Because I guess this is a recurring series now!
Last month I covered Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, talking way too much about where I thought the game fell short, not only in comparison to other Castlevania games, but as a game overall. It put a less than favorable flavor in my mouth, so I decided to march forth with more of the portable 2000s run of the series to see how it evolved, iterated, and improved.
Despite my less than favorable opinion on Circle of the Moon, the game was a hit for all intents and purposes, selling over half a million copies, netting a lot of 9s from critics, and likely spurring Konami to fast-track a follow-up. However, rather than have the Circle of the Moon team take another (whip) crack at it, they were largely uninvolved with the game, replaced by a new team. A team led by Symphony of the Night assistant director Koji Igarashi, designer Shinichiro Shimamura, and character designer Ayami Kojima, and a grab bag of twelve-ish other Konami staff, they managed to produce a successor just 15 months later, dubbed Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance.
If Circle of the Moon was its own unique spin on Castlevania in a post-SOTN world, then Harmony of Dissonance is just Symphony of the Night Junior, and… I think that’s a wonderful thing.
Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance Review
Platforms: Game Boy Advance, Wii U, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC (Reviewed)
Developer: Konami Computer Entertainment Kobe & M2 Co., Ltd.
Publisher: Konami
This review is based on the version of the game included in the Castlevania Advance Collection for PC.
Part 1: General Game Goodness
Sandwiched between Simon’s Quest and Rondo of Blood— for those who care for the series’ roundabout timeline, Harmony of Dissonance offers another example of what I call a “handheld narrative.” Protagonist Juste Belmont ventures to a mysterious castle alongside his friend, Maxim Kischine, to rescue Maxim’s lover and Juste’s friend, Lydie Erlanger. Maxim clearly has memory issues, raising suspicions about both the nature of the castle and what he did to Lydie, yet the two go through the castle at their own pace, occasionally crossing paths.
You can probably piece together what is going on from that description alone, and while there is more story than Circle of the Moon, it’s not by much. Story scenes are sparse and short. Characters don’t feel like they have all too much character, barring the endearing skit that plays out during the good ending. While effective, the core twist of the story likely stemmed from a rationale to have the player switch between two versions of the same castle, à la Symphony of the Night. And I know this is far from a unique take, but the story largely feels like a remix of elements from Symphony of the Night, right down the having the same general requirements to access the true ending.
Harmony of Dissonance is more than a little derivative from its 1997 predecessor. This was a point of criticism with the game at the time, when game-likers were jet-jacked off of a decade of turbulent innovation. However, looking back at it 24 years later, I cannot help but view it as a handheld sequel that tries to do most of what Symphony of the Night did and succeeds on nearly every front. This execution of a similar yet different experience is what we used to expect from sequels, back when the market allowed people to make a game in a little over a year.
Just to name a few examples, both games star a man with an elegant coat and long silver hair who leaves behind an after-image that follows when jumping or running. The equipment system from SOTN is reprised, right down to the general menu design and smorgasbord of quirky equipment to play around with, some offering plain lateral stats, others imbuing secondary effects. Money has a purpose thanks to a merchant who will sell gear and potions for handy healing. And the HOD castle is similarly doubled in size thanks to the magic of asset recycling, even if the application is quite different, switching color palates and secondary details rather than flipping everything upside down.
Its inspirations are overt, but that does not really matter if the game is fun to play, and Harmony of Dissonance plays like a dream. All remnants of the clunkier, frictional, movement of Circle of the Moon is gone and Juste controls like butter. He moseys on at a fast yet controlled pace. Jumps have enough air time and air control to make platforming and navigation a breeze.
Attacks have enough wind-up and recovery to make precision valuable, but the limited health of common enemies, range of the whip, and generous hit box makes thwacking fodder feel good. And in a move that I cannot help but view as a response to COTM, the player has the ability to dash both right and left, making dodging especially easy and giving players the ability to blast through a clear area by rapidly tapping the shoulder buttons, skimming with one foot on the ground. Simply put: the game feel is good.
It feels good, and by extension, exploration feels good, even if it is fairly direct for the first half of the game. The starting area is pretty self-contained, featuring two bosses, a handful of upgrades, and maybe three environments. But continued exploration reveals a psychedelic tunnel to a warp point that sends them to the other side of the castle, now bearing a harsher, darker atmosphere. With no real guidelines, the player is left to explore, going on and on through a winding series of splitting pathways until they’ve explored most of the castle, when the signature twist is delivered. That you were not exploring just one castle, but two. The normal castle A and the darker drearier castle B.
As a twist, it’s functional if not unsurprising, as otherwise the game would be positively teensy, and the game opens up considerably upon discovering this factoid. Every hallway you just spent two hours trekking through is prime for re-exploration, and with every light/dark castle switch room doubling as a warp room, I can’t really complain about the navigation.
This turns the second half of the game into a largely freeform experience, only gated by— pretty arbitrary— keys that must be obtained from specific bosses. And though you can criticize that the stage layouts are the same, I don’t really mind as every area has an aesthetic and enemy makeover, making exploration fun and… even easy. Instead of needing to memorize two different layouts, you just need to remember one, and that makes exploring surprisingly enjoyable, as you aren’t paranoid or poking around in the dark. The layout is the layout and the game’s not going to mess with you by including rooms exclusive to one map and not the other. Hell, there aren’t even any real secret rooms. …But there are rooms you can only access by walking through walls.
Next, I should talk about bosses. Bosses are generally pretty easy big hulking things with telegraphed strikes that do big damage, but any combined onslaught of whipping, sub-weapon-ing, and magic-ing along with jumping and dashing, should be enough to get past them without too much difficulty. Maybe one or two failed attempts, just enough to get the pattern down and win. They mostly get by on their designs and vibes over their mechanical complexity, but I don’t particularly mind any of them all the same. Well, except for one.
The last boss, divided into three phases, is naturally the hardest, but mostly due to how it breaks these conventions, with the first stage putting Juste against a fast human-scale enemy. They dump-run back and forth, throwing out a bevvy of attacks that can be quite tricky to dodge, and can hit fast if you don’t predict their next move. It’s not unreasonable, but the game does precious little to prepare them for this encounter. You really do not fight enemies like this in Harmony of Dissonance. However, players at this point should have enough potions to tank it and get to the end. Afterward, Dracula follows with his two phases, but he’s a little punk baby who can’t do much about a spinning ring of crosses, and the demon form is… both strange and kind of pitiful— not even cool!
Also, if you want to get 200% map completion in this game, you need to beat the final boss four times, because of the map design, and I don’t understand why. They just had to add some platforms to prevent this, but they didn’t.
Part 2: Upgrade Ups (and Downs)
As for upgrades, key ones are few in numbers beyond the opening third, and they largely cover the basis for the series. Damage numbers, the bestiary, a couple stat buffs, slide, double jump, and the inevitable super jump with all of its “press down to go up” weirdness. They work well, you don’t really need anything else, though I have to ask why the crush boots aren’t considered a relic, and are instead a piece of equipment. When used with the super jump, Juste can smash through special conspicuous ceiling blocks, including blocks that hide a resource necessary to get the good ending. Combined with the utterly cryptic choice to hide upgrades and a key item in the ceiling of one random save room, it makes me wonder if they intended people to look this stuff up online.
General upgrades and equipment are far more interesting and regimented this time around, as the developers simply have more stuff they can scatter across the castles. Potions are placed caringly during the early game, providing struggling players an appreciated pick-me-up. Health upgrades are great for obvious reasons, even if most of your added health will come from straight leveling. Heart upgrades are fine, as you really don’t need 200 hearts. This only leaves equipment upgrades, which are by far the most intriguing.
Equipment is placed to give the player a steady upgrade path as they go through the intended route, replacing headgear, armor, and the like semi-regularly without need to rely on random enemy drops. Though, if you do get lucky and nab an early Kettle Hat from an Axe Armor, good for you. However, there are also several niche items that add some appreciated variety and character to the experience. Armor that heals your health while moving. Accessories that boost the item drop rate or specific sub-weapon damage. Or, my favorite, a whole set of armor that you obtain by knocking a giant metal armored suit into a bunch of gears. Now that’s what I call an upgrade!
The upgrade system around the whip, however, is a lot less refined. You start with the Vampire Killer and don’t upgrade the whip itself, just the tips the whip is using. You have four elemental tips that boost the power of the whip slightly, let it deal extra damage to enemies weak to a given element. How do you know what element an enemy is weak to, or resists? Well, intuition can be right, but you largely need to consult the bestiary for this information. There is no hit spark or sound effect to indicate if something is super effective or not very effective, so a lot of the time you are going to just run whatever your most recent whip tip is. Or, at least that’s what I did.
There is also a charged whip tip lets the player hold down B for a stronger centralized attack, which I guess has combat applications. However, the charge time is long, and equipping this tip weakens the whip. Clearly, the player is meant to use it for its “secondary” purpose of knocking down walls blocking their path and put this tip aside for the superior steel tip. The steel tip has an attack buff and deals neutral damage, which is great before it is replaced with the stronger platinum tip. Or in other words, you spend most of a campaign going through attack side-grades before just getting two direct upgrades. That’s, uh… a progression system, I suppose.
Yeah, the whip’s upgrades are a garb bag, but I do like it as a weapon and appreciate the choice to only give the player one good weapon. A static weapon like this helps the player learn the limits of their character, gives them something to spend their time with and master. You learn how long the whip is and what the recovery rate is, and that’s not a bad thing at all. Though, the elemental system is pretty lame. Elements are a very shoehorned in system that does not ever have much mechanical depth. Even if damage is reduced, it’s still damage.
Another less sensible element of this game is the decision to throw in random furniture items for Juste to find to fill up a room in the basement. This is a complete vanity feature, has zero mechanical meat to it, but I’m willing to just give it a pass as a fun extra thing to collect and gawk at.
I’m similarly ambivalent on the choice to cap Juste’s power at level 47, severely reducing the EXP that Juste can get from enemies, as at that point in the game, you are handily strong enough to take on the final boss. It’s strange, makes little sense, but does not really hamper the experience either. …Unless you want to get the game-breaking equipment locked behind being level 50.
Next, I want to talk about the economy. Still working off of the single shopkeeper model of SOTN, HOD tries to be cute with the concept by stranding a merchant across both castles in specified rooms that are not labeled on the map and are usually locked behind certain pre-determined requirements. The player’s level, the player’s currently held amount of hearts, of coins, and… it’s mostly all pointless. Just let me buy things, don’t make me choose between a cryptic puzzle and backtracking.
The main reasons to visit the merchant are to grab healing potions, which are actually effective in this game, and occasionally spruce up your equipment, which can vary from shop to shop. And while money might be a bit sparse if playing the game organically, there are plenty of opportunities to abuse cash spawns to nab $100 to $400 sacks every few seconds. They knew people would want to money grind, and facilitated it with ease.
The heart economy is also strange, as you can hold so many hundreds of hearts yet lack any reliable way to getting them back if you are aggressive and drop down to, like, 50 hearts. Obtaining hearts is a test of patience, just whip a lot of candle sticks, and the choice to not have them restore, while magic does both automatically and in every save room, only makes magic the better option. On that note, I should FINALLY talk about this game’s magic system.
Part 3: Magical (Mis)Fortune
One of the more interesting elements of… well, this entire run of Castlevania games, is how frequently they shift the magic system, how it works, and what it can do. Symphony of the Night had magic, but unless you were a degenerate (complimentary) fighting game player, you probably did not use it beyond transformation. Circle of the Moon had the conceptually brilliant DDS system, which I praised for its versatility, and Harmony of Dissonance has something… different.
The DDS system has been entirely discarded, and the game tries to replace it with a vaguely similar yet not nearly as cool magic combination system. Throughout the game, the player will find five spell books. Four elemental, one special, that can be used in conjunction with their sub-weapon to cast various spells in exchange for MP. There are 31 spell fusions to try out, and the system has more than enough variety to warrant experimentation, but it sadly runs into the sub-weapon problem.
With no way to easily switch sub-weapons, with spawns being dictated by the environment, players have a great incentive to just stick to one sub-weapon that works for them. Cross, axes, holy water— whatever. Unless they are placed in an ideal spot, or littered around like refuse, players are going to be conservative, especially when these sub-weapons are the keys to accessing magic spells. And trust me, you want access to magic spells, as magic is powerful. In fact, magic is probably too powerful.
While not all book and sub-weapon combinations are ideal, they generally deal a lot of damage. Some are streams of damage that persist for a few seconds, some are AOE effects that attack everything on screen, some target one opponent and deal massive damage, and others hit everything for a little damage. Spells are safer and more effective than trying to whip enemies, and they’re stronger than using most sub-weapons individually. This means that if you have MP, you should be using it on enemies, and are effectively handicapping yourself if you choose to not use it on enemies in a pesky spot or literally any boss.
Starting out, I mostly ran with the dagger and ice book to create a stream of rapidly moving homing missiles, with other ice spells having pretty good damage or range. However, I pretty much stopped experimenting once I obtained the wind book about a third of the way through the game. The wind book pairs with the cross to create a circle of death and destruction so powerful that you truly do not need any other magic spells in the game. You stand next to a boss, bam, they take 15 hits of damage in six seconds. You can dash through environments and watch enemies burst before they can reach Juste. And… no, that is all you need. The system already discourages experimentation, and then it just gives players an answer so dominant I don’t know how it got through the tuning department.
I can definitely see some players preferring to simply not use magic because of its immense power (the game actually supports this as a challenge mode), but magic also has another problem. You cannot use sub-weapons while you have a spell book equipped. Magic is used via up plus attack, same as sub-weapons, and if you want to switch the two, you need to go into the pause menu to disable or re-enable a book. While you can easily change the book you have equipped by holding up and the shoulder buttons, there is no way to quickly unequip it outside of this menu, which is just insane to me. I know the GBA only has six buttons, but this is just a bizarre design decision, if not oversight, that lead me to never use sub-weapons outside of bosses.
Hmm… I was going to criticize the absence of any MP upgrade items, a feature introduced to the series in COTM, as Juste’s MP starts at 100, yet skirts past 200 by the end of the game, while everything else increases dramatically. However, magic in this game is SO GOOD that maybe it’s for the best that it skipped the series until its return in Portrait of Ruin.
Part 4: Audiovisual Alternative
Following criticisms of the darker, gothic, and debatably murkier visuals of Circle of the Moon, Harmony of Dissonance was given a considerably different visual identity. The title features lighter and softer colors, rarely using pure black in its environments, and tries to give its world a more defined color identity.
Sometimes it can look wildly impressive, with a big highlight being the psychedelic backdrops of the early game cavern areas, the glowing gemstone catacombs, the blue flashing lights in the waterway, or the rapidly moving Mode-7-like 3D clouds of the tower. However, the game suffers from an overabundance of grays in its color palate, in part due to the decision to make much of the dark world look, well, gray.
I still think the game looks good, but the color palate lacks contrast in a way that’s unlike many other GBA titles. I can tell they were trying to make the game bright enough to be played on a virgin GBA, but since this was Castlevania, they also did not want to use many highly saturated colors. In balancing these goals, while making two versions of every environment, I think they stretched themselves too thin.
This decision actually led to the creation of numerous fan hacks of the game that aim to change how the title looks, often making it darker. At a glance, I don’t think any of these alterations are overall improvements. Some of them just look ugly to me. However they do highlight a shortcoming with HOD’s color definition, and one that I don’t think can be fixed without compromising the game’s visual identity. For example, Juste has a blue outline. It’s a bit weird, a bit distracting, but it helps him pop against any environment and makes up his identity as a playable character. Removing it risks just removing a part of him.
Also, because I have to put this somewhere, the decision to use highly saturated green and cyan for the map screen in this game was a bad one. Neither of these colors mesh well with the white outlines of the rooms— especially against a black background— and the green overpowers the yellow warp rooms. You are constantly looking at the map if you are playing the game with a completionist mindset, and this is not at all pleasant on the eyes.
Next, we have the music and… yeah, this is just a technical downgrade.
The GBA did not have a dedicated sound chip. While many games were somehow able to approximate Sony’s excellent S-SMP audio of the Super Famicom, other composers struggled to make the most of it, delivering something that sounds less like GBA music and more like chiptune music. This can work for a bubbly affair, but it is not necessarily the best pair with a series like Castlevania. The melodies and compositions are all there, the music sounds good at its base level, but it sounds good in spite of its technical limits. I don’t actually mind it while playing, as it does pair very well with the sound effects, but listening to it on its own… the crustiness is real.
It’s honestly kind of amazing how much more definition and clarity the same composer, Soshiro Hokkai, managed to achieve with the sequel, Aria of Sorrow. And while I would not call the Harmony of Dissonance music bad, it’s a technical pivot that was not received well at the time and one that I’m not too crazy about either. It does the job, I like it, though it does not really wow me.
Part 5: Maxim Mode
Because I had such a good time with Harmony of Dissonance, I decided to go for a second playthrough in Maxim Mode, an alternate mode where you play through the entire game as Maxim, à la the Richter mode pioneered with Symphony of the Night. As a mode, it’s strangely sparse but still pretty fun. Unlike his adept friend, Maxim’s move set is very simple. He has one weapon, his sword, one sub-weapon, a sword boomerang sub-weapon, his movement speed is jacked up to the point it is almost a liability, and he has a triple jump. There are no levels, items, or upgrades— pressing Start just freezes the game, like an old NES game— and there is not a single line of dialogue or instructive text in the entire game.
You are just expected to figure out that you’re supposed to travel through the castle, kill all the bosses, go to Castle B, and then beat the second form of Dracula. I guess the first two phases would be too hard? Aside from three or four barriers, there is nothing preventing you from going through the castle in whatever direction you choose, and warp points are accessible enough that you have a shockingly high degree of freedom.
Going through this map again, with a character who feels like a darn cheat, really did a lot to endear these map designs to me. The winding pathways, hallways of monsters that function as mini challenges, careful placement of save and warp rooms, and sheer visual variety of each new area— All of these things and more really sunk in after going through the game at this accelerated pace. My 200% playthrough as Juste was full of the inefficiencies one would expect on a first playthrough, and it took me 7.5 hours. I played Maxim Mode like a suboptimized dumbass and I managed to beat it with 197% map completion in just under three hours, a pretty perfect length for a breezy replay, I’d say.
Maxim Mode has the presentation of an afterthought or easter egg, but I think it is an incredibly smart way to recontextualize this game as an action title. They previously tried this with Richter Mode in Symphony of the Night, but I think it works far better here, as you can explore the entire castle (almost) fully and don’t feel like you’re only getting half the game. Though, it does a few things that are just a trifle bit weird.
The damage tuning of the mode can be a bit questionable. Maxim’s attacks do 79 damage to all enemies, because I guess 80 was too much and 75 was too little. Every damage source, except for spikes, deal at least 30 damage to Maxim, which is a bit much for a game where the 30-ish HP upgrades come in increments of 5 and the starting HP is… 305? 310? Something around that range.
Maxim is able to collect money from enemies and candles, yet there are no shops and absolutely zero purpose in collecting money. So why didn’t the game just spawn hearts instead? It already replaced most fixed equipment locations with a single heart (not even a BIG heart) so clearly they had the knowhow to do this.
Not unlike Alucard, Maxim has three magic abilities triggered by using complex button inputs that you need to figure out by accident or external resources. One is a screen damaging strike, another restores health in exchange for hearts, while the other is a super jump that is… just the space jump and screw attack from Metroid. It lets you crawl up higher, damage enemies, and pivot in new directions midair, only limited by the magic meter. …Now that’s what I call a Metroidvania!
Conclusion: Harmony of Delight
My first thought when I finished Harmony of Dissonance was “I wish I played this game as a kid.” Because so much of what I love about the series, about this genre, is present in this game.
I love how the characters feel, from their dash to their jump to their attacks. I think the world is tightly designed and only enhanced by how many times you run through it. I think the game is mostly well-balanced around a loosely leisurely playstyle without many major friction points that have put me off from replaying certain games of this mold. And when it isn’t balanced, it’s easy. And even after going through it twice for this review, I would still be down to go through it again.
It does have some scuff and a few questionable choices, which I have highlighted in my signature level of detail, but I think this game is unfairly looked down upon as the weakest GBA entry in the series. What it lacks with new ideas, it makes up for in being a direct and straightforward experience that knows what it wants to be and delivers on that.