Bear Ring

The Bear Ring is a ring in Castlevania: Circle of the Moon that holds the "curse of the bear", and is dropped by the Skeleton Medalist. Its effect is to lose 100 STR, DEF, INT and LCK, with no apparent benefits. However, if the player uses the Pluto + Black Dog DSS combination, Nathan Graves will turn into a green bear called Bear Tank, instead of a Skeleton, and attack by throwing different kinds of bombs.
==Availability==
Rare drop from the Skeleton Medalist found inside a secret room located along the long chasm Nathan Graves and Hugh Baldwin fall into at the beginning of the game in the Sealed Room. A piece of the left wall can be broken by striking at it (marked by a darker area in the background). The secret room apparently only holds a power-up inside, but a block on the ceiling can actually be broken as well to reveal yet another secret room, where the only Skeleton Medalist in the game appears.
==Characteristics==
The description for this ring states that it holds the "curse of the bear". This curse consists on reducing all of Nathan's stats –STR, DEF, INT and LCK– by 100 when the ring is equipped, with no apparent benefit whatsoever. However, if while wearing the ring, the player activates the DSS combination, Pluto + Black Dog, instead of turning into a Skeleton, like the effect normally does, they'll turn into a green cartoonish bear called Bear Tank.
While in this form, Nathan is limited to using double jumps only; he cannot run, tackle rocks, move crates, or perform high jumps. However, the bear's normal walking speed is considerably fast.
Bear Tank features a cannon on his head and another on his backside. Pressing ATTACK makes him fire a teddy bear missile from his head cannon, while pressing UP + ATTACK will make him bend over fire a teddy bear missile from his backside cannon high into the air. Pressing DOWN + ATTACK will instead make him toss a bomb a short distance in front of him.
Unfortunately, both teddy bear missile attacks deal about half the damage Nathan's standard whip does; and the tossed bomb does about the same damage. In addition, the Bear Tank form can arguably be considered to be even worse than the normal Skeleton form, as it doesn't feature any special attacks (like the Skeleton's random giant bone throw that deals 9,999 damage), but still shares the characteristic of being killed in just one hit. Due to all these reasons, the Bear Ring is mainly considered to be a novelty item added to the game just for fun.
==Item Data==
==Gallery==
===Animations===
COTM Pluto + Black Dog + Bear Ring.gif|Pluto + Black Dog + Bear Ring
==Trivia==
*The bear Nathan Graves transforms into is Bear Tank from Rakugakids, a 2.5D fighting video game by Konami for the Nintendo 64, released in 1998.
**Bear Tank has also made cameos in several other Konami games, such as Goemon: Mononoke Sugoroku and the pop'n music series. One of these games is Konami Krazy Racers, where Dracula is one of the playable racers.
*By equipping two Bear Rings at a low level, Nathan can reduce some of his stats into negative values, such that any DSS combination will grant 9,999 STR, at the expense of being able to get killed by a single Bone Head.
**A practical method is to play Thief Mode so that the ring has a reasonable drop rate. This method requires the Kick Boots to reach the Skeleton Medalist, and the Diana + Griffin combination to deal enough damage. If done correctly, the 9,999 STR glitch will work at Level 19 or lower.
**For comparison, the Skeleton Form will occasionally throw a big bone equal to 3,000 STR, while Fighter Mode at Level 99 only has about 1,500 raw STR.
==External links==
*Castlevania Dungeon
Category:Forms
Category:Pop Culture
Category:Rings
Category:Circle of the Moon Items