What was-your-first/is-your-favorite Castlevania game?

My first Castlevania game ever was Aria of Sorrow on the GBA, and my favourite Castlevania game is Dawn of Sorrow for the DS.
**I am not in love with Soma at all!!

Yep!
In our family we had a weekly rental.  As long as we did our chores, on Friday my parents would take me and my brother in to town and let us each pick out one game and one movie to rent for the weekend.   When we got older and the rental place started doing weekly rentals my parents started letting us do two games and two movies at a time.

Ah the good ol' days...

Kinda curious, what does everyone think about the Lords of Shadow games? I enjoyed the first one but havent gotten through Mirror (wasent overly impressed at what little I did play) or played 2 at all yet. I know alot of others hate on LoS, but I enjoyed it, It never claimed to be a traditional Castlevania or Igavania game so it dosent bother me how different it was, it was beautiful and fun and overtaking The Forgotten One was a infuriating task, perfect no... but less then perfect don't mean anything.

Oh god lords of shadow. That game forever made me more cynical and jaded =P.

I was really looking forward to lords of shadow over a year in advance. I pre-ordered the special edition, I was stoked. I realized they said they were going to reboot the game, but back then they kinda gave the impression they meant the whole storyline, I was expecting that. I was not expecting them to completely change the entire feeling of the game altogether, like honestly it shouldn't have even been called castlevania at all. The ONLY thing castlevania about it was you played as a dude named belmont cracking a whip. There was no castlevania music, I'm not even talking about reusing old tracks, I mean the music style is completely different.Why the crap would they decide to axe a game that could very well have the most legendary pegedree of music in all of gaming second only to Touhou.

Then there was the fact that the game had absolutely no gothic/victorian/decorative castle atmosphere... 1/3 of it is some mayan jungle, 1/3 is desert..and the castle parts don't even count cuz they are pretty much empty, not lit, and delapitated, not furnished, no ornate design...The only good looking castle part I really can think of is that mission where you have to climb up a tower to kill some giant crow or something (I forget the type of bird, been awhile).

I didn't even mind the fact the game would be 3d. Curse of darkness and lament of innocence are 2 of my fave castlevania games! I was actually looking forward to a promising 3d game because there were more than enough 2d options on handhelds, I like having both, and 3d was needed more IMO. But the combat mechanics were a step backwards from either curse of darkness OR lament of innocence IMO. Not to mention the fact that bosses were too often riddled with QTE events than actual gameplay. 

It's kind of a shame that the settings were so uninteresting to me , because the visual quality of the game is remarkable, like if you told me it was a ps4 game and I didn't know better I'd believe it.

My first Castlevania... actually, the first game I played in my life was Symphony of the Night and for that reason it's my favorite in the series, but Super Castlevania IV and Aria of Sorrow are top #3 for me.

I was really young when I first played CV. I believe I had a gray box like nintendo, and I had a dude walking with a whip (I know could be any number of the 3). I was about 4-5 when I first played it, possibly younger, so I don't remember a whole lot. Then when I was 7ish I played SoTN