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Right, so talking about Bloodstained in the previous post reminded me that I hadn't written a post about the Castlevania Advance Collection, which I bought back in September, but only started playing through a couple weeks ago. I've since completed Circle of the Moon, Harmony of Dissonance, and Aria of Sorrow. (All of these are games that I previously played through, many years ago, on original hardware that I no longer own.) I have not yet completed Dracula X in this collection, mostly since it is just the subpar SNES version of Rondo of Blood, and for whatever reason it just doesn't appeal to me as much as the previous three did (mainly because it's a more traditional platformer and not a Metroidvania; also because Maria isn't a playable character in DX like she is in RoB).
Of the three I played, AoS is hands down the best of the bunch, of course. CotM is a close second, in my opinion, even though it came out before HoD.
Seriously, I'm just going to rantfor a bit about Harmony of Dissonance now, partitioned off into it's own littlelarge area.
<HoD rant>
I knew even when I originally played it on the GBA that it was not as good as Circle of the Moon, but having replayed it in 2023... man, does it suck. It is by far the worst of the CV Metroidvania games, that's for sure. For me, the main complaint is probably all the mostly empty rooms that are nothing but zig zags up one side and then zag zigs back down the other side that are there for absolutely no other reason than to impede traversal and pad out the game. Half the time, there aren't even any enemies in such rooms. Seriously, there are at least four or five variants of that type of room in the game (or twice as many, if you count the duplicates in the second castle), and it blows. Here is a map of the game, with the room graphics filled in. (Now, double all of that shit, because there is a second castle that is nearly identical.) Really, just look at all the rooms that consist of nothing but vertical areas with a long platform on the left with a tiny drop on the right, followed by a long platform on the right with a tiny drop on the left, repeated ad nauseam. Either that or just too-long, boring-ass, horizontal hallways. Oh, and all the goddamned locked doors. Fuck all those locked doors. Most of those locked doors are there just to force you to have to continually go the long way around to get anywhere, since you can eventually get to both sides of some of those locked doors, regardless, but can't actually unlock them until pretty much the end of the game. Probably the only unique bit in HoD that (mostly) doesn't suck is that area where you race the giant metal ball through an obstacle course to get the end before the ball gets there and triggers a switch to close off a secret area with good loot in it. And then they repeat that with a more difficult variant in the second castle.
Ah yes, the second castle. That deserves an entire paragraph all of its own. In an attempt to replicate the "inverted castle" thing from Symphony of the Night, Harmony of Dissonance consists of not one but two entire castles that you have to traverse in order to complete the game. The difference being that in SotN, at least the second castle was, you know, inverted (i.e. upside down). In HoD, on the other hand, with the exception of a very rare few areas (like that one area where there is no light and you have to wear the Night Vision Goggles to progress [or else just blunder through a bunch of spikes, trial-and-error style], which is only in one of the castles), the second castle was pretty much exactly the same in layout as the first castle, just with a different color scheme (usually bland grayscale) and different enemy placement. It is an inferior, poor man's version of SotN's inverted castle in every way.
The Magic Book skill system in HoD (basically a half dozen or so books that pair with the normal CV subweapons like the holy water, cross, etc.) is nowhere near as interesting as the "Dual Set-Up System" in CotM (two rows of cards, where each card on each row can pair with any card on the other row, where each pair is its own unique thing) or, especially, the soul collecting of AoS (where every single enemy in the game drops a soul that gives Soma a new attack or traversal ability or stat boost or whatever). Most of the attacks associated with any given combination of book+subweapon are worthless, or vaguely interesting but too gimmicky to be of practical use. Once I got the Wind Book, the Wind+Sacred Fist combination (which was basically just a simple, low-MP-consuming, hadouken-like projectile that did a shit-ton of damage) was my preferred combination. It didn't take a million years to activate, nor did it last a million years once activated, nor did it eat like half or more of the MP bar for a single use, like some of the other combos did. Most bosses just melted if you used that. But then, most bosses in HoD melted if you mostly just stood in one spot and spammed the whip button over and over, too, so that's not really saying all that much, to be honest. And, of course, unlike in CotM or AoS, in HoD, while you can change what magic book you're using whenever you want, you're limited to what subweapon you have at any given time, until you find a new one in a candle somewhere, same as any other CV game that makes use of the subweapons, which is another thing that makes the magic book system kind of suck, too, compared to the other two games.
Also, there's Juste's weird blue outline and shadow-effect that he has for seemingly no reason. (I've heard it was for "visibility" reasons, but neither Nathan from CotM or Soma from AoS needed that horseshit.) And his walk cycle looks ridiculous. And, just in general, the graphics in HoD are just plain uglier than in either CotM or AoS, overall.
And the whole "randomly collecting furniture to fill an empty room, just to get a very slightly different variation on the best ending if you got all of it" thing was insipid.
Lastly (and, for me, most importantly), the music in HoD sucks ass. I mean, for any given "random generic video game," the music is still okay, I suppose, but for Castlevania? I.e. a series known for having some of the best music in all of video gaming? Yeah, it sucks. The only halfway decent track in HoD is probably "Successor of Fate," i.e. the one associated with the first area in the game. (And I actually liked the in-game version of that better than the "orchestral" version they used for the end credits, too, just because the credits version was pitched differently.) "Chapel of Dissonance" is okay, too. I liked the first five seconds or so of the second area theme, too... but then that shit GBA baseline kicks in, ugh. But then you have shit like this. (Just to note, a couple of those are mislabeled; the one listed as "Aqueduct of Dragons" should be "Skeleton Den" and the one listed as "Skeleton Den" should be "Aqueduct of Dragons.") And what else doesn't outright suck is just lackluster. Well... there is "VK2K2," which is bar none the best track in the game, and probably my favorite ever version of "Vampire Killer" out of the many, many versions of "Vampire Killer" that exist, though in the actual game, "VK2K2" is sadly hidden behind a cheat code that you can only access after beating the game and the boss rush mode at least once. It and the other two boss rush tracks are also the sole contributions that Michiru Yamane made to the HoD soundtrack, which is probably why most of the rest of the music is puke.
<CV music geek out>
Meanwhile, over in Circle of the Moon, the music is a bunch of cool remixes from previous games like this. Their original counterparts, for comparison: "Introduction" from Castlevania 64, "A Vision of Dark Secrets" from Bloodlines, "The Sinking Old Sanctuary" from Bloodlines, "Clockwork" from Dracula's Curse, "Aquarius" from Dracula's Curse, "Clockwork Mansion" from Super Castlevania IV (probably my favorite track[s] from any CV game ever), "Vampire Killer" from the original Castlevania, "Shudder" from CV64, "Big Battle" from Dracula's Curse, and, of course, fuckin' "Illusionary Dance" from Rondo of Blood (it took me a bit to find a video with Dracula's laugh at the start, which, to me, is part of the track; most other videos annoyingly left out the laugh). Seriously, CotM's version of "Dance of Illusions"/"Illusionary Dance," aka Dracula's final boss theme in many of the CV games, is still to this day actually my favorite version of it, and there have been many versions of it over the years, all of them great. And for the original tracks in CotM, "Awake," aka the first main area music in the game, is way better than HoD's first area music mentioned above.
And meanwhile, over in Aria of Sorrow, you have... well... all of this good shit. Really, just the entire soundtrack. And as with CotM, AoS's first area theme also blows HoD out of the water. And, of course, special mention of fuckin' "Heart of Fire," which is a remix of both "Heart of Fire" from OG CV and "Don't Wait Until Night" (or "Can't Wait Until the Night" depending on your source) from Haunted Castle.
Basically, all of that is just to show that most of the music in Harmony of Dissonance is desiccated butthole by comparison.
</CV music geek out>
Anyway, in conclusion (of this rant, anyway), when compared to the vast majority of video games out there, HoD is still a pretty okay, perfectly playable-from-start-to-finish video game, I'll grant, but when compared specifically to pretty much any other Castlevania game, it is bottom rung. Maybe it's better than some of those shit-tier mobile phone CV games that Konami shat out that I haven't played because they're poop, but still. Worst of the mainline console/handheld CV games, anyway. "A GBA masterpiece" it most definitely is not.
</HoD rant>
Okay. Now that all of that is over and done with. Yeah, Harmony of Dissonance was mostly dog's ass, but Circle of the Moon and Aria of Sorrow more than make up for it, and make the Advance Collection plenty worthwhile.
There are also some added features in the Steam version that aren't in the original games. Most notably is the rewind feature. Basically, you can hold shift and then press the left arrow key, and it will literally "rewind" the game (if you're playing on keyboard anyway, as I was, as I'm not sure how/if it works with a controller). Very useful for when you fuck up and don't want to have to reload from a previous save. I'll freely admit that I abused the hell out of that shit. CotM in particular is pretty damn hard, and even with that rewind thing, it could be frustrating at times. It was useful for the metal ball race in HoD, too, as that could have sucked a lot worse otherwise. Also, I had already beaten all three of these games "legit" on the GBA, back in ye olden dayes, so I didn't care much if I "cheated" in these recent playthroughs.
And there are also just straight up save states, like any emulator worth its salt has these days, so you can save at any point without having to find a save point. Also allows for exploits if one wanted to use it in such a way (but with the rewind feature already right there, there's no real need to bother with save states for such).
Another thing the Steam collection has is full lists of equipment, items, powers, and enemies, all right there, available at the start, with all entries fully unlocked. This is via the Advance Collection's overlay, which is an addition to the original games themselves. Also, some of the games originally didn't have a bestiary or anything like that at all, and for the ones that did, most of the entries were locked until you actually, for instance, killed at least one enemy, or got at least one of their drops, before you could view those entries in the in-game versions. I mean, it's not world-changing or anything like that, but it's still neat to have.
One of the simultaneously useful and annoying new features are the new pop-ups on the side that appear whenever you attack an enemy in CotM or AoS, which show you specifically which enemies have card drops (in CotM) or souls (in AoS) and whether you have or haven't acquired them yet. Especially useful in CotM, since otherwise it was kind of a Guide Dang It situation on trying to find all of the DSS cards. Fortunately, though, you can turn the feature off entirely, if you don't want to use it (and it can and does take up a fair bit of screen real estate, especially when you're using a quick, multi-hit attack on a single beefy enemy, which doesn't look all that great). In HoD, it was used to show you which Dracula artifact or random piece of furniture you had or had not yet collected in each section of the castle(s), which was nice.
One complaint I have about the Steam version is that the keys apparently cannot be reconfigured. For keyboard, the arrows are the GBA D-pad, Z/X are A/B, A/S are Select/Start, and Q/W are L/R, and if you don't like that, then fuck you, I guess. Also, F1 brings up the overlay menu. And Esc brings up the "Do you want to quit?" menu, and you better be damn careful on that shit, because if you forget whether Z or X is A or B and you press the wrong one, you'll get dumped out to the desktop and lose all your progress. It happened to me a few times. (Oh, and this is also a reason why I'm less than enthused to keep trying to play Dracula X. For CotM, HoD, and AoS, jump was Z and whip was X. In DX, jump is X and whip is Z. It sucks.)
So, yeah, in conclusion (for real this time), even though Harmony of Dissonance certainly isn't the best thing since sliced bread, and Dracula X is sort of the odd man out of the bunch (i.e. it's not a Metroidvania like the other three and it also wasn't a Game Boy Advance game like the other three [it was a SNES game]), I would still definitely recommend this collection for Circle of the Moon and Aria of Sorrow, at the very least.
Despite how shitty Konami has been lately, for a huge variety of reasons, I'd probably still buy a Castlevania DS Collection (or whatever they ended up calling it) on Steam, if they ever made such a thing, and it had the same quality as this did (Harmony of Dissonance sucking not withstanding, as that's not the fault of this particular bundle). Konami not ever making such a thing would just be indicative of yet another way in which it is shitty in this modern era.
(Post started at 2:40pm. Post actually posted at 9:00pm, mostly due to being interrupted and distracted, by things both related and unrelated to the making of this post.)
Of the three I played, AoS is hands down the best of the bunch, of course. CotM is a close second, in my opinion, even though it came out before HoD.
Seriously, I'm just going to rant
<HoD rant>
I knew even when I originally played it on the GBA that it was not as good as Circle of the Moon, but having replayed it in 2023... man, does it suck. It is by far the worst of the CV Metroidvania games, that's for sure. For me, the main complaint is probably all the mostly empty rooms that are nothing but zig zags up one side and then zag zigs back down the other side that are there for absolutely no other reason than to impede traversal and pad out the game. Half the time, there aren't even any enemies in such rooms. Seriously, there are at least four or five variants of that type of room in the game (or twice as many, if you count the duplicates in the second castle), and it blows. Here is a map of the game, with the room graphics filled in. (Now, double all of that shit, because there is a second castle that is nearly identical.) Really, just look at all the rooms that consist of nothing but vertical areas with a long platform on the left with a tiny drop on the right, followed by a long platform on the right with a tiny drop on the left, repeated ad nauseam. Either that or just too-long, boring-ass, horizontal hallways. Oh, and all the goddamned locked doors. Fuck all those locked doors. Most of those locked doors are there just to force you to have to continually go the long way around to get anywhere, since you can eventually get to both sides of some of those locked doors, regardless, but can't actually unlock them until pretty much the end of the game. Probably the only unique bit in HoD that (mostly) doesn't suck is that area where you race the giant metal ball through an obstacle course to get the end before the ball gets there and triggers a switch to close off a secret area with good loot in it. And then they repeat that with a more difficult variant in the second castle.
Ah yes, the second castle. That deserves an entire paragraph all of its own. In an attempt to replicate the "inverted castle" thing from Symphony of the Night, Harmony of Dissonance consists of not one but two entire castles that you have to traverse in order to complete the game. The difference being that in SotN, at least the second castle was, you know, inverted (i.e. upside down). In HoD, on the other hand, with the exception of a very rare few areas (like that one area where there is no light and you have to wear the Night Vision Goggles to progress [or else just blunder through a bunch of spikes, trial-and-error style], which is only in one of the castles), the second castle was pretty much exactly the same in layout as the first castle, just with a different color scheme (usually bland grayscale) and different enemy placement. It is an inferior, poor man's version of SotN's inverted castle in every way.
The Magic Book skill system in HoD (basically a half dozen or so books that pair with the normal CV subweapons like the holy water, cross, etc.) is nowhere near as interesting as the "Dual Set-Up System" in CotM (two rows of cards, where each card on each row can pair with any card on the other row, where each pair is its own unique thing) or, especially, the soul collecting of AoS (where every single enemy in the game drops a soul that gives Soma a new attack or traversal ability or stat boost or whatever). Most of the attacks associated with any given combination of book+subweapon are worthless, or vaguely interesting but too gimmicky to be of practical use. Once I got the Wind Book, the Wind+Sacred Fist combination (which was basically just a simple, low-MP-consuming, hadouken-like projectile that did a shit-ton of damage) was my preferred combination. It didn't take a million years to activate, nor did it last a million years once activated, nor did it eat like half or more of the MP bar for a single use, like some of the other combos did. Most bosses just melted if you used that. But then, most bosses in HoD melted if you mostly just stood in one spot and spammed the whip button over and over, too, so that's not really saying all that much, to be honest. And, of course, unlike in CotM or AoS, in HoD, while you can change what magic book you're using whenever you want, you're limited to what subweapon you have at any given time, until you find a new one in a candle somewhere, same as any other CV game that makes use of the subweapons, which is another thing that makes the magic book system kind of suck, too, compared to the other two games.
Also, there's Juste's weird blue outline and shadow-effect that he has for seemingly no reason. (I've heard it was for "visibility" reasons, but neither Nathan from CotM or Soma from AoS needed that horseshit.) And his walk cycle looks ridiculous. And, just in general, the graphics in HoD are just plain uglier than in either CotM or AoS, overall.
And the whole "randomly collecting furniture to fill an empty room, just to get a very slightly different variation on the best ending if you got all of it" thing was insipid.
Lastly (and, for me, most importantly), the music in HoD sucks ass. I mean, for any given "random generic video game," the music is still okay, I suppose, but for Castlevania? I.e. a series known for having some of the best music in all of video gaming? Yeah, it sucks. The only halfway decent track in HoD is probably "Successor of Fate," i.e. the one associated with the first area in the game. (And I actually liked the in-game version of that better than the "orchestral" version they used for the end credits, too, just because the credits version was pitched differently.) "Chapel of Dissonance" is okay, too. I liked the first five seconds or so of the second area theme, too... but then that shit GBA baseline kicks in, ugh. But then you have shit like this. (Just to note, a couple of those are mislabeled; the one listed as "Aqueduct of Dragons" should be "Skeleton Den" and the one listed as "Skeleton Den" should be "Aqueduct of Dragons.") And what else doesn't outright suck is just lackluster. Well... there is "VK2K2," which is bar none the best track in the game, and probably my favorite ever version of "Vampire Killer" out of the many, many versions of "Vampire Killer" that exist, though in the actual game, "VK2K2" is sadly hidden behind a cheat code that you can only access after beating the game and the boss rush mode at least once. It and the other two boss rush tracks are also the sole contributions that Michiru Yamane made to the HoD soundtrack, which is probably why most of the rest of the music is puke.
<CV music geek out>
Meanwhile, over in Circle of the Moon, the music is a bunch of cool remixes from previous games like this. Their original counterparts, for comparison: "Introduction" from Castlevania 64, "A Vision of Dark Secrets" from Bloodlines, "The Sinking Old Sanctuary" from Bloodlines, "Clockwork" from Dracula's Curse, "Aquarius" from Dracula's Curse, "Clockwork Mansion" from Super Castlevania IV (probably my favorite track[s] from any CV game ever), "Vampire Killer" from the original Castlevania, "Shudder" from CV64, "Big Battle" from Dracula's Curse, and, of course, fuckin' "Illusionary Dance" from Rondo of Blood (it took me a bit to find a video with Dracula's laugh at the start, which, to me, is part of the track; most other videos annoyingly left out the laugh). Seriously, CotM's version of "Dance of Illusions"/"Illusionary Dance," aka Dracula's final boss theme in many of the CV games, is still to this day actually my favorite version of it, and there have been many versions of it over the years, all of them great. And for the original tracks in CotM, "Awake," aka the first main area music in the game, is way better than HoD's first area music mentioned above.
And meanwhile, over in Aria of Sorrow, you have... well... all of this good shit. Really, just the entire soundtrack. And as with CotM, AoS's first area theme also blows HoD out of the water. And, of course, special mention of fuckin' "Heart of Fire," which is a remix of both "Heart of Fire" from OG CV and "Don't Wait Until Night" (or "Can't Wait Until the Night" depending on your source) from Haunted Castle.
Basically, all of that is just to show that most of the music in Harmony of Dissonance is desiccated butthole by comparison.
</CV music geek out>
Anyway, in conclusion (of this rant, anyway), when compared to the vast majority of video games out there, HoD is still a pretty okay, perfectly playable-from-start-to-finish video game, I'll grant, but when compared specifically to pretty much any other Castlevania game, it is bottom rung. Maybe it's better than some of those shit-tier mobile phone CV games that Konami shat out that I haven't played because they're poop, but still. Worst of the mainline console/handheld CV games, anyway. "A GBA masterpiece" it most definitely is not.
</HoD rant>
Okay. Now that all of that is over and done with. Yeah, Harmony of Dissonance was mostly dog's ass, but Circle of the Moon and Aria of Sorrow more than make up for it, and make the Advance Collection plenty worthwhile.
There are also some added features in the Steam version that aren't in the original games. Most notably is the rewind feature. Basically, you can hold shift and then press the left arrow key, and it will literally "rewind" the game (if you're playing on keyboard anyway, as I was, as I'm not sure how/if it works with a controller). Very useful for when you fuck up and don't want to have to reload from a previous save. I'll freely admit that I abused the hell out of that shit. CotM in particular is pretty damn hard, and even with that rewind thing, it could be frustrating at times. It was useful for the metal ball race in HoD, too, as that could have sucked a lot worse otherwise. Also, I had already beaten all three of these games "legit" on the GBA, back in ye olden dayes, so I didn't care much if I "cheated" in these recent playthroughs.
And there are also just straight up save states, like any emulator worth its salt has these days, so you can save at any point without having to find a save point. Also allows for exploits if one wanted to use it in such a way (but with the rewind feature already right there, there's no real need to bother with save states for such).
Another thing the Steam collection has is full lists of equipment, items, powers, and enemies, all right there, available at the start, with all entries fully unlocked. This is via the Advance Collection's overlay, which is an addition to the original games themselves. Also, some of the games originally didn't have a bestiary or anything like that at all, and for the ones that did, most of the entries were locked until you actually, for instance, killed at least one enemy, or got at least one of their drops, before you could view those entries in the in-game versions. I mean, it's not world-changing or anything like that, but it's still neat to have.
One of the simultaneously useful and annoying new features are the new pop-ups on the side that appear whenever you attack an enemy in CotM or AoS, which show you specifically which enemies have card drops (in CotM) or souls (in AoS) and whether you have or haven't acquired them yet. Especially useful in CotM, since otherwise it was kind of a Guide Dang It situation on trying to find all of the DSS cards. Fortunately, though, you can turn the feature off entirely, if you don't want to use it (and it can and does take up a fair bit of screen real estate, especially when you're using a quick, multi-hit attack on a single beefy enemy, which doesn't look all that great). In HoD, it was used to show you which Dracula artifact or random piece of furniture you had or had not yet collected in each section of the castle(s), which was nice.
One complaint I have about the Steam version is that the keys apparently cannot be reconfigured. For keyboard, the arrows are the GBA D-pad, Z/X are A/B, A/S are Select/Start, and Q/W are L/R, and if you don't like that, then fuck you, I guess. Also, F1 brings up the overlay menu. And Esc brings up the "Do you want to quit?" menu, and you better be damn careful on that shit, because if you forget whether Z or X is A or B and you press the wrong one, you'll get dumped out to the desktop and lose all your progress. It happened to me a few times. (Oh, and this is also a reason why I'm less than enthused to keep trying to play Dracula X. For CotM, HoD, and AoS, jump was Z and whip was X. In DX, jump is X and whip is Z. It sucks.)
So, yeah, in conclusion (for real this time), even though Harmony of Dissonance certainly isn't the best thing since sliced bread, and Dracula X is sort of the odd man out of the bunch (i.e. it's not a Metroidvania like the other three and it also wasn't a Game Boy Advance game like the other three [it was a SNES game]), I would still definitely recommend this collection for Circle of the Moon and Aria of Sorrow, at the very least.
Despite how shitty Konami has been lately, for a huge variety of reasons, I'd probably still buy a Castlevania DS Collection (or whatever they ended up calling it) on Steam, if they ever made such a thing, and it had the same quality as this did (Harmony of Dissonance sucking not withstanding, as that's not the fault of this particular bundle). Konami not ever making such a thing would just be indicative of yet another way in which it is shitty in this modern era.
(Post started at 2:40pm. Post actually posted at 9:00pm, mostly due to being interrupted and distracted, by things both related and unrelated to the making of this post.)
no subject
Date: 2023-12-08 09:21 am (UTC)From:AoS was my favorite of the GB games as well. For the DS games it'd be a toss up between Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin. Didn't like the last DS game as much although it was still enjoyable. You just had to remember there were times you were definitely too weak to beat a monster in your path and that you'd have to just find a way around it - to come back to it later if needed when you were backtracking.
Of the 6 games I think I still need to complete Circle of the Moon. I got that one later on and didn't quite get back to it afterwards, unlike the other 5 where I got it and played them immediately. My backloggery confirms "unfinished" for CotM, but also says that about HoD. I would have have completed Hodbefore starting up my completed list though, which is why it says that. I made a choice when I started to not try to remember what games I beat before that - and if I wanted to add them as completed, I'd have to do it all over again. Maybe I should break out the DS (or GBSP - don't really feel inclined to try to play that on the GBA without a light, and playing it on the GC is not ideal since there's some controller lag using the Gameboy Player addon for the GC. Great for RPGs and the like. Not so much for action platformers.)