Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance is a platform adventure game for the Game Boy Advance an published by Konami. Overall it's just an okay game; worth playing, but nothing new or exciting.

Review

Good

• The game yields a lot of play time, and creating a light and dark side of the castle was a clever way to add difficulty and length, and also introduce some nice puzzles.
• Some of the backgrounds had amazing graphics.
• Some of the puzzles were challenging and took several attempts, but none seemed unfair.
• I liked how the secondary weapons could be affected by the various spell books to create more special abilities.
• Some of the monsters were quite clever, like the level 3 skeleton dragon that curled around the columns.

Bad

• The story is pretty garbage and none of the characters are interesting.
• A lot of the graphics are pretty bad, especially the character sprites.
• The fact that this came out after Castlevania: Circle of the Moon which is better in every way, should have been embarrassing to Konami.
• Most of the monsters were just repeats of earlier Castlevanias with very little originality.
• There are surprisingly few secrets.
• The game has a lot of backtracking.
• Using Maxim's ring to unlock one of the castle's many locked doors took forever to find!
• Why does Juste have an ethereal after-image from the beginning? It doesn't feel earned, and it's visually distracting.
• The same weak enemies remain for most of the game making backtracking rather pointless.
• I wish the developers had come up with a better way to handle the secondary weapon. I kept accidentally picking up a weapon I didn't want.
• The cross is vastly superior to the other weapons which is fine when you get it, but then it makes all the others obsolete.
• There aren't any decent hints for getting the good ending.

Ugly

• Nothing really.

Links

• mobygames.com/game/castlevania-harmony-of-dissonance - Moby Games.