the music by Óscar Araujo (who also composed the music to the first Lords of Shadow) to the general writing of the in-game elements. And aside from the Mirror and the Lost Soul not being as developed or playing more of an important role, I have not other complaints.
If you have a 3DS, the game is still available as a digital download if you do not want to search out the physical cartridge, otherwise, it is available on other storefronts such as Steam, and (might be?) available on their respective Xbox and PlayStation stores. It is a fun game and another interesting take on what could have become another formulaic Castlevania series.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental
P.S. Apologies again for the crappy quality and less than dynamic pictures from the game. Apparently, you could save screenshots using Nintendo's MiiVerse, which was discontinued back in 2017. So I had to use the camera on my phone.
