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Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance Developer: Konami Based on: Trying your damnedest to squeeze a cutting-edge PS1 game onto GBA while an orchestra runs its collective nails down a chalkboard. |
Games | Game Boy Advance | Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance
Article by Parish
A few decades before Dracula made his scheduled reappearance (and unexpected second reappearance) to fight Richter Belmont? and Alucard?, a fellow named Juste Belmont took his own pleasant afternoon jaunt through the vampire's castle. Did he set forth to fight Dracula? Perhaps, although Konami decided to be coy about it and has led gamers to believe that, perhaps, this Castlevania game may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with the prince of the night. Possibly.
No, the villain here is Count X, who sponsored a vampire-building tournament to determine who could build the best undead monstrosity. Suddenly, Count X stole the top eight designs and used them to take over the world by placing each vampire in its own platform-filled theme world! OK, this is a lie, but it's probably safe to say that after more than a dozen of these games, every gamer on earth recognizes that the resemblence between Castlevania's Dracula and Megaman's Dr. Wily runs a little more deeply than the white hair and moustache.
But that's irrelevant, because who plays Castlevania specifically for the sake of killing Dracula? It's a sure bet that hardly anyone out there sits down with a new Castlevania game and thinks, "Dracula, you rat bastard, I'll get you this time." You play for the experience of the overall game, what snooty art types such as myself call the "gestalt." (Well, Germans probably call it that too, it being a German word and all.) Sometimes this so-called gestalt is oriented toward creating a challenging game, as in the emotionally-damaging original; sometimes it's simply to give you an interesting world to explore and lots of beautifully-drawn (albeit rotting) creatures to slay.
Harmony of Dissonance falls very clearly into the latter category, like Symphony of the Night. In fact, those five words - "like Symphony of the Night" - could be used as the sum total of this review, if I were less inclined toward verbosity. So you can stop reading now if that's all you want to know; everything hereafter is just me flapping my lips needlessly.
For all intents and purposes, this is a handheld version of Symphony of the Night. Not an exact copy of the PlayStation game, but one which consists largely of SotN-like elements duplicated or imitated with the confines of the Game Boy Advance. Yeah, you thought Circle of the Moon? was an impressive handheld take on the concept, but that's because you had no idea Harmony of Dissonance would ever exist.
Juste Belmont, the lively protagonist of the game, is a Belmont strangely lacking in physical defects. He has no chest pains as with Simon, he lacks the idiotic voice of Richter, and his game wasn't cancelled as with Sonia. He even walks at a brisk pace, in much the same way that Nathan Graves (an honorary Belmont by virtue of his seemingly crippled foot speed) didn't. His biggest physical inconvenience appears to be a bright blue glow around his body - which helps his sprite show up more clearly on the GBA's dim screen, but probably is a major nuisance when tries to get to sleep in the dark of night.
As a matter of fact, everything is a lot easier to see here than it was in Circle of the Moon. The game retains an appropriately gruesome, macabre atmosphere, but you can actually see what you're trying to kill without standing in direct sunlight. Sprites are bigger and backgrounds more... back-ground-ish. The animation is a lot more fluid than in CotM, and Juste not only has Alucard-like shadows trailing his actions but also walks with more than three frames of motion. As a matter of fact, he looks like Alucard (if Alucard were to don a colonial British soldier's redcoat and a pair of Air Jordans) -- a fact which would be easily pinned on a lack of creativity by illustrator Ayami Kojima if not for the fact that everything about this game is, yes, like Symphony of the Night. That comparison includes the game's flow, gimmicks, the general plot and character relationship structure, and also the addictive gameplay quality.
There are some differences, though. The graphics have all been redrawn - for some monsters, it's the first time since the original Dracula X - and rescaled to create a slightly beefier-feeling game. Juste handles differently than any previous Castlevania character, combining control and skill attributes of just about every protagonist to date (Richter's slide, Simon's droopy whip, Alucard's dashes). His special skill is to mix magic spells with his sub-weapons, creating up to five alternate attacks with each special weapon that's found around the castle. (Although once you get the Wind/Cross combo, that's all she wrote.)
It would appear that Juste is able to use magic as the result of his being the fruit of a horizontal bop between Trevor Belmont? and Sypha Belnades, although that doesn't explain why the other Trevor-descended Belmonts (i.e., all of them) couldn't use magic as well. But hey, it's a video game. If you're still looking for logic in this particular medium, you're probably a newcomer. Overall, there's a pleasant balance of the familiar and the unique in HoD; and if at times the gameplay seems a bit much like that of a certain noctural symphony, it's OK. I challenge you to name a better game to borrow from.
Plus, HoD demonstrates a gooshy sort of affection for the history of the Castlevania series in the form of homages and cameos, just - you guessed it - like Symphony of the Night. Familiar bosses from previous games return (both alive and dead); Juste collects tokens left by his ancestors (even those who starred in the dreadful Game Boy titles); and of course you'll recognize a bevy of foes, including a few critters (and weeping statues) brought over from the recently-reissued X86000 game. My personal favorite homage is the whip-wielding skeleton named Shimon - which is the Japanese name for Belmont clan hero Simon, but written with the kanji characters for "death gate." (Or something like that. I know just enough Japanese to be amused by the few things I think I understand. Look, just leave me to live in my own little world. I'm happy here.)
One translation I know is correct is that the title was "Concerto of Midnight Sun" in Japan. Because it says so in plain English on the title screen, you see. But the U.S. version has one again been given a new title - in this case, that "Harmony of Dissonance" name I've been mentioning over and over. You know, 'cause so many kids these days are all about dissonance. The new title actually does make sense once you hear the music, though - sound is the one area in which HoD does not mimic Symphony of the Night. The music isn't too badly composed, but holy crabs does it sound wretched...like someone crawled into my GBA and replaced the music processor with an NES sound chip. The GBA is pretty anemic to begin with, sound-wise, compared to the SNES and its famous Sony chip (every time a poorly-sampled bell rings on GBA, a Sony executive gets his wings), but at least there was a little effort to put forth some good tunes in Circle of the Moon. Not so here. It's written to be all harmonic and stuff, but the tinny little bleeps sound dissonant indeed. This was the tradeoff for the amazing PS1-quality visuals, and honestly was worth the compromise. If you ever see a handheld game with more graphical goodness than this, you're probably hallucinating.
Otherwise, though, it's all SotN-like. Down to the stark lack of difficulty, in fact - you'll be hard-pressed to die here, and even more challenged to take more than ten hours to complete the game. Happily, HoD offers far more replay incentives than its predecessor. It lacks most of the odd variants of CotM but offers more useful modified gameplay models (including one with no magic, which can be a trick against the supposedly "too easy" bosses). It also features multiple endings and, best of all, no schmalty Kenny G song over the credits. So in other words, it's perfectly decent from start to finish.