#castlevania hod

[muffywaifu]

October started! And that means Vaniatober too, couldn't wait honestly! ;w;

Wanted to do something simple for day 1, went with the prompt of candle and room decorating came to mind!

So here's a lil Juste, hope I will manage to do all prompts again

[minzart]

Juste... Juste sweety we gotta have a talk.

He's gonna get out of that castle ripped with how many pieces of furniture he gets to carry until I go back to that room

[heta-magisch]

pale lydie

[magneticros]

This game is so beautiful

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (2002)

[makusuto]

theres no widely known and accepted ship name for juste and maxim so i volunteer makusuto

its a combination of the romaji of their japanese names Makushīmu Kishin and Jusuto Berumondo

= makusuto

[luciscet]

Tried out Harmony of Despair and Soma is surprisingly my favorite to play as.

[minzart]

Death to Juste in their second encounter be like:

"Are you telling me that my lord's remains were gathered?! Now this makes sense listen. Belmont shut up. Listen . This castle is actualy TWO CASTLES-"

[reser-catloons]

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (Review)

A good metroidvania and a very nice follow up to the somewhat messy Circle of the Moon, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance has really interesting map exploration, a fun narrative gimmick, and an exceptionally interesting magic system.

The game starts like any other Castlevania title from that era, we explore the castle for a little bit and eventually find the first teleporter room. Juste comments that the room looks the same "but different" after traveling through the teleporter, and it's a small clue, but enough of a hint combined with the opening graphic and the title of the game that this entry is going to be using some kind of inverted castle mechanic just like Symphony of the Night. I sighed. The inverted castle was by far my least favorite aspect of SotN, and I wasn't looking forward to that kind of thing making a return, but it's completely different here. For starters, the castle isn't sickeningly upside down; the layout is identical, but its contents are different in every room (except for save room and teleporters). This implementation led to an interesting exploration rhythm where the player needs to constantly think about which side of the castle they need to interact with to progress, and the abundance of teleport rooms made this gameplay loop fun and fulfilling.

The magic system in this game is a pretty big and sharp double edged sword. On one hand, there's a ton of really interesting effects that you can discover that can drastically alter the way that you play game and deal with normal enemies on a room to room basis. However, on the other hand, the sacred fist sub-weapon combined with the wind spellbook seemed to trivialize most boss fights in my playthrough. I guess this isn't inherently "bad", but I really mean 'trivialize' when I say that; the sheer range and power of that spell led to a situation where I basically never bothered to attempt to learn any bosses patterns, and almost all bosses were beaten on the first try after I came across this combination. Nonetheless, it's a really cool system, and a huge upgrade to the DSS system that we had in the previous game.

I want to also take a moment to talk about how good the whip feels in this game. It's no super castlevania 4, but the whip responsiveness and hit registration just feels amazing in this game. Once you really get a good feel for how long it takes before the hitbox is active and where exactly the bound of the hitbox are, using the whip to starts to feel really good. Then again, you could just keep using the sacred fist wind spell.

Overall, this is really solid title, and I think it's a bit overlooked. It's not as good as aria of sorrow, and there's some early game clumsiness that makes exploration feel obtuse until you really start to get into the groove of things, but once you let yourself really sink it, all of its systems to start to shine.

Final Score: (8/10)