by [name redacted]
Harmony of Dissonance is director Koji Igarashi’s attempt to rescue the Castlevania series by wresting control back from the supervision of Konami’s Kobe studios. Whereas KCEK’s Circle of the Moon was set pretty much outside established continuity, this new game is Castlevania in function as well as in form. Though maybe no better or worse a videogame its own right, Harmony is in nearly every respect a vastly superior Castlevania.
Oy. Anyway, I finally — after far too long — got a copy of ChuChu Rocket! Advance. I played around with it a bit back around the system’s launch last year, so I knew what to expect. And yeah, it’s ChuChu Rocket!. It’s… a little creepy, and generally gives me an oddly wistful sensation, to notice how precisely the game captures its original Dreamcast flavour. I mean, this game still feels like a Dreamcast game. It’s got the same atmosphrere to it that I’ve always associated with the system. Heck, for some reason Sonicteam even tried to emulate the original game’s web page content in the GBA version. If the GBA had only four face buttons rather than the mere two, there’d be almost nothing wrong with this version.
Odd that the GBA suffers from the same problem for which the Dreamcast was always criticized: too few buttons.
As much as I’m glad to finally have a copy around (especially for under ten dollars, as it was), I feel almost a little uncomfortable with the game. It’s hard to place the sensation exactly, and it’s certainly not the game’s fault. Maybe a bit of it is a lingering sadness over the Dreamcast situation which normally manages to stay more or less repressed. But there are some other factors in there as well. Something to do with Sega content on a non-Sega machine? Associations which I’m not willing to bring completely into consciousness? I don’t know.
Wow. Only thing is… Harmony of Dissonance is damned short. It was a fortuitous decision, in this light, for Igarashi to have jammed so many secrets into the game. I accidentally ended up finishing the game, getting what I think must be a luke-bad ending, in less than ten hours, with nearly 200% map completion, all but two items for Juste’s room (one of which I’ve since found), somehow without two of the magic books (again, one of which I’ve since got — it’s the one I put off getting for a while, since it was kind of stressful to race the marble (you’ll… see what I mean)), and without two of the relics (one of which I believe must be Dracula’s eye).
Circle of the Moon, to mention, I’m probably well over fifty hours into — and I’m still missing the Black Dog card. (It’s in the battle arena.) I beat the game it at around thirty hours or so (though I took my tubular time, as I tend to), but since then I’ve still been wandering around, collecting things, and generally powering Nathan up far more than necessary. In comparison to this nigh-pointless time vacuum, HoD is amazingly self-contained.
There are only two isolated map squares which I can’t seem to access, one in each of the two castles. One of them’s behind a big lump of rock (which isn’t there in the other castle), and the other one is in the marble-racing room. It’s just that there doesn’t appear to be any obvious entrance in the A castle.
I’m guessing if I’ve got all of Dracula’s parts and have the maps completely filled-in I’ll get a better ending than the one I received — not that it was really too bad, mind. And during the ending credits I was treated to one of the two high-res bits of music in the game. Might as well not spoil which one, but it was what I thought one of the better themes anyway. If audio was working properly on Edgar here, I’d probably have dubbed the tune off a while ago for referencing in my post the other day.
I’ve toyed around a bit with Maxim, and it seems like his game has been completely reformulated from Juste’s. While playing through the first time I noticed that HoD had a very classic, almost action-oriented layout to its stage design. Although there was a lot of wandering, whenever I needed to go somewhere it tended to be along a pretty straight route and usually through some new territory. What happens in Maxim’s game is that nearly all of the adventure elements have been removed. You can save, but that’s about it. Otherwise, it’s more or less become a classic Castlevania game. What’ve been mixed up are the paths available to you and the order in which you play through the castle. So far (though I’ve barely played into Maxim’s game at all) it looks like you’re constrained to a somewhat linear path.
Also, Maxim plays like a ninja. That’s about the best description I can give. He’s got Juste’s dashes, but on top of that his running, jumping, and attacking speeds are all about fifty percent greater. He’s got a triple-jump, a slide kick, and a normal ducking kick from the outset, and his normal attack is a quick sword swipe. He only has one special weapon, which is a strange and elaborate cross-like contraption. Maxim is just a speedy, strong character. His game ends up playing something like a cross between Strider and Ninja Gaiden (though without the wall-crawling). Considering that Ninja Gaiden and classic Castlevania play almost exactly the same, this seems appropriate.
The boss mode is actually fairly interesting, and the widely-reported secret contained therein, really is firing up my jones for a GBA compilation or remake of the original NES trilogy. (I mean, it’s perfect down to the sound effects. Even the irreplacable “whoop!” sample.)
Muh. So. There that is. I guess it’s better to have a condensed hunk of gaming goodness than a sprawling fifty-hour affair stuffed with needless filler and busywork. (God, why are so many games full of tedious chores these days, just in order to increase playtime? Who started this trend? Wasting my time is not the key to my heart, people. Let me finish the fool game already, so I can move onto something else!) There was barely a moment in HoD which felt superfluous, with the exception of some nasty backtracking in the last third or so. Once the teleporters are all located this isn’t as much of a problem, but — oy. And y’know, people always make what seems to me to be way too big of a deal about backtracking in adventure games. So far as I’m concerned, it’s all part of the exploration aspect in a game like Metroid or Zelda.
But remember what I said about the castle’s layout in this game? There are two sides to everything. The first time through, it’s great and really focused-feeling. The problem is, whenever you want to go back to someplace, you usually have to go far out of your way to return. Much of the time I just put off some smaller tasks which I knew I could finish in another part of the castle because I didn’t want to put in the effort to slog all the way back there through ten minutes of rooms and corridors. The game’s pretty good at directing you back to each part of the castle in turn, though. So generally you don’t have to do a ton of backtracking if you’re patient enough to wait until you’re back in the neighborhood. But the thing is, there are a ton of shortcuts that are present from the beginning but which are locked until very late in the game. The “skull doors”, for instance, exist mostly to keep the player from being able to revisit earlier sections of the castle without putting a ton of effort into winding his way back through his own footsteps. I don’t see why this is in many cases, except perhaps to keep the player from being distracted from the tasks at hand. This is fine in retrospect, but at the time it was kind of frustrating.
And yet this kind of a limitation has its interesting effects. Indeed, it kept me from bothering to revisit the start of the game until about eight or nine hours in. And there’s something… well not exactly poignant, but at least interesting, about finding one’s self preparing for the end by going back to where one began. Everything just went full circle, in a sense.
And come to think of it, isn’t this kind of the point of the series?
Ken Burns’ Civil War series is showing on PBS this week, two episodes every night. I watched another chapter a few moments ago, but I just don’t have the patience to stick around for the second one. It’s interesting stuff, but this miniseries has perhaps the most soporific presentation I’ve ever seen. Must escape before I lapse into a coma. Sorry, Grant.
Onto other things.
Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance has a very nice tone to it. It’s… a little harder to immediately get into and enjoy than was Circle of the Moon. It’s not as instantly agreeable, and it feels kind of… cold. But now that I’ve played a little bit, it’s opened up a lot and it’s become clear how much more well-made this game is in general than KCEK’s last effort. The control is much tighter. The level design is more interesting. And the entire thing is much more Castlevania-ey than CotM ever managed to be. It’s got that same slightly… uneasy tone that most of the main chapters have had, and which I’ve not felt for quite a while. All of the edges of the screen are crammed full of minute and curious gothic detail.
The game also has a constant sense of forward motion that was lacking in CotM. It feels like I’m going somewhere when I’m playing — like there’s a goal — rather than like I’m just puttering around randomly in an adventure game world. CotM was fun, but that was about it. A fun, Metroid-style platformer with Castlevania trimmings. HoD feels like Castlevania. You know how that map popped up between levels in the first game? You know how in level three you could see the final tower in the background as a goal? It always felt like you were making progress. And that sensation is back.
What’s more, and what is interesting — something I’ve not felt for a very long time with this series is that… old movie sensation. The first few games in the series were spattered with spoke holes in all of the title screens and menus, as if you were playing through a silent horror movie. And the games had an aesthetic and an atmosphere to match. HoD seems to bring this general feeling back. It’s not just going through the motions, it’s doing its best to do things right. Igarashi seems to really understand the heart of the series, in a way that KCEK just can’t handle.
As for the music: you’ve heard how awful it’s supposed to be. This is both entirely true and false.
To be sure, compared to what KCEK achieved with CotM just a year ago, the sound quality is a obviously lacking. A few months ago I spent an hour, one night, simply lying in bed and listening to the Catacombs theme from Circle of the Moon in a pair of headphones. Much of the music in CotM was borrowed and remixed from other games (mostly Bloodlines and Dracula’s Curse), but the music quality was higher than anything I’d heard on a handheld system before. And indeed, it was some of the best Castlevania music I’d ever heard. What’s more, the original compositions were absolutely perfect and memorable additions to the growing roster of Castlevania anthems.
This comparison is, I think, the greatest factor which initially makes the music in Hod so very startling, and for a while even a little grating. Although it might be interesting on its own right, the music is not of the same almost unreasonably high standard set both by CotM and by Castlevania in general. This just doesn’t sound like what you inevitably going to expect. Beyond its mere quality, the composition is also a bit odd.
That said, it’s not as bad as people say, and it has its own odd personality. Try to picture Darkstalkers music played on an NES. Now mix in the occasional motive from Simon’s Quest, and top it off with a few tunes from the original Gameboy games. That’s the HoD score, in a nutshell. It sounds like NES music, basically. But like Castlevania music. Only… a more recent kind of Castlevania music, played on an NES. It’s atmospheric and sprawling. As opposed to NES Castlevania music, which is more melodic and clever. Got it?
The thing is, the music here manages to set its own sort of retro tone. If you’ve played the NES games and the original Gameboy trilogy, I think it’s a lot easier to appreciate what’s been done. Try to take the music as a low-fi experiment, rather than a result of ROM budgeting. On its own level, especially in contrast to the high-budget presentation of every other aspect of the game, the music has its own interesting tone going on. If anything, I think it helps just a bit in adding to the “grainy” emotional texture of the game that I was getting at before. If there’s anything that Castlevania needs in order to retain its unsettling ambiance, it’s a certain offputting creakyness — and the music in HoD seems to do a very good job in maintaining this sensation.
Controversial? Certainly. But I think the music succeeds in its own strange way. Perhaps I’m being too forgiving, but I dig.
All of the other sound effects are great, though (further adding to the perplexing aural quality of the game). Something that strikes me: there’s a strange, startled “nAnI?!” whenever Juste is poisoned or cursed. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be Juste’s own squeak — as it doesn’t sound like the same voice who does all of the item crash screaming and the hopping grunts and so forth — or if it’s intended to come out of the monsters which are whapping him. I suppose the latter wouldn’t make much sense, so I suppose it’s kind of amusing to see a Belmont (especially as arrogant a one as Juste) lose his cool when things don’t go as he plans.
The control, again, is so much better and tighter and more… full-seeming than in CotM. Don’t get me wrong; I loved how Nathan felt in that game. But the control was generally pretty loose, and while Nathan always did exactly what he was told to, he didn’t seem to have much… substance to him. The entire game had that weird sort of a sensation for me, so it’s not just the control. But there was no heft. What flexibility he had felt both kind of messy and strangely contrived. Why did he suddenly get certain abilities when he did, for instance? Why was being able to push crates a special power? What the heck is that “rocket jump” special move? Where does it come from? Whenever I learned a new move with him, it felt more like it had merely been arbitrarily unlocked for me so as to allow me to progress.
Juste, in contrast, starts off feeling much more… rigid than Nathan. His dash ability is indescribably helpful, and it’s neat that he’s able to swing his whip around as in Super Castlevania IV. But he’s less of a jumping bean, he doesn’t start with a slide move, he initially can’t automatically twirl his whip as Nathan could. He’s certainly animated a hell of a lot better than Nathan, and his sprite is larger and more visible — but he’s… well, he feels more like a Belmont than a random platforming character with a whip. Just as floaty ol’ Nathan was great for soaring aimlessly around the open structures in his game, Juste has a much more satisfying kind of focus to him. What he loses in out-and-out freedom he gains in precision and, frankly, respectability.
Nothing seems to be wasted on Juste, and nothing seems to be arbitrary. His starting abilities make sense, and (at least so far) every time I’ve gotten a new one it’s been a pretty logical (and balanced) addition. Plus, if you’re missing a particular move from nearly any other Castlevania game — it’s apparently in here somewhere. Now that I’ve got a slide move and can automatically spin my whip around as Nathan did (although I could manually approximate this effect before), I feel like I’ve earned the abilities and like they’re natural extensions to what I started off with. They’re not just there.
I also like how carefully Igarashi has been to make clear the time period in which the game takes place, and exactly who the characters are in relation to the universe we know so far — from the box to the instructions to the game itself, there’s no mystery at all. It’s stated right out that fifty years have passed since Simon’s Quest and that Juste is Simon Belmont’s grandson. It says what he’s doing, what the relation of this task is to the previous game (chronologically speaking), and how uncommonly gifted he is even for a Belmont. And in the (commendably well-made) instructions, it quickly mentions that his magical abilities come from the Fernandez (Belnades) family.
I’m only about two hours in, but — as you’ve likely gathered — my impression is good so far. The game feels — again — more like a true Castlevania game than any I’ve played in a while. And there are elements I’ve seen from a bunch of other Castlevanias, here. The refereces are particularly heavy to the first two Gameboy games, to the NES trilogy, to the Dracula X series (which makes sense, seeing as how HoD can sort of be considered the third game in that subseries), to Bloodlines, even to CotM and Super Castlevania IV. And heck, the N64 games are even referenced slightly (what with the Fernandez name).
I think a few more things probably could have been done with the game, but in general I’m impressed up to this point. And I’m more confident than ever that Igarashi is the guy who should be heading this series; no one else at Konami seems to really get it the way he does. And even if the game does have its flaws, it feels real. It’s not hard to tell how much effort went into the game, and how devoted the man is both to the legacy of the series and to its fans. This isn’t something you get a whole lot in any form of art or entertainment, seemingly least of all videogames and film. And it’s exactly what was missing from Circle of the Moon. He’s got my trust for the future.
A short note: Is Ayami Kojima (Igarashi’s chosen artist since Symphony of the Night) of any relation to Hideo? They both work at Konami, after all.
Hmm…
I keep typing these things off to random people as I sort them out in my head. It seems to make more sense, though, to dump them somewhere I can more easily dig for them later. So here this is.
Of course, Bionic Commando is a spin-off of Commando. We know this much.
It seems that the arcade version of Bionic Commando comes first. I saw it once in a LaVerdiers, years ago. I’m not sure if I ever got to play it, though. It’s super-deformed and action-oriented, but familiar. Apparently, Super Joe (from Commando) is the main character.
(As a note, Super Joe also is in a game I’d never seen before by the name of Speed Rumbler. He’s in a car this time, and someone kidnapped his family. It looks like Commando, only… with cars.)
The second game in the series is Bionic Commando for the NES. The main character is Ladd, and he’s out to defeat Hitler and save Super Joe. It’s an action-adventure sort of in the vein of Blaster Master or Metroid, with occasional overhead-view segments to hark back to the original Commando.
The Gameboy version of Bionic Commando (still the same title, yes) comes third. Super Joe has disappeared again while looking for a secret weapon known as “Albatross”. The main character is now Rad Spencer. It appears to play very similarly to the NES version.
Finally we get the Gameboy Color edition, Bionic Commando: Elite Forces. Super Joe’s gone yet again — only now he’s moved up to the title of Commander Joe. Maybe they figured a desk job would keep him from getting taken hostage all the time. No luck, though. Now there are two main characters — a nameless male and a female Bionic Commando, each of whom gets referred to throughout the game by whatever the player dubs them. The female one, with her purple pony-tail, seems to be the one given more focus. Also, the overhead-view throwbacks to the first Commando seem much more elaborate than before.
So:
[Commando]
[Speed Rumbler (?)]
…
Yes, I’m back from Otakon.
Circle of the Moon contains perhaps the best remix of “Vampire Killer” I’ve heard anywhere outside of the original Castlevania. I finally realized also why the music at large reminds me so much of Bloodlines: the tune heard the most throughout the game is taken directly from that game. That — would explain some things.
The new main theme to CotM, however — “Catacombs”, I believe, is the title — is a perfect and entirely worthy addition to the trusty archive of classic Castlevania anthems. It goes along very well alongside the likes of “Vampire Killer”, “Bloody Tears”, “Beginning”, and “Theme of Simon”.
It seems years since I’ve heard good chip music. New music, anyway. This is one respect in which games have really gotten worse over the years. Some days, I like to wish the medium had never switched to optical storage. It’s all just gone downhill from there…
I now have a copy of Castlevania: Circle of the Moon for my HELLO KITTY PINK Gameboy Advance. This is the first real, legity-type GBA game I’ve gotten, and it’s… fabulous. I mean, it doesn’t do anything new; it doesn’t even particularly try. But it’s extremely solid.
If anything, it reminds me a lot of Bloodlines. Bloodlines was pretty, and very well-made, but it didn’t really do anything particularly new; it was just a good game that followed the standard Castlevania formula more or less precisely. Circle of the Moon is exactly the same idea — only it’s based on the modern, elegant, explorative, Igarashi-influenced image of Castlevania rather than the “classic”, action-based version of the game. So, it’s a terrific game; one of the best in the series. A great showcase for the system. But it’s nothing intrinsically special; just enjoyable and well-made and entirely appropriate.
That’s the only bad thing I can say about it: All it is, is a terrific game. No more. It doesn’t even try; all the effort was in making the game solid, playable, and entertaining. Not that there’s really anything wrong with that. If only more games had such a fault. Harmony of Dissonance, however — that looks to be something more. So I’m looking forward to it.
I’m really getting to like my GBA a lot, now. I’ve been going over eBay, looking for copies of the remaining original Gameboy games which I had, and were stolen long ago. Most of them, aside from Metroid II, I’ve been able to track down at no more than around five dollars (plus shipping). A couple are so obscure and strange that I’ll probably not find them anytime soon. But now that I’ve a system on which to play them again, it’d be nice for my collection to be restored to as it used to be.
I now possess a transparent pink Gameboy Advance.
It’s a far step from the sleek black one with Kusanagi and Yagami clan symbols over which I’d been drooling for the past few months, but it’s a GBA nonetheless.
I have no games for it, but I’ve Oracle of Ages and a handful of original GB games which weren’t stolen years ago (including Gargoyle’s Quest!) — so I should be set for now. It’s interesting to note that the left and right triggers toggle — uh, sideways letterboxing, for older games. As with some widescreen TVs. Pressing the left trigger will cause the picture to be stretched to fill the entire GBA display. The right trigger will center it again.
But — if one likes 2D games (and anyone with a brane does), this looks like the best thing one can get at the moment short of a Neo-Geo. Also, given the amount of support Sega is putting behind the thing — well.
Yay! I have a living console again! Now that I do, watch Nintendo suddenly, miraculously, cease to exist. Just to annoy me.
Hey, maybe it’d do for me to get a PlayStation 2 after all, if this is the way the universe likes to work.
I finally touched a GBA the other day! The games available were F-Zero, for some reason (bleh), and ChuChu Rocket!. And only the former was out of its packaging, which frustrated me a bit. Who cares about a crappy racing game, with ugly Mode-7 pixels all over the place. I want to see what Sega is up to.
All the same, this is a terrific system. Everything about it is perfect or nearly so, from what I can determine so far; it’s solid, it feels nice in the hands (I’ve had two people complain to me about the triggers, but I just don’t think they’re holding it properly), it’s smoothly-designed and simple — the cart fits flush with the top of the system; the back is curved in an ergonomic way, while the front is completely flat — mostly a huge screen, with a couple of buttons around the edges. It seems perfectly molded to comfortably slip into one’s pocket — as opposed to the boxy shape of every other handheld out there. And it’s as “real”-feeling as the NGPC was, and its screen is every bit as good as well. The sound is nice. It’s more powerful than either the SNES or the Genesis. Sega is developing for it. Its boot-up screen is nice. I like the packaging. The cartridges are cute. I like the colors it comes in.
Wow, there are too many great consoles coming out. This thing reminds me a bit of the DC in a way. It’s very small; very compact and functional, and yet stylish and cute at the same time. And it feels like an “old” game system. Like it’s made with the classic sensibilities of the pre-Playstation era.
I think Nintendo is making a sort of a comeback. The N64 and GBC were both mostly lame ducks — uninspired, unimpressive, ugly, and poorly-executed. They had their standout titles of course, since they were made by Nintendo, but past the Virtual Boy they’re perhaps the least impressive things Nintendo made for a long time. Now both the GBA and the GCN are here or on their way — and both are very, very impressive. I think it’s a good thing that Sega seems to like Nintendo so much (though they appear to have a certain fondness for Microsoft as well); there’s so much insipid bland gunk out there — mostly due to Sony — that it’s about time the old timers, who know how gaming actually works, team up to knock the garbage back to where it belongs.
Speaking of the GBA — before leaving home the other day, I started flipping through a new issue of Newsweek. In its “cyberscope” section there was a page devoted to the launch of this system — and almost everything which was said in the article was wrong in some minor or major way, or misleading through a lack of proper supporting information. I was very annoyed. Not only do the mainstream media outlets refuse to give videogames equal billing with movies, books, and music, choosing instead to continue treating them like an occasional curiosity — despite games being the largest entertainment industry in the country at this point — but when they do report they do it with a level of unprofessionalism which leaves me trembling. What moron hired this guy to write these things?
That got me thinking. I’m a heck of a lot more competent than anyone I’ve ever seen in a mainstream outlet, in terms of this medium. I can write better than most people out there. I could probably fix this.
I’m going to do a bit of research, and try writing to a bunch of mainstream magazines and newspapers, describing to them the situation and proposing a way to remedy it (read: hire me). I could do this. I never have considered my writing worth anything at all, but this is merely because it comes as naturally to me as blinking. It takes no particular effort, so it can’t be valuable. But if it is this simple for me, why not get paid for blinking — and get free review software while I’m at it?
I think I know what I’m gonna be doing in the near future at least. And hey — I’m good. If I figure out how to present myself properly, they’d have to be insane not to hire me. Since there’s such a dearth of valuable criticism and coverage in the mainstream eye, I could possibly even carve a bit of a name for myself — but I’m getting ahead of things here.