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Review – Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (GBA)

Konami – GBA- 1 Player

Itching for more Game Boy Castlevania action after completing Circle of the Moon, I set out to find a copy of the Castlevania Double Pack.  This is a repackaging of Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow onto one Game Boy Advance cart.  Both games are complete and there isn’t any extras so I’lm just going to review them as separate games.

Since Harmony comes first in release order, I’ll start with it.  It is however the third game I played through.  I started it second but after about five minutes of play I couldn’t stand it and decided to give Aria of Sorrow a go.  I can’t really place why, but I just don’t care much for this game.  One major gripe is the controls.  Most Symphony style Castlevania games have a “Back dash” button.  This one has a “Dash Left” and “Dash Right” via the L and R buttons.  While this almost seems intuitive since it means always dashing in one direction, when you’re used to always dashing backwards with one button no matter which direction your sprite is facing, it becomes a problem.

That seems a bit confusing.  Ok, traditionally, if you’re facing “left” and press “back dash”, you slide backwards, to the right.  This is regardless of which button is assigned to back dash.  With the new system, if you’re facing left, and press the L button, you dash forward, press the R button and dash backwards, if you’re facing right, L makes you dash backwards, and R makes you dash forwards.  Anyway, it really screws with your head when you’re just trying to dash somewhere and you keep changing direction.

The next issue is the graphics.  They are just plain huge and ugly.  They tried to make them colorful and flashy but it just ends up being kind of a mess.  Also, many of the enemies have different looks than one might expect them to.  First rule of sequels, if you’re recycling enemies, make them resemble the same type of enemy from previous games.  You can update the look somewhat but a previously fat heavily armored “Armor” enemy shouldn’t suddenly be tall and lanky.

Also what’s up with Juste’s constant glow.  He’s also too huge for the screen.  Actually it’s possible he’s not any larger than our other protagonists but I just found he seems slightly too large, especially for the small GBA screen.

Anyway, this game uses a new magic system as well.  You gain magic books based on elemental properties as you progress.  These books combine with your traditional sub weapons (knife, axe etc) to create a more powerful “Item Crush” style attack.  The problem with this system is that you’re limited to one type of sub item at a time.  Finding the better items isn’t always easy and occasionally you can accidentally pick up another item and loose your useful one.  The result is that you’ll pretty much just end up using one or two of these abilities ever (generally the most useful are the rotating shield ones).

Also, your only weapon is the whip.  While this was also true in CotM, it would have been nice to see the return of Symphony’s multi weapon system.  Instead of new weapons, you equip your whip with various stones to give it additional powers.  Essentially it makes the whip a little stronger.

The primary saving grace for this game is the plot, which is actually pretty decent, even if it does come off as a rehash of Castlevania 2.  There is a bit of a twist fairly early in the game involving the castle itself that is pretty well done.  Also the plot points surrounding Maxim are rather intrigue, though really obvious once you realize what’s going on.

As far as new school Castlevania goes, I’m going to have to rank this one at the bottom of the barrel.  It’s fun for many of the reasons Symphony and Circle were fun, but at the same time it all around feels like a huge rip off from lots of previous Castlevania games.  While I wouldn’t go out of my way to find a copy of this game, if you can get the Double Pack with Aria then it’s well worth it.

Review – Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (GBA)

Konami – GBA – 1 Player

Castlevania is a game series I haven’t always cared much for. The early games were just plain too difficult for my tastes. If I was going to play a tough platform game I’d play something fun and fast like Blaster Master or Ninja Gaiden. After many recommendations I picked up a copy of Symphony of the Night. It languished for years, un-played, on my game shelf. I’d never been a big fan of the whole “horror/gothic” thing, why would I want to play a game full of it?

I then of course played Symphony and loved every minute of it. This sort of side scrolling action game just isn’t made anymore on these next-gen systems. It’s all about 3D! Sadly, Symphony left me wanting more. Armed with my trusty Game Boy Advance, I managed to find more with Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. 2D is all but dead on the home console but it’s still pushing it self out on the Portable system.

Fortunately, Konami realized the popularity of the new format used in Symphony and continued the new exploration and RPG style elements from SotN into its Game Boy series of Castlevania games. This installment takes us back to the whip thrashing heroes of the older games with out hero, Nathan Belmont, err… Nathan Graves. Nathan sets out with his companions Morris and Hugh Baldwin (No relation to the actor) to slay the newly resurrected Dracula. There’s pretty much only one staple for the Castlevania series, and that’s the fact that Dracula is always pulling the strings SOMEHOW and is pretty much always the final boss. If you didn’t finish by killing Dracula, you’re probably not done yet or you got a “bad ending”.

Gameplay is pretty comparable to Symphony. In this game you’re stuck with using the whip for the entire game however. To help out though you collect DSS (Duel Setup System) cards. These cards are themed around mythical animals and gods and are combined for varying themed effects. For example, combining a Flame based Salamander card with the whip enhancing Mercury card will give you a flaming whip. The Earth based Golum card with Mercury gives an longer earth based whip. At the same time combining either of these animal cards with say, the Jupiter based recovery card will cause Fire or Earth damage to heal you. Only two cards, one from each set, can be used at a time though so you’ll find yourself often switching and strategizing. The cards are obtained randomly from enemies and can be a bit of a challenge to collect.

Still, you’ll end up using the same half dozen combinations for most of the game. A lot of them are mostly useless, especially the projectiles and special whips. I found only the Earth whip to be of any true use since it has a longer reach. This lets you hit many enemies before they get too close and start attacking. Hit, not kill, mind you. Most of the enemies take about twice as many hits as should really be necessary to kill them. I find the hits tended to decrease by one for each level gained but near the end of the game the experience necessary to level becomes astronomically too high. I believe while I was “power leveling” I figured up having to pass through the entire Coliseum bonus areas (filled with the toughest monsters) something like 2-3 times before gaining a level. This is not a small task and the Coliseum enemies are tough and give more exp than normal enemies. Still, with a few DSS exploits the final boss was still relatively easy to defeat at my finishing level.

At least there is a fair variety of enemies to keep you entertained in your times of leveling need. Even basic color swaps (like the armors) have completely different attack patterns. The castle is also expansive and varied enough to keep things interesting the whole trip through. You’ll do some backtracking, but it’s backtracking that makes some level of sense.

In comparison to Symphony of the Night, which is a game that all three GBA Castlevania games try to emulate to varying degrees, I’d say it’s a decent follow-up. It’s not quite as polished overall but it has its own merits and methods. A game doesn’t have to be an exact copy of its great predecessor in order to be worthwhile.

Review – Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PS1)

Konami – Playstation – 1 Player

Castlevania games are hard. Or at least they used to be. They tend to be kind of random, long and have clunky controls. At least on the NES. I have never really cared much for Castlevania games. The whole “goth” and “vampires” thing never really appealed to me either. Still, Symphony of the Night I one of those games you hear people talk about a lot. When people start saying a game is one of the best they have ever played, it generally is worth giving a little attention to.

I had first purchased SotN on this notion. This was still several years after it’s release and it would sit in my collection for several years after I acquired it. I still couldn’t quite bring myself to get over the fact that it was still a Castlevania game. Eventually of course, I came up on a need for something to play, so I decided to work my way through this game.

I’ll have to say I was initially disappointed by the main character. I suppose I still am a bit. I have always associated Castlevania as being Simon Belmont. Or at the very least SOMEONE named Belmont. Instead I find that I get to play as some flakey gothy vampire wannabe named Alucard. What’s with Japan’s obsession with anorexic pretty boys sporting flowing white hair anyway? On top of that, you don’t even get to wield the classic whip weapon. Still, there was something intriguing about the gameplay and environment.

Also the music was intriguing. The soundtrack for this game is absolutely wonderful. It matches the visuals extremely well to create the perfect atmosphere for the game. It also helps to keep things entertaining, which is good because there is a lot of backtracking and random exploring involved in this game. The castle is quite large without being overwhelming. The designs and areas are varied more than enough to keep you from getting lost without having to look at the map all the time. Not to mention that once you reach the second half of the game you realize just How brilliant the level designs are. It’s not every game that allows you to traverse every area upside down as if it were designed to be played that way.

The action is quick as well. There are RPG elements of upgrading weapons and levels to help prevent you from easily traversing areas you’re not supposed to be, though generally there are lots of puzzles and required items that do this quite well. In that respect the game does come off as a bit of “Find item A to enter area B, now find Item B to enter area C” aspect to it. Still, many of those old power-ups remain useful for most of the game.

I guess I should interject some sort of opinion here, this being a review and all. This game is a blast to play. It is certainly deserving of all the praise it receives. After I finished the game the first time through, I felt compelled to replay it again, several times. Fortunately there are some reasons to replay. As Alucard you have the option of several different endings, depending on which items you have in your inventory at the time an how you go about defeating some bosses.

There is also the ability to play as Richter Belmont. Hey look, we get to be a Belmont after all! Complete with whip power. Richter’s gameplay is also considerably different than Alucard’s, it’s more reminiscent of the play style of more classic Castlevania games, essentially you simply charge through and kill everything until you get to the end. Not plot or leveling or power ups required. NOTE: in the Saturn version you also get to play as Maria, I’ve not played this version of the game.

Anyway, this classic game is spot on awesome and comes highly recommended.

Review – High School Dreams (PC)

April 15, 2010 | DR Studios

Back in my college days i played a fair number of Japanese “dating simulators”.  The style pushed by these games tends to be still image graphics with walls and walls of expositional text.  Occasionally you make a choice.  It’s sort of like a Choose your own adventure book.  High School Dreams is sort of an American take on the same basic concept.  This game has a fairly rough development history according to Wikipedia.  Originally developed by Eidos, it was dumped when SquareEnix bought out Eidos.  After being dumped, DR Studios went on to develop the title themselves before being released on the GreenMan Gaming download service.  Several sites such as IGN still list this game as canceled despite being released in early 2010.

Originally I had picked this up because I wanted to try out Greenman’s service and it was the cheapest thing on the site that wasn’t a DLC, being on sale for around a dollar.  After playing through I have to say I was rather pleased with the game itself.  You play as the “new girl” in town and must navigate through the ins and outs of the High School social network.  The game pushes itself as a dating simulator style game and there is a “main plot” of courting one of the 6 main male character in order to get a date for the Prom, though the prom occurs only a few weeks into the school year so it’s more of a Homecoming event than anything.

The game has much much more depth than simply trying to find a date for the prom.  It actually has so many concurrent social mechanisms running at once things become a bit overwhelming at times.  I will say that it is impossible to actually manage to “go out” with all of the guys at once time during one play through.  For starters, your clothing options all influence what different folks think of you, so you’ll never be able to impress everyone at once.  Even if you try rotating the wardrobe, there is the problem of needing to buy more clothes to fulfill every option.  There are several mini game jobs to play to earn cash but this will eat into the time you have to interact with everyone. 

There is also the basic underlying idea of interacting with the world eating up time.  As you talk to random NPCs you can learn different bits of gossip, then you can turn around and spread this gossip.  This is sometimes necessary to help keep yourself from gaining a poor reputation.  There are also numerous magnets hidden around to collect, though they do not serve any purpose as far as I could tell.  In order to help better your friendship with your best female companion you’ll have to have the occasional sleep over which can be made more beneficial by updating your room’s furniture. 

In short, being a new girl in High School is a lot more work than I’d ever expected.

The game is not without it’s short comings.  I have my suspicions that some of these shortcoming were spawned from the game’s rocky development cycle.  Basically, they lost their publisher and budget and had to cut some of the ambition out of this title.  For example, there are a few additional male characters that seem like they were originally intended to be options during the dating sequences.  The game itself is also somewhat buggy.  The path finding mechanisms are iffy sometimes for the NPCs.  The game itself takes an eternity to load, at least it did on my wimpy laptop, though once the initial load is over it runs pretty briskly.  By “eternity” I’m talking at LEAST ten minutes once you leave the title screen, probably more like fifteen.

The game also lacks a lot of overlap between the characters that really could flesh out the world.  For example, you can end up “dating” 3 or 4 guys at once and no one seems to notice or care.  You never seem to get a “what the hell I thought we were friends”.  Also, despite that I ended up very high on the scale with the nerdy photographer guy, yet had only done one favor for the class clown guy, there were suddenly rumors about how pathetic I was for going out with the class clown.  Really?  I barely interacted with the guy.

This brings up another point.  Every one of your dating options is a blatant stereotype, though fortunately, you do tend to find that they are more than their stereotype would suggest, though not MUCH more.  There is the pretty boy, who won’t even speak to you; the jock who is obsessed with basketball; the nerdy photography obsessed guy, who ignores his best friend who is a girl for you; there is the lonely goth kid who spends all his time reading and indoors; and finally there is the “token black guy” who is into music.  It tends to make selection on things like gift really obvious from the start.  Also disappointing, you almost never interact with anyone outside of the school itself other than when you go on a date.  You pretty much never just happen to run into someone at the mall or the beach or the park.  The interactions are somewhat limited as well, unless you’re at a point for a special event, you get the same idle chit chat whether a guy is totally indifferent to your or if he’s totally in love with you.

There are also some issues a bit with pacing.  Thankfully, the learning part of the school day is totally superfluous.  You get up, get dressed, go tot school, the clock jumps to 3 PM.  The clock runs very quickly though, which is frustrating when you’re trying to complete some fetch quest for one of the many NPCs.  On the other hand, the game tends to plod along before getting to any level of a resolution.  After about 2 weeks of in game time, I was wondering when this game’s plot was going to go somewhere.  It barely gets off the ground unfortunately.  You do fetch quests and pick the “best” chat choices until you get asked to the prom.  Prom culminates in a series of mini games to see if you can win being Prom King and Queen.

The Prom mini games are mostly rehashes of the job mini games.  These actually are surprisingly varied and reasonably fun.  Each has 3 difficulty levels though the difficulty is more based on not missing things more than actually getting more difficult.  There are a few match the music notes DDR style games.  There is a matching game at the Laundromat, the ice cream parlor has the most challenge where you must quickly fulfill orders while keeping your supply of Ice Cream stocked.  The park ranger has you plant flowers in the flower bed though I’m not sure if there is any way to actually lose this mini game.  Completing mini games on the higher levels also earns special outfits that generally have a high appeal to one of the 6 boys you can court.  Doing the Cheerleading game for example will net you a cheerleader outfit which the Jock loves.

The overall result is a huge mixed bag.  Maybe I’m just viewing it from the wrong perspective, not really being anywhere near the target audience for this title.  It’s extremely ambitious in it’s presentation but at the same time it’s lacking some key interactions to make the world feel rich while at the same time coming off as a bit rushed.  On the other hand, I’m sure my daughter will love playing this game over and over just for the dress up aspect.

High School Dreams is available here on Greenman Gaming.

Review – The Path (PC)

Tale of Tales | March 18th, 2009

Ok, so I did a review a while back of The Graveyard, also by Tale of Tales.  If the graveyard is essentially a pointless tech demo, The Path is the final product.  The Path takes the story of Little red Riding Hood and creeps it out into a spooky horror story.  You must navigate each of 6 sisters through the woods to meet with Grandmother at her house.  The only instructions you get from the game are to “Stay on the Path”.  The path is just that, a path running through the forest from your starting location to grandmothers home.  It is straight and empty.  You can very much simply stay on the path The Graveyard style and walk “up” to grandmother’s house.

The fun and real point comes when you leave the path.  For in the forest is where the wolves lurk.

The problem is that the wolves are more or less all metaphorical.  I have read several other reviews and analysis of this plot that for the most part, each of the girls goes through some sort of ravaging or rape, which is metaphorical for the wolves of the forest.  There is no sex in this game mind you, anything sexual is merely implied and any point where it would occur, the screen simply fades out.  Each of the girls has a special location in the forest which will trigger some sort of event.  For example, one girl will encounter a man camping in the forest.  Another encounters some sort of spirits in the middle of a lake.  These encounters essentially all end badly” and your character will wape up in front of Grandmother’s House battered and wounded.  Once entering Grandmother’s House you are treated to a bunch of random “creepy stuff” in an on rails FPS perspective.  Depending on items collected and events passed you will get added bonus rooms to this end sequence.

After completing the trip with a girl you return to the start and get to repeat the trip with another girl.

I get the point of the game.  There’s sub tones of keeping yourself on the straight path and obeying and not trusting strangers in the woods.  On the other hand, you get zero points for staying on the path and going to Grandmother’s home.  I do somewhat appreciate the intrinsic artistic metaphor of it all to a point. 

The issues on the concept almost all lie in the presentation.  The biggest flaw is the plodding pace that the girls travel.  It’s pretty much as slow as the grandmother in The Graveyard.  There is a run option when you hold shift but irritatingly, as you run, the screen shifts to a more top down angle which obscures your perspective and makes it difficult to see where you’re going.  I’m sure this was done to enhance the metaphor of running blindly into danger or some bull shit but there is only so much crap you can throw at a person before the experience gets ruined.

There are also other issues such as unclear direction for where to go.  You can unlock a map but by the time you’ve collected enough flowers to do so, you’re likely going to have completed the game and who cares.  Navigating blindly and being “lost” is kind of fun for the first girl or two but eventually the player will get the point and want to just push what little plot there is onward.

Which brings up another issue.  The plot is pretty vague.  Once again, there is only so much that Artsy can fill before the person playing, or more accurately, in this case, viewing, will take before they want some sort of explanation.  The biggest oddity is the Forrest girl which wanders around near the player the whole game.  There isn’t much explanation as to who she is, there are implications that she is the Grandmother, or that she is the forest spirit or that she is the “real wolf”.  Who knows, who cares.

I will say one thing for this game, it goes on sale occasionally.  While I personally don’t feel it’s worth bothering with at it’s $10 regular price point, it’s probably an ok play if you want an interesting artsy game for a couple of bucks when it’s on sale.

The Path can be found here on Steam.