Spoiler Notice: This one is going to be technically spoilers off. I say technically just because there’s not a whole lot to really spoil here but you’ve been given fair warning.
One day Juste Belmont, descendant of Simon Belmont, finds his old friend, Maxim, returned from a training expedition. Maxim, wounded and suffering from memory loss, tells Juste that another friend of theirs, Lydie, has been kidnapped. Racing off to her rescue the two men soon find themselves outside of Dracula’s castle…
If I had to sum up Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance I’d have to say it’s… solid. Dissonance was the second Castlevania on the Game Boy Advance. IGA (Koji Igarashi) went in wanting to create something similar to Symphony of the Night and by God that’s what we got along with a smattering of Simon’s Curse.
HoD is pretty much your bog standard Metroidvania. Travel through the castle defeating enemies and finding new abilities so you can go deeper into the castle and fight more enemies and find more abilities. It’s an age old formula and Dissonance does it well enough.
Being a Belmont Juste is armed with that old iconic family heirloom, the Vampire Killer whip. Despite being influenced by SotN Juste never changes his weapon though he can find various tips for the end of the whip which can add elemental damage or in one case allows you to break through certain types of stone pillars. For the most part I ended up sticking with the tip that just flat increased offense. Elemental damage is nice but for the most part it was just too situational. Annoyingly it was necessary to switch over to the Crushing Stone a few times in order to progress as its charge was the only thing capable of breaking aforementioned stone pillars. (Annoying because unlike all the other tips the Crushing Stone doesn’t increase offense.) While changing the tips around in the menu is pretty quick it just kinda sucks the charge didn’t get added to a better tip later in the game.
The old series standard of subweapons also returns though they get quickly outclassed in their base form thanks to a new addition in this game, magic books. Magic books synergize with subweapons, creating different effects depending on what combination you’re using. For example combining the Cross and the Wind Book (Easily found after an early boss fight) gives you an encircling shield that will damage practically everything you run into. This shield absolutely carried me through most of the game because its damage rate is practically broken. Even most bosses went down pretty quickly with this thing. It’s supposed to be balanced by needing MP but since MP is constantly regenerating (Albeit at a slow rate) and Save Points being fairly accessible (More so if you’re willing to abuse the game’s Suspend Save which will take you back to the last Save Point you used) this is rarely an issue.
As far as the story goes it’s serviceable. You’ll find out a bit more about what happened to Maxim and why there’s two castles for you to traverse through. I said this was similar to SotN, right? Yeah, there’s a second castle for you to explore though you find out about it a lot sooner than you do in SotN. Still at the end of the day it’s nothing really to write home about.
The castles themselves also weigh in as being all right. A few of the old familiar set pieces are there. The entrance corridor, the clock tower and the ascent to Dracula’s chambers being a few. I will compliment the background work in quite a few places as being exceptional, especially for being on the GBA. Unfortunately I don’t really have anything to say about the music. Nothing really stuck out to me but I won’t say anything was explicitly bad.
For the most part I don’t really have many quibbles with Dissonance though there are a few oddities. One minor example being that you need to find items to see how much damage an enemy is taking and for their name to be displayed on screen. While you don’t need to go super out of your way to find these relics it’s just a baffling design decision that those are tied to items like that when I don’t believe any other game does that. (I could absolutely be misremembering though.) Another odd thing is that throughout the castles you can find random pieces of furniture that you can bring back to a particular room to decorate it. This has very little effect on anything at all. Just a minor difference in the Best Ending and an achievement on the Advance Collection if you get all the furniture.
Still at the end of the day Harmony of Dissonance is a decent game. There’s not a lot that really stuck out for me but it was a good time killer. If you get this as part of the Advance Collection you can’t go wrong with giving it a shot.
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