Triple Review of the GBA Castlevanias SPOILERS
Yes in some ways this is a passive aggressive method of brainwashing my friend Don in order to make him play a Castlevania game. But really it’s not…;)
Critically acclaimed, the CV games on the GBA has made an incredible splash on the gaming market. Considering that each incarnation got better and mostly surpassed the predecessor, it leads to say…how good is it really?
Well…it’s good. Not great, but good.
Basically some history. To tell the truth, the CV games on the GBA are somewhat your typical CV flair from the NES and SNES versions so long ago. You get a whip, and you go around whipping stuff. Whatever.
It wasn’t until CV started out with it’s pretentious titles (CV title generator here) that it got somewhat interesting. The main ones being most recognizable being; Rondo of Blood (RoB), Symphony of the Night (SOTN), Circle of the Moon (CotM), Harmony of Dissonance (HoD) and Aria of Sorrow (AoS).
Now Rondo of Blood is by no means the “giant step” that most CV fans make it out to be. To tell the truth only a few interesting things had been interesting, namely multi-endings (depending on how many hostages [real ones, not generic Metal Slug ones] you save), gameplay additions and multiple levels = some kinda replay value. Granted RoB was on the TGFX16-CD, which made crisp music available and larger graphics, it still was the same old CV game. Whip and jump. But before I go on, this is acclaimed to be the best CV if not the best “old skool” CV game of the bunch, so if you were to get it, do not get the really crappy SNES port. Kthx
This is where “IGA” came in (not the supermarket, the game producer)and produced SOTN for the PSX and Saturn. Basically it took most conventions of the previous and “rushed that shit down”. Gone was “stiff all or nothing” jumping, you could reverse your jump at anytime. No more whips, this time it is a collection of swords, axes and other goodies like magic and shit like that (and morphing). And finally, no more static stages of just scrolling left to right, there were “areas” to explore. Entire huge ass rooms to check out.
In many ways, people related SOTN with the much praised Super Metroid on SNES and in some ways they are totally correct. In fact with some of these GBA games, one divergent path would lead you to an incredibly huge area to explore, which often left hours before you came back to explore the other path.
Hell even the map system seemed totally ripped off from Super Metroid. So with the exception of the God awful N64 CVs, and the GB one, the CVs after SOTN were based upon the same template of SOTN. Explore and kill stuff.
But onto the actual reviews, but the history was just to tell you how the games are nowadays.
Circle of the Moon
A pretty cool CV for my tastes. I didn’t know WTF people we talking about on how blasy the atmosphere is, but I liked it. It wasn’t great, especially compared to the latter games, but it was no slouch. Personally I think this is one of the most challenging games in a long time. Granted you may have weapons to kick ass, but they hardly help quite as much in the latter games. At the time, the animation was great for me, I think it was pretty spectacular, but often it held palette swaps of enemies which was pretty fucking annoying. However the animation was stiff, often had only a few frames of animation at any time, not to mention the fairly static looking bosses. Kinda like moving a cut and page picture in paint and saying that it flies. However the sad part is that you are regulated to a fucking whip again.
The DSS card system allows for combinations of different whip elements, which is incredibly convenient for kicking ass. The fact that on a few weapons work effectively all the time lends itself to have different combinations to be explored. However by the end, like all other games, you will find yourself using the same damned power-ups ultimately making that aspect of the game boring. However the game is still difficult even with these features.
Basically for me: 4.0/5.0 stars.
Harmony of Dissonance
After playing CotM, I thought HoD was going to be gay by looking at the screens. Funny thing is, usually blown up GBA screenshots are usually pretty shitty in a mag or website but when you see it in action and the small screen, then it looks pretty damn cool. HoD brought the graphics whore out of me, basically because like 98% of the enemies in here have their own sprites. I shit you not. There is little palette swapping in this version, and if there were, the sprites tend to look or animated differently (aesthetic differences like a Viking hat or something).
The graphics are indeed pretty solid and being so bright, really made the game shine through. The only gripe is the really bad choice of having a “blue outline” to the main character “Juste Belmont” which = gheyness. A lot of sprites have these multi colored outlines which leaves me why the hell would someone do this? Unless it was to fit in with the hyperdelic colors of HoD’s backgrounds I suppose it was needed. The other upside is how fast this game is, and I mean fast compared to the other CV games. It is like Megaman speed.
But the down part is how fucking easy this game is. If you ever play the Boss Rush mode, you will understand. With the whip, the enemies and bosses just become nice little “whip puppets” of the S&M demo. It was insane on how easy to defeat some of these opponents, the only setback that I had was fighting “Death” and only because I was complacent in beating the shit out of the other bosses and disregarded the fact that Death’s second form was just as hard and just as “life depleting’ as his first form, which left me with a lack of health management skills, aka dodging attacks. PWNAGE.
But still the graphics whore comes out of me ever so much because to tell the truth, the bosses are really THAT WELL ANIMATED. Instead of CotM where all the of the sprites acted out as a single sprite, many of the enemies and especially the bosses, got animated with multiple sprites moving together like a giant Power Ranger. The effect….well just play the first few minutes of HoD and you’ll see how fucking fluid it turns out to be.
Another downer to the game is when you get to the “second” castle. It was fairly interesting how when this revealed that it actually “split” the parts of the castle you already explored into two parts. Let’s just say you look over castle A and when it splits into Castle B and Castle C, the result is half of A is in B and half of A is in C.
The problem with this isn’t how it could be confusing…no not at fucking all. What fucks with you is the blatant attempt to “length” the game by making you absolutely stupid things in order to explore parts of the castle, which only results in double-backing and revisiting areas. How this happens is that there are “two types of portals”. Yes. Scattered about the castle are portals; one for decent transportation to a different area of the castle, (I’ll call them Suzys) and another for transportation between Castle B and Castle C (I’ll call them Port-holes)
What happens when two castles are accessible to you? Well instead of making the notion of logic of having the transporters become naturally become Suzys for each respective castles, then instead both act as Suzys and Port-holes. The result? FUCKING HI JINKS.
There are points in the castle where you have to use a Suzy to access a different part of the castle….an “unexplored” part mind you, but you didn’t got through a Port-hole in order to access that unexplored area. The result? A total waste of your time. I was stuck at this one point that basically pissed me off for hours upon end.
Upon this edition’s magic system is the “Spellbook” system that utilizes a combination of a Spellbook element and a typical CV sub-weapon. The result? Well compared to the rest of the GBA CV’s you get a pretty shallow and small selection. However in the game only 2-3 combinations are useful….I mean “abuseful”, which essentially makes this game the laughing stock at the annual “Difficult Game Convention”. The other thing that truly irked me is how you have to repeatedly go back and forth in order to turn off or on the magic spell book. There is a handy “Change” spellbook feature, but in the heat of battle and when you depleted your MP stock, you want to easily turn off the MP eating sub-weapon to just use the Heart depleting sub-weapon. Instead you have to go to the status screen and turn it off. GHEY.
Although I was about to give it a higher score for it bringing the graphics whore out of me, I realize how faulty this game is. Not “I don’t want to play this game again” faulty but “Fun game, but it’s faults make it less that great”. Oh yeah there is a special secret character added for kicks. Kinda fun…kinda not.
3.5/5.0 stars.
Aria of Sorrow
After prattling on how HoD was so bad, you’d think I’d say AoS was that good? Wrong. Personally I think this is where IGA screws up pretty royally. If HoD and CotM made love and had a child, and brought it up to try to be like SOTN, AoS would be it. First of all the good things about the game.
Huge ass system is back now, in the form of souls. Three categories of attack souls, ability souls and status souls. Makes for unlimited combinations but to tell the truth, you would really only need to switch tween 4-5 souls at the end. However biggest thing divergent from the past GBA games, NO WHIP…well kinda. Only a few of the mass amounts of swords, hammers, spears and knuckles (guns too) really work well, but not a whip in sight save for only one “whip sword” which you will quickly get rid of. This game is as much SOTN as it tries to be and succeeds in ways. However here comes the bad part.
Graphics: Once again I become a whore. The thing is the animation is fluid, but the character design is basically shit at times. Nothing really in this game made me gasp or squeal as much as HoD to tell the truth. It looks like a lot of the enemies from CotM made a come back, palette swap and all (thankfully kept to a minimum). I can’t put my finger on it, but something just irks me about this edition of CV. The sprites are almost like the fluidity of HoD, but the solid looking character design form of CotM.
Looking at the main character move made me almost vomit because he seem to have move so slow….especially compared to HoD. I mean he looked a bit *too* fluid to my tastes because it almost looked like he was floating on the ground. The animation was fluid…like I said before, but how they moved looked stiff.
Background: Once again a combination of the static CotM and HoD’s bright backgrounds. It just felt…blegh really. Nothing compelled me and it seemed a bit too dominant at times, making it difficult to concentrate.
Easy as pie: Not really at times, but with the right souls, you can fuck up people really good without missing a beat. I at one point inadvertently read a tips section and got access to basically the most powerful weapon and armour early onto the game….not really early since it could be access at anytime but still too early. This really depleted the fun of having a variety of weapons since they paled to the power of this kickass sword.
Boss Rush Mode? Not too bad. Haven’t completely finished it, but truly challenging at times.
The final result? Well I have to say that this game has basically the best secret character mode of the three. Lots of variety to him…much more than HoD’s and really really cool. But for being kinda irky about it I give it:
4.0/5.0 stars.
Yes in some ways this is a passive aggressive method of brainwashing my friend Don in order to make him play a Castlevania game. But really it’s not…;)
Critically acclaimed, the CV games on the GBA has made an incredible splash on the gaming market. Considering that each incarnation got better and mostly surpassed the predecessor, it leads to say…how good is it really?
Well…it’s good. Not great, but good.
Basically some history. To tell the truth, the CV games on the GBA are somewhat your typical CV flair from the NES and SNES versions so long ago. You get a whip, and you go around whipping stuff. Whatever.
It wasn’t until CV started out with it’s pretentious titles (CV title generator here) that it got somewhat interesting. The main ones being most recognizable being; Rondo of Blood (RoB), Symphony of the Night (SOTN), Circle of the Moon (CotM), Harmony of Dissonance (HoD) and Aria of Sorrow (AoS).
Now Rondo of Blood is by no means the “giant step” that most CV fans make it out to be. To tell the truth only a few interesting things had been interesting, namely multi-endings (depending on how many hostages [real ones, not generic Metal Slug ones] you save), gameplay additions and multiple levels = some kinda replay value. Granted RoB was on the TGFX16-CD, which made crisp music available and larger graphics, it still was the same old CV game. Whip and jump. But before I go on, this is acclaimed to be the best CV if not the best “old skool” CV game of the bunch, so if you were to get it, do not get the really crappy SNES port. Kthx
This is where “IGA” came in (not the supermarket, the game producer)and produced SOTN for the PSX and Saturn. Basically it took most conventions of the previous and “rushed that shit down”. Gone was “stiff all or nothing” jumping, you could reverse your jump at anytime. No more whips, this time it is a collection of swords, axes and other goodies like magic and shit like that (and morphing). And finally, no more static stages of just scrolling left to right, there were “areas” to explore. Entire huge ass rooms to check out.
In many ways, people related SOTN with the much praised Super Metroid on SNES and in some ways they are totally correct. In fact with some of these GBA games, one divergent path would lead you to an incredibly huge area to explore, which often left hours before you came back to explore the other path.
Hell even the map system seemed totally ripped off from Super Metroid. So with the exception of the God awful N64 CVs, and the GB one, the CVs after SOTN were based upon the same template of SOTN. Explore and kill stuff.
But onto the actual reviews, but the history was just to tell you how the games are nowadays.
Circle of the Moon
A pretty cool CV for my tastes. I didn’t know WTF people we talking about on how blasy the atmosphere is, but I liked it. It wasn’t great, especially compared to the latter games, but it was no slouch. Personally I think this is one of the most challenging games in a long time. Granted you may have weapons to kick ass, but they hardly help quite as much in the latter games. At the time, the animation was great for me, I think it was pretty spectacular, but often it held palette swaps of enemies which was pretty fucking annoying. However the animation was stiff, often had only a few frames of animation at any time, not to mention the fairly static looking bosses. Kinda like moving a cut and page picture in paint and saying that it flies. However the sad part is that you are regulated to a fucking whip again.
The DSS card system allows for combinations of different whip elements, which is incredibly convenient for kicking ass. The fact that on a few weapons work effectively all the time lends itself to have different combinations to be explored. However by the end, like all other games, you will find yourself using the same damned power-ups ultimately making that aspect of the game boring. However the game is still difficult even with these features.
Basically for me: 4.0/5.0 stars.
Harmony of Dissonance
After playing CotM, I thought HoD was going to be gay by looking at the screens. Funny thing is, usually blown up GBA screenshots are usually pretty shitty in a mag or website but when you see it in action and the small screen, then it looks pretty damn cool. HoD brought the graphics whore out of me, basically because like 98% of the enemies in here have their own sprites. I shit you not. There is little palette swapping in this version, and if there were, the sprites tend to look or animated differently (aesthetic differences like a Viking hat or something).
The graphics are indeed pretty solid and being so bright, really made the game shine through. The only gripe is the really bad choice of having a “blue outline” to the main character “Juste Belmont” which = gheyness. A lot of sprites have these multi colored outlines which leaves me why the hell would someone do this? Unless it was to fit in with the hyperdelic colors of HoD’s backgrounds I suppose it was needed. The other upside is how fast this game is, and I mean fast compared to the other CV games. It is like Megaman speed.
But the down part is how fucking easy this game is. If you ever play the Boss Rush mode, you will understand. With the whip, the enemies and bosses just become nice little “whip puppets” of the S&M demo. It was insane on how easy to defeat some of these opponents, the only setback that I had was fighting “Death” and only because I was complacent in beating the shit out of the other bosses and disregarded the fact that Death’s second form was just as hard and just as “life depleting’ as his first form, which left me with a lack of health management skills, aka dodging attacks. PWNAGE.
But still the graphics whore comes out of me ever so much because to tell the truth, the bosses are really THAT WELL ANIMATED. Instead of CotM where all the of the sprites acted out as a single sprite, many of the enemies and especially the bosses, got animated with multiple sprites moving together like a giant Power Ranger. The effect….well just play the first few minutes of HoD and you’ll see how fucking fluid it turns out to be.
Another downer to the game is when you get to the “second” castle. It was fairly interesting how when this revealed that it actually “split” the parts of the castle you already explored into two parts. Let’s just say you look over castle A and when it splits into Castle B and Castle C, the result is half of A is in B and half of A is in C.
The problem with this isn’t how it could be confusing…no not at fucking all. What fucks with you is the blatant attempt to “length” the game by making you absolutely stupid things in order to explore parts of the castle, which only results in double-backing and revisiting areas. How this happens is that there are “two types of portals”. Yes. Scattered about the castle are portals; one for decent transportation to a different area of the castle, (I’ll call them Suzys) and another for transportation between Castle B and Castle C (I’ll call them Port-holes)
What happens when two castles are accessible to you? Well instead of making the notion of logic of having the transporters become naturally become Suzys for each respective castles, then instead both act as Suzys and Port-holes. The result? FUCKING HI JINKS.
There are points in the castle where you have to use a Suzy to access a different part of the castle….an “unexplored” part mind you, but you didn’t got through a Port-hole in order to access that unexplored area. The result? A total waste of your time. I was stuck at this one point that basically pissed me off for hours upon end.
Upon this edition’s magic system is the “Spellbook” system that utilizes a combination of a Spellbook element and a typical CV sub-weapon. The result? Well compared to the rest of the GBA CV’s you get a pretty shallow and small selection. However in the game only 2-3 combinations are useful….I mean “abuseful”, which essentially makes this game the laughing stock at the annual “Difficult Game Convention”. The other thing that truly irked me is how you have to repeatedly go back and forth in order to turn off or on the magic spell book. There is a handy “Change” spellbook feature, but in the heat of battle and when you depleted your MP stock, you want to easily turn off the MP eating sub-weapon to just use the Heart depleting sub-weapon. Instead you have to go to the status screen and turn it off. GHEY.
Although I was about to give it a higher score for it bringing the graphics whore out of me, I realize how faulty this game is. Not “I don’t want to play this game again” faulty but “Fun game, but it’s faults make it less that great”. Oh yeah there is a special secret character added for kicks. Kinda fun…kinda not.
3.5/5.0 stars.
Aria of Sorrow
After prattling on how HoD was so bad, you’d think I’d say AoS was that good? Wrong. Personally I think this is where IGA screws up pretty royally. If HoD and CotM made love and had a child, and brought it up to try to be like SOTN, AoS would be it. First of all the good things about the game.
Huge ass system is back now, in the form of souls. Three categories of attack souls, ability souls and status souls. Makes for unlimited combinations but to tell the truth, you would really only need to switch tween 4-5 souls at the end. However biggest thing divergent from the past GBA games, NO WHIP…well kinda. Only a few of the mass amounts of swords, hammers, spears and knuckles (guns too) really work well, but not a whip in sight save for only one “whip sword” which you will quickly get rid of. This game is as much SOTN as it tries to be and succeeds in ways. However here comes the bad part.
Graphics: Once again I become a whore. The thing is the animation is fluid, but the character design is basically shit at times. Nothing really in this game made me gasp or squeal as much as HoD to tell the truth. It looks like a lot of the enemies from CotM made a come back, palette swap and all (thankfully kept to a minimum). I can’t put my finger on it, but something just irks me about this edition of CV. The sprites are almost like the fluidity of HoD, but the solid looking character design form of CotM.
Looking at the main character move made me almost vomit because he seem to have move so slow….especially compared to HoD. I mean he looked a bit *too* fluid to my tastes because it almost looked like he was floating on the ground. The animation was fluid…like I said before, but how they moved looked stiff.
Background: Once again a combination of the static CotM and HoD’s bright backgrounds. It just felt…blegh really. Nothing compelled me and it seemed a bit too dominant at times, making it difficult to concentrate.
Easy as pie: Not really at times, but with the right souls, you can fuck up people really good without missing a beat. I at one point inadvertently read a tips section and got access to basically the most powerful weapon and armour early onto the game….not really early since it could be access at anytime but still too early. This really depleted the fun of having a variety of weapons since they paled to the power of this kickass sword.
Boss Rush Mode? Not too bad. Haven’t completely finished it, but truly challenging at times.
The final result? Well I have to say that this game has basically the best secret character mode of the three. Lots of variety to him…much more than HoD’s and really really cool. But for being kinda irky about it I give it:
4.0/5.0 stars.
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