LMFAO, wow, after reading this entire thread, I almost completely forgot what I was going to say! You crazy kids and your arguments and seeing people without shirts and ghettos. I blame Grand Theft Auto because it's easy.
Anywho:
I have to hands down agree about PoR and DoS on some extint:
as much as I like Dawn, I have to agree with the TC in saying that it's pretty much just a upgraded version of Aria, dumbed down with the kiddie anime feel.
A tweak in the soul system here, a much less impressive story (Aria's was much better IMO) that only got interesting if you got the bad ending there, and a few new places to visit here. The fun I had with that game was collecting the different souls and making new, badass weapons, but little else.
Now PoR...wow. Just wow. I have to say though, I don't agree that the story was horrible: I find that the way it was displayed was really downfall, not the storyline itself. It had the potiential to be quite dark:
A young man that wasn't completely trained in the ways to use the VK but is determined to carry the burden along with issues reguarding his now dead father.
Char was...okay, pretty annoying overall. But had they tried being serious, they could have gone on the whole 'feels like a child' thing with a much better approach, giving her the insecurity and need to prove herself as a mistress of magic and intellgence and not just to be assumed to be useless, meaningless, and uneffective simply because she's 'just a child'.
Wind's entire story was the making for tragic story telling. A father who loves his two and only daughters that is killed by a vampire, the last thing he sees is those same girls he loves so much being turned into something he most likely despises and there is absolutely nothing he can do. His so his at unrest and it's trapped within the walls of Castlevania. So he helps Johnathan, the son of a old and fallen friend, in the hopes that he can help himself and those same girls along the way.
Meanwhile, you have Brauner, who was devistated by the death of his own daughters, to the point that he learned to despise humans (sounds familiar) only to see two girls that resemble those very same girls he lost and in his...whatever you want to call it, joy, grief, hope for a second chance, he steals them and their humanity.
The girls forget who their actual father is and seemed doomed to be damned for all eternity only to be rescued later and have to deal with their father's death by seeing him one last time.
Brauner shows (in all endings) how deeply he cares for the girls--
You know what, you get the point. It had a pretty nice, deep story and it got completely ruined in the ridiculous, anime presentation. I would have loved to seen PoR's story in the usual dark, Castlvania manner I'm used to.
The two games weren't bad by any means, I just hated the presentions of each's story, the been there done that feel I got (esp. with Dawn) and the disappointment at the second half of PoR's portrait stages.