Harmony of Dissonance

The Gameboy Advance saw three Castlevania adventures in as many years after its release: Circle of the Moon (2001), Harmony of Dissonance (2002), and Aria of Sorrow (2003). Aria of Sorrow was my first experience with the remodeled portable Castlevania series, and still remains the finest (excluding last year's fantastic Dawn of Sorrow on the DS, of course). At the time of Harmony of Dissonance's release, the step up in visuals combined with a simpler brand of gameplay made it stand out as a worthy successor to the two-dimensional masterpiece Symphony of the Night. The RPG/Castleroid adventure style it adopted and familiar main character made for an easy comparison; whether it deserved the subsequent praise it received is debatable.

Dissonance sees you in the fancy vestments of Juste Belmont, the latest in the famed bloodline to take Vampire Killer in hand and explore Dracula's castle. The adventure begins when Juste and companion Maxim have stumbled upon a mysterious castle while looking for mutual friend Lydie. Maxim is wounded, and Juste must proceed alone. Such is the life of a vampire hunter.

It's easy to fault this game in hindsight, because Konami really accelerated the quality of the series with Aria of Sorrow. Though at the time its simple blend of action and upgraded powers was a throwback to the Castlevania games of old. Though this simplicity is the reason why Harmony of Dissonance is the weakest in the portable Castlevania series.

Most of the shortcomings in Dissonance are revealed through comparisons to Aria of Sorrow, and make it stand out as a transition between what the series used to be, and what the portable Castlevania series is today. The last portable adventure before Circle of the Moon – the much maligned Castlevania Legends for the Gameboy in 1998 – was definitely a recipient of the design traditions from the NES and SNES Castlevania adventures. There were no experience points, and no additional weapons – simply a series of power ups to be collected, and a life meter to maintain. The popularity of the gameplay model used by Symphony of the Night made Konami reconsider the direction of the series. Where Circle of the Moon may have confused matters with the innovative card-collecting DSS (Dual Set-Up System), Dissonance went back to being an action game first and foremost.

Special abilities in Dissonance are made up by the traditional sub-weapons (such as the Axe, Holy Water, etc.) and spellbooks that can be found around the castle. The spell book system in Dissonance is an add-on to the sub-weapons that can be picked up. Equipping a Fire spellbook, for example, will create brand new fire attacks that are different for whatever sub-weapon you're holding at the time. The limitation in this approach is that the spells available are directly related to how many spellbooks you happen to be carrying, since you can never hold more than one sub-weapon. Using these spells depletes your mana pool, not your heart pool. This results in a balancing act between hearts for using the sub-weapon, and mana for using the associated spellbook attack. By including two different systems for special attacks, the game ends up feeling very inconsistent. Was this a traditional Castlevania adventure, or was it pushing the series forward with a complex spell system?

There are a limited number of spellbooks to collect, and it doesn't approach the same amount of possibilities as Circle of the Moon's DSS based on randomly dropped cards or Aria of Sorrow's soul collecting system. I found myself listless in most parts of the game, because there was no real overarching goal pushing me forward beyond the token experience points to level up. Knowing that there was always another special ability to obtain, at least made wandering through Dracula's castle a little more rewarding in Aria of Sorrow.

As a melee weapon, Juste will only be using Vampire Killer. There are a series of whip upgrades to collect that add types of elemental damage or alternate attacks to the whip. It would be tough to expect the same variety as the weapons in Symphony of the Night or Aria of Sorrow because of the weapon limitation, but the whip power ups were disappointing in their lack of variety and uniqueness: elemental damage and some base damage modifiers are all you have to look forward to. Relics are mostly passive abilities, or enhance existing abilities like Double Jump and Slide to gain access to new parts of the castle.

The Boss battles don't pose much of a challenge, and simply act as roadblocks to new areas of the castle (sometimes literally). Beating a boss will only occasionally yield a Relic, and as such the sense of real reward wasn't there as it was in Aria of Sorrow. Overall I didn't find the game very difficult; it was the save points spread far apart that artificially extended the challenge.

I've said previously that this is the only portable series that has real, noticeable enhancements to the visuals through each new game. An addition to Dissonance worth mentioning is the ghostly blue trail that Juste leaves behind while jumping and moving. The original Gameboy Advance didn't have an integral lamp, and Circle of the Moon was a very er…brown game. To alleviate this, the developers enshrouded the hero character of Dissonance in a blue aura, to make him more visible in low light conditions. Because I only ever played this game on a Gameboy Advance SP, I thought the blue aura was some kind of power-up. It's distracting for the first 3 minutes of playing the game.

Nevertheless, the environments lack variety in colour, and appear to be constructed of overly repetitive tilesets. There are also many rooms that don't serve any purpose, or are wide open with only a few monsters wandering inside. To its credit, exploration is stressed in Dissonance, as it was a lot less linear in the way the castle unfolded. About a third of the way into the game, you will find a portal that seemingly only transports you to another part of the castle. But this is a mirror image of the castle you were in - with a number of subtle differences that open up more avenues of exploration, while increasing confusion. I've never used the automap so much in playing either Metroid or Castlevania. Incidentally, the music gets irritatingly loopy when you're lost.

Probably the strangest additions to the game are "collectibles": pieces of furniture scattered around that can be gathered to decorate a room on one of the lower levels of the Castle. I couldn't figure out the purpose of this exercise; I'd almost consider it a mini-game for the completist. Actually, I think it makes a perfect metaphor for the entire game: wandering Dracula's castle searching for items of no consequence in an attempt to fill the voids of wasted potential in this adventure.

I see Harmony of Dissonance as more of a turning point for the series than a fully realized Castlevania game. It was clear where Konami wanted the portable series to go, but they had a hard time leaving the traditions established by the previous eight years of similar games. Additionally, Dissonance provides an excellent foil for Aria of Sorrow, entrenching it as one of the best games to be released for the Gameboy Advance. Though it also serves as a reminder of the towering achievements of Symphony of the Night in the Castlevania lineage; it just took Konami a few years to reach a new equilibrium in design.