Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls does look and feel a lot like Symphony of the Night. However, you can roam around the castle killing monsters, finding secret treasures, and grinding levels as you normally enjoy doing in adventure games. Instead, it is more a like Super Mario Bros where it is segmented into stages. There are currently 7 chapters as of version 1.30, each chapter has 4 sections, and each section has 5 stages except the last section has only one stage for a boss fight. Therefore, the game has 112 stages so far.
If you are a perfectionist, DO NOT play this game unless you enjoy playing casually since it is almost impossible to collecting 100% of everything in the game. Additionally, the game has not finished yet. I will explain later why this game is not for you, perfectionist.
A little bit of a history here. Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls was originally released on Android Play store as a free-to-play (pay to win game). As a regular F2P game, you have a limited number of times you can play per day. Some equipment requires Summoning, which requires Gems to summon (in-game currency), which require real money to buy. Later, the game was not successful and was acquired by Apple and it became an exclusive game for Apple Arcade. Of course, the F2P scheme is not relevant anymore since you’ve already paid $5 per month for the subscription service. Therefore, they removed the energy limit, meaning that you can play as many stages as you want per day, also they removed the in-game purchase and give you extra Gems from daily and weekly missions.
Here are the reasons why I said it is almost impossible to complete 100% of the game:
- A chance to summon 5-stars equipment is below 1% (I would say 0.5%), 1 summon costs 300 gems, which means you will need 60,000 gems to get one 5-stars equipment. The same equipment requires you to obtain it 5 times to upgrade to maximum; 60,000 x 5 = 300,000 gems. It is not all, there are total of 44 5-stars equipment in the Summon, which means 300,000 x 44 = 13,200,000 gems. Assume that you complete all daily and weekly missions, you will earn 30,000 gems, which means that you will have to play 352 weeks (6.7 years) to get 10.5 million gems. Lol.
- Not to mention other stores that have unique 5-stars equipment as well. Below are the amounts you need to buy all equipment for each shop:
- Event Market has two currencies: Halloween Coins and Winter Coins.
- Halloween Coins: 955,000.
- Winter Coins: 955,000.
- Trade Market has two currencies: Gold and Elgos Coins.
- Elgos Coins: 1,425,000. Elgos Coins is the most time-consuming currency to farm.
- Gold: 12,600,000.
- Astral Atrament: 610,000.
- Event Market has two currencies: Halloween Coins and Winter Coins.
- Upgrade equipment requires golds, lots and lots of golds, the amount of gold you will never be able to farm until you die, haha, I’m just kidding.
- Equipment that can be summoned can also be obtained from complete stages, sounds good, right? Hell no, you do not directly obtain the weapon but a few fragments of it. You need 100 fragments to materialize the weapon. The drop rate of the weapon fragments is BS. In average, you get 2 or 3 every run if you are lucky.
I think I do not need any more reasons to convince you not to play. But if you do, here are some glitches that will help you save 6-years of your life trying to complete the game:
For beginners, you can start from the Game Menu to understand the overall, Characters to see which characters suit you the most, finally the guide for the most optimal gameplay.