It's time to keep the GBA Metroidvania train rolling. We started with Castlevania, then moved on to Metroid, and now it's time to make our way back to Dracula's castle.
I was pleasantly surprised last year when I, sort of on a whim, decided to take a shot at Castlevania: Circle of the Moon on the Game Boy Advance. I had heard good things about the handheld titles in the series, but never actually took the time to play any of them. And that's a shame, because Circle of the Moon was outstanding. It was truly an exceptional example of just what the tiny but mighty GBA was capable of. It got me excited to dig into the other games in the genre I had missed from that console, both Metroid and Castlevania alike. I moved right along to Metroid: Zero Mission and while I wasn't as high on it as I was COTM, it was still a solid experience that was incredibly well designed and polished. So naturally, the next step in the progression was back to 'Vania with the next in that sereis' GBA trilogy, Harmony of Dissonance.
Arriving in late 2002, Harmony of Dissonance puts you in the role of Juste Belmont, grandson of Simon Belmont, 50 years after the events of Castlevania II for the NES. Juste's childhood friend Lydie has been kidnapped by an unknown assailant and taken to a mysterious castle. He sets out with his friend Maxim to rescue her and bring her back home. But this will not be an easy task. For one, Maxim begins acting strangely as soon as the duo arrive at the castle, opting to split up and search rather than look for Lydie together. Things quickly go from bad to worse when Juste encounters Death, Dracula's servant, who confirms his suspicions that the count it looking to once again come back. As a Belmont, Juste can't allow this and resolves to once again gather the remains of Dracula and destroy them, while also looking for Lydie. This leads to an alternate reality plot that frankly, isn't really worth exploring or spoiling, as it quickly becomes needlessly confusing. I get that Castlevania isn't really meant to be super plot heavy, but this was messy to the point of disappointing.
And frankly, disappointing is the optimal word for just about every part of Harmony of Dissonance. While it's definitely not bad, I felt it was a substantial step down in quality from either of the other GBA Metroidvanias I have played up to this point. That disappointment started almost immediately upon turning the game on, as I felt the graphics were worse than what was on offer in either COTM or Fusion. HOD has this sort of choppy outline around all of its assets and washed out color pallete that those two games didn't have. There were some impressive background effects in some parts of the castle, but it just didn't look as good as those earlier games on a minute to minute basis. The regular enemies looked okay, but Juste looks like he was copy and pasted from another game and a lot of the bosses were very disappointing. The sound is also a problem here, this might be worst soundtrack I have ever heard in a Castlevania game. That's a high bar to clear, to be fair, but HOD sounded more like a mid-era NES game (and not in a charming way). Compare that to COTM or Fusion, which both had sound quality that was on par with the best the SNES could offer. It's not so horrible that you want to turn the sound off, but it's definitely a weak spot for the game.
But the absolute weakest spot here is the castle design, which felt poorly thought out and disjointed. That is always an important part of these games and I think Konami completely dropped the ball here. COTM's map felt a little bare bones at times, but it flowed nicely and offered just the right amount of backtracking and exploration. Fusion was divided into very truncated sections, but at least those sections were well done in on their own. But HOD's map is an absolute mess, it's filled with dead ends and poor telegraphs that lead to me constantly getting lost or having to trapse from one end of the map to the other. You expect to get a little turned around in a game like this, but not to the level it happens or for the reasons it happens here. There are so many pointless dead ends and confusing obstacles that you are never quite sure where you should go. It feels overly sprawling, yet also too linear at the same time. There are far too many points in the game where there is literally only one way to procede, which shouldn't happen that often in a Metroidvania. And if you go to the wrong section of the map, there's a good chance that you are going to have to turn around and go completely back in the other direction. Not loop around or take a warp point like you would be able to do in most Metroidvanias, like, straight up walk back to where you were. It led to the game lasting far longer than it needed to.
And the worst part of all this? There are not one, but two castles to explore. That might have actually been a positive here, especially if the second castle was better than the first. But it isn't any better. Though at least it's not worse. Because in HOD, both castles are identical. This isn't like Symphony of the Night's reverse castle, where the orientation completely changes the gameplay and all of the rooms look visually different. The layouts are completely identical, with slight changes to the backgrounds and locations of items and bosses. There are about five points where you can travel back and forth between the two, which are located in the absolute least convenient parts of the castle. At least you can warp between them, but that hardly matters when everything is so disjointed. Again, the switching back and forth feels more like an excuse to try and pad out game length than to add actual variety or challenge. What was the point? To add additional bosses? A lot of the bosses here don't even guard essential items, so what's the point in that?
Besides, bosses in HOD are trivial, because the game is horribly balanced. Remember how I complained about the bosses in COTM being needlessly difficult? Yeah, they definitely went too far in the opposite direction. The bosses here all have simple patterns and relatively small life pools...and yet that isn't even the biggest problem here. That would come from the magic system, which absolutely breaks this game in half. On it's surface, the magic system here seems fairly begnin. Juste will find a variety of books throughout his journey, which will make alterations to his secondary weapons. It's not an inherently bad system and leads to some cool combinations, it offers a lot of the positives of COTM's cards without the negatives of having to get said cards to drop. But the effects are entirely too powerful and too easy to acquire. Once I had the combination of the wind book and cross, I don't think I ever took it off for the rest of the game. With it, I was able to basically walk unencumbered through enemies and even bosses with little to no effort. I should also mention that equipping one of these books causes Juste to use MP instead of hearts to activate his secondary abilities. This essentially makes hearts, and by extension heart max increases, completely useless.
That's a lot of negative, but I can't say I completely hated my time playing HOD. For one, the controls are tight and responsive, which always helps. The graphics might be disappointing, but it was still an overall nice looking game. I think HOD does a really good job of making you want to keep playing, despite how frustrating it is. The enemies may go down easy, but they have some creative designs and many of them were fun to fight. And hey, there's something to be said for how fun it is to just blast through enemies with minimal resistance as you watch the game just crack in front of you. The bottom line is that Konami is so good at making games, especially games like this, that even when they do a realtively poor job there still manages to be some level of fun. I focused on the negatives here because I was just so taken aback by them that it kind of made it hard to really focus on the fact that I had at least a decent time playing HOD.
That said, this was still a very flawed game and a major disappointment after the excellent COTM and very good Metroid Fusion. While the game controls well and has its moments, HOD is too unbalanced, too confusing and too poorly designed to really stand out amongst its very strong contemporaries. The badly designed castle map was the biggest killer here, I'm starting to find that this is the most important part of games like this and it absolutely buried HOD. All of the other flaws could be worked around, but that one was unforgivable. I can't say I entirely hated it, but HOD was a major diappointment.
6/10
I was pleasantly surprised last year when I, sort of on a whim, decided to take a shot at Castlevania: Circle of the Moon on the Game Boy Advance. I had heard good things about the handheld titles in the series, but never actually took the time to play any of them. And that's a shame, because Circle of the Moon was outstanding. It was truly an exceptional example of just what the tiny but mighty GBA was capable of. It got me excited to dig into the other games in the genre I had missed from that console, both Metroid and Castlevania alike. I moved right along to Metroid: Zero Mission and while I wasn't as high on it as I was COTM, it was still a solid experience that was incredibly well designed and polished. So naturally, the next step in the progression was back to 'Vania with the next in that sereis' GBA trilogy, Harmony of Dissonance.
Arriving in late 2002, Harmony of Dissonance puts you in the role of Juste Belmont, grandson of Simon Belmont, 50 years after the events of Castlevania II for the NES. Juste's childhood friend Lydie has been kidnapped by an unknown assailant and taken to a mysterious castle. He sets out with his friend Maxim to rescue her and bring her back home. But this will not be an easy task. For one, Maxim begins acting strangely as soon as the duo arrive at the castle, opting to split up and search rather than look for Lydie together. Things quickly go from bad to worse when Juste encounters Death, Dracula's servant, who confirms his suspicions that the count it looking to once again come back. As a Belmont, Juste can't allow this and resolves to once again gather the remains of Dracula and destroy them, while also looking for Lydie. This leads to an alternate reality plot that frankly, isn't really worth exploring or spoiling, as it quickly becomes needlessly confusing. I get that Castlevania isn't really meant to be super plot heavy, but this was messy to the point of disappointing.
And frankly, disappointing is the optimal word for just about every part of Harmony of Dissonance. While it's definitely not bad, I felt it was a substantial step down in quality from either of the other GBA Metroidvanias I have played up to this point. That disappointment started almost immediately upon turning the game on, as I felt the graphics were worse than what was on offer in either COTM or Fusion. HOD has this sort of choppy outline around all of its assets and washed out color pallete that those two games didn't have. There were some impressive background effects in some parts of the castle, but it just didn't look as good as those earlier games on a minute to minute basis. The regular enemies looked okay, but Juste looks like he was copy and pasted from another game and a lot of the bosses were very disappointing. The sound is also a problem here, this might be worst soundtrack I have ever heard in a Castlevania game. That's a high bar to clear, to be fair, but HOD sounded more like a mid-era NES game (and not in a charming way). Compare that to COTM or Fusion, which both had sound quality that was on par with the best the SNES could offer. It's not so horrible that you want to turn the sound off, but it's definitely a weak spot for the game.
But the absolute weakest spot here is the castle design, which felt poorly thought out and disjointed. That is always an important part of these games and I think Konami completely dropped the ball here. COTM's map felt a little bare bones at times, but it flowed nicely and offered just the right amount of backtracking and exploration. Fusion was divided into very truncated sections, but at least those sections were well done in on their own. But HOD's map is an absolute mess, it's filled with dead ends and poor telegraphs that lead to me constantly getting lost or having to trapse from one end of the map to the other. You expect to get a little turned around in a game like this, but not to the level it happens or for the reasons it happens here. There are so many pointless dead ends and confusing obstacles that you are never quite sure where you should go. It feels overly sprawling, yet also too linear at the same time. There are far too many points in the game where there is literally only one way to procede, which shouldn't happen that often in a Metroidvania. And if you go to the wrong section of the map, there's a good chance that you are going to have to turn around and go completely back in the other direction. Not loop around or take a warp point like you would be able to do in most Metroidvanias, like, straight up walk back to where you were. It led to the game lasting far longer than it needed to.
And the worst part of all this? There are not one, but two castles to explore. That might have actually been a positive here, especially if the second castle was better than the first. But it isn't any better. Though at least it's not worse. Because in HOD, both castles are identical. This isn't like Symphony of the Night's reverse castle, where the orientation completely changes the gameplay and all of the rooms look visually different. The layouts are completely identical, with slight changes to the backgrounds and locations of items and bosses. There are about five points where you can travel back and forth between the two, which are located in the absolute least convenient parts of the castle. At least you can warp between them, but that hardly matters when everything is so disjointed. Again, the switching back and forth feels more like an excuse to try and pad out game length than to add actual variety or challenge. What was the point? To add additional bosses? A lot of the bosses here don't even guard essential items, so what's the point in that?
Besides, bosses in HOD are trivial, because the game is horribly balanced. Remember how I complained about the bosses in COTM being needlessly difficult? Yeah, they definitely went too far in the opposite direction. The bosses here all have simple patterns and relatively small life pools...and yet that isn't even the biggest problem here. That would come from the magic system, which absolutely breaks this game in half. On it's surface, the magic system here seems fairly begnin. Juste will find a variety of books throughout his journey, which will make alterations to his secondary weapons. It's not an inherently bad system and leads to some cool combinations, it offers a lot of the positives of COTM's cards without the negatives of having to get said cards to drop. But the effects are entirely too powerful and too easy to acquire. Once I had the combination of the wind book and cross, I don't think I ever took it off for the rest of the game. With it, I was able to basically walk unencumbered through enemies and even bosses with little to no effort. I should also mention that equipping one of these books causes Juste to use MP instead of hearts to activate his secondary abilities. This essentially makes hearts, and by extension heart max increases, completely useless.
That's a lot of negative, but I can't say I completely hated my time playing HOD. For one, the controls are tight and responsive, which always helps. The graphics might be disappointing, but it was still an overall nice looking game. I think HOD does a really good job of making you want to keep playing, despite how frustrating it is. The enemies may go down easy, but they have some creative designs and many of them were fun to fight. And hey, there's something to be said for how fun it is to just blast through enemies with minimal resistance as you watch the game just crack in front of you. The bottom line is that Konami is so good at making games, especially games like this, that even when they do a realtively poor job there still manages to be some level of fun. I focused on the negatives here because I was just so taken aback by them that it kind of made it hard to really focus on the fact that I had at least a decent time playing HOD.
That said, this was still a very flawed game and a major disappointment after the excellent COTM and very good Metroid Fusion. While the game controls well and has its moments, HOD is too unbalanced, too confusing and too poorly designed to really stand out amongst its very strong contemporaries. The badly designed castle map was the biggest killer here, I'm starting to find that this is the most important part of games like this and it absolutely buried HOD. All of the other flaws could be worked around, but that one was unforgivable. I can't say I entirely hated it, but HOD was a major diappointment.
6/10
Comments
Post a Comment