#32: Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance
Weirdly lo-fi and clunky, but compelling
This review was originally posted to Twitter on January 8, 2019
Initial release: 2002
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Developer: Konami
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was a landmark title, a great leap forward for the franchise in every way. The Game Boy Advance sequels generally feel like a step down, having to conform to inferior hardware — Harmony of Dissonance especially.
Castlevania’s first foray onto the GBA, Circle of the Moon, was a smashing success, but it was dogged by complaints of being too dark (the original “purple taco” version of the GBA, with its utter lack of backlight, was to blame for that) and repetitive environments. Harmony of Dissonance was a response to both of those issues. It succeeded at resolving one of them.
It’s important to remember that when this game was released, the original GBA hadn’t been supplanted by the much nicer, sleeker SP version yet. but even with that in mind, the graphics are quite washed out in places, giving the game an overall brighter feel than you’d expect from a Castlevania game. Additionally, the hero, Juste Belmont, has a bright outline around him, and certain enemies (namely, bats) do as well. This is probably to aid vision on the too-dark GBA, but it’s still ugly nonetheless. That being said, there are several graphical improvements that weren’t in Circle of the Moon, from sprite rotation to simple polygons (for example, swinging doors, much like in Symphony of the Night.) By 2002 standards, this is one of the most technically impressive games on the Game Boy Advance.
Unfortunately for the sake of the graphics bump, the sound had to take a hit. While the sound effects are decent, the music is played entirely on GBA’s legacy Game Boy sound channels. The heavily layered music, to lots of listeners, was markedly inferior, even dissonant (heh.) Part of this is because Konami cheaped out on using cartridges with more memory, which were more expensive. Concessions had to be made, and the dev team focused on graphics. (Personally, I think the music sounds fine, it’s got an old-school flavor to it that suits the game’s status as a loose sequel to Castlevania I and II.)
The game itself is… decent. The basic plot is that it’s been fifty years since the events of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, and Juste Belmont’s best friends Maxim and Lydie have disappeared. One day Maxim shows up with no memory of where he’s been, and leads Juste to the castle where he says Lydie was kidnapped to. What follows is a fairly basic storyline in which Maxim struggles with possession and Death tries to resurrect Dracula, all while Lydie just stands around and gets kidnapped a couple times. And Juste has to do all the work.
The castle itself is awfully short on visuals and areas, sadly. A big part of that is because of the game’s central premise, that there’s actually two identical castles, and you’ll be flipping back and forth between them. This is… one of my pet peeves in gameplay devices. It’s a wonder that I like Silent Hill so much, because otherwise I generally dislike “dark worlds” in video games. i find them to be a lazy way to pad out the game, and it takes away from environments the game could have had instead. (This is also the source of my irritation with Symphony of the Night’s inverted castle.
That being said, it’s not immediately obvious that such a thing is happening. when you first switch to the dark castle, you’re dropped in another part of it, and it’ll be a while before you start to see areas you were in before, subtly altered. This is a clever way of concealing things during the early game. Unfortunately, as the game progresses, in order to complete the game you’ll have to explore both castles to their fullest. This would be fine if the environments weren’t so dull, especially in the dark castle. It often feels like the dark castle is a desaturated palette swap of the light castle, just with some scarier visuals in the far backgrounds. It’s not all bad though, there’s some neat details here and there to drive home the fact that this is, in fact, the dark castle.
It’s probably just as well that the castle is fairly dull, though. There’s very little in the way of interesting environments or rooms; most of the game is long series of corridors and the occasional big room, as the gameplay focus is on enemies, who can be quite lethal. There’s little in the way of secrets as well. No wall chicken this time, and the items that open up more of the game to you are fairly few. The only real reason to explore is for an odd subquest involving collecting furniture to stock a room with. There’s not even a reward.
Okay, no, that’s not true — if you complete the room and get the best ending, Lydie leans against Juste in the final cutscene in a hint of a romantic connection. I guess chicks dig interior decoration, or something.
The somewhat detached and slow nature of the progression means that often times bosses are optional — and sometimes you’ll approach them from the other side of the room! On the other hand, the bosses are mostly quite good. Several alumni from Castlevania III are here, as is not one but two Legion bosses. In fact, Harmony of Dissonance is a bit of a love letter to the whole NES trilogy, even down to the plot involving a treasure hunt to track down Dracula’s relics… again.
Playing as Juste can be either satisfying or slippery. He’s very agile, more than even Alucard was in Symphony. The shoulder buttons can send him dodging in either direction. Repeatedly tapping them means you can traverse long stretches quickly, provided you don’t run into anything. Like all Belmonts, his weapon of choice is a whip, and true to the standard introduced in Super Castlevania IV, the whip is controllable after the initial swing. The subweapons are all here, too, and can be combined with spellbooks for cool effects that use magic points instead of hearts. You’ll of course level up steadily over the course of the game, though you’ll often hit spots where enemies can really fuck you up while you’re not doing as much damage as you’d like. You can also change the properties of your whip, such as elemental status.
All in all, Harmony of Dissonance isn’t a bad game despite its technical shortcomings, but it does feel a little underwhelming. It can be gotten through quite quickly, and the plot doesn’t really seem to matter much in the overall timeline. It’s still better than Castlevania II tho.
