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 rant
for a bit about
Harmony of Dissonance now, partitioned off into it's own
littlelarge area.
( HoD rant behind cut for good measure, along with a big music nerd-out for the other games )
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.)
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