Making the protagonist of a Castlevania game overpowered is, if we’re honest, half the fun in these games. Rooting around for the best equipment, abilities, spell cards, souls or transformations is what makes these, and indeed the entirety of the Metroidvania genre, tremendously enjoyable. Amassing such things will often take a great deal of time, which is kind of the point, but doing so can make your protagonist incredibly powerful. Here’s how we go about it in Aria of Sorrow specifically.
Powerful Souls
- Alastor
- Headhunter
- Red Minotaur
Whilst we have committed a great deal of time to writing about various Souls in Aria of Sorrow, you can realistically get yourself to a very powerful state with just a few, though gathering and powering them up is a different story altogether. If you’re truly committing to making Soma super powerful, then you’re going to have to go the extra mile, which in this case means gathering a lot of souls. The Headhunter soul will increase Soma’s stats depending on the amount gathered, and will keep scaling to a massive +33 in each if you continue to collect, making it by far the best all round passive boost achievable.
Outside of this, you’ll have to dip into the Chaotic Realm to grab Alastor, which is a very powerful sword familiar that brings to mind Symphony of the Night, and spend some time grabbing the massive axe soul from the Red Minotaur. Once these are collected and fully powered up Soma will feel positively unstoppable, mainly because he is. You could argue that the Red Minotaur soul itself is very expensive, and you’d be right to do so, but you’ll soon discover that nothing lives long enough for it to become an issue, not even bosses. Besides, any minnows that get in your way will be struck down by your regular equipment…
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Ideal Equipment
- Claimh Solais
- Eversing / Dracula’s Tunic
- Black Belt / Satan’s Ring
To make Soma even more powerful, you’re going to want to focus on his equipment. Not only does this include his weaponry, which has to hit as hard as possible, but also stat bonuses need to be taken advantage of. The first of these recommendations is rather obviously the Claimh Solais, which is universally agreed upon to be the best weapon in the game. Technically speaking there are models with a higher raw attack power, however they’re not all available in one mode, and they do not include the Holy property that the ‘Solais does, which will make it do increased damage on a great deal of the populace. Besides, it also comes with bonus statistics, and we want to gather as many of these as possible.
When it comes to armour and accessories, it would be rather easy to simply tell you to gather the canon items – Dracula’s Tunic and Satan’s Ring – and whilst you certainly should, there are alternatives. Two of our favourites are the Black Belt, which adds more to attack than any other accessory, and Eversing, which has the highest defence rating possible. Quibbling over a few points in either of these cases probably isn’t worth it, but it’s worth playing around with these items to determine which combination of pieces nets you the most damage. We would include the Chaos Ring and Death’s Sickle but, alas, they’re only available in Hard Mode.
Levelling Up
- Red Minitaur
- Stolas
- Chaotic Realm
Levelling your character up is arguably the least important aspect of building a protagonist, after all there are no equipment requirements and the chosen souls will do the job alone, however building up passive stats via levelling will actually net you quite a lot in the long run, so it’s worthwhile when building a super Soma. Sadly, much like other titles in the series, there is a soft cap to gaining experience which makes levelling to the maximum prohibitively time consuming. Still, farming every single soul multiple times for the Headhunter soul will get you a great deal of experience, and taking down key enemies can speed things up.
Speaking of which, by far the best options outside of the Chaotic Realm are the Red Minotaur or Stolas enemies. These give 1000 and 1500 experience points respectively, and whilst the latter does seem like a better option, they’re a lot more time consuming to take down. As you can see, you can take down the Red Minotaur enemy with one swipe of the Killer Mantle soul, which is a lot quicker and easier than chopping through Stolas’ massive health pool each time. We’ve managed to get Soma into the 70 something levels by simply taking Red Minotaur down repeatedly, and whilst we’re slightly more crazy than the average ‘vania player, it’s not entirely out of reach for a normal player.
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Categories: Castlevania - Aria of Sorrow