Discussion Castlevania Advance Collection Writeup

[Christi Junior]

With the 3 Castlevania games on the DS having just been made available on current gen systems through a really cool compilation, I thought now was as good a time as any to revisit my old writeup of the Castlevania Advance Collection, which did for the GBA Castlevanias what Dominus Collection does for the DS games. Like all my writeups, this was originally posted on the Fediverse, and amusingly enough, my buddy Rasterman was also playing through these games at the same time and posting his own impressions, so we got a rare case of dueling writeups. And with that out of the way, let's get to the actual games:

Circle of the Moon



Hey, so you know how in 1995, two separate live-action movies starring talking pigs were released? This is kinda like that, only involving Fedi writeups about GBA Castlevania games coming out the same week. Will this writeup be a Gordy or a Babe? You be the judge.

Anyway, thanks to Rasterman for reminding me that the Castlevania Advance Collection exists, it was one of those games that I was interested in, but didn’t end up buying when it first came out. I’d already played Circle of the Moon to completion on the GBA, but I never finished Harmony of Dissonance on the Wii U, and Aria of Sorrow I never played at all, so it still seemed like good value. Also, I wouldn’t mind revisiting Circle of the Moon anyway.

So far I’ve finished CotM and HoD, so let me go over those two games in order. Circle of the Moon was surprisingly nostalgic for me, I say surprisingly because the criminally underappreciated N64 Castlevania games have always loomed much larger in my memory, but replaying CotM for the first time in over 20 years, I found myself repeatedly remembering how I felt playing it for the first time: My reaction to the beautiful, yet creepy choir song that’s the main menu theme (I was impressed by the GBA having improved so much over the GBC in terms of audio), to seeing early-game areas later on suddenly becoming populated with legitimately strong enemies, and of course, the ridiculous amounts of newfound freedom that comes with the Roc Wing, and how it felt leaping hundreds of feet up in the air to the remix of The Sinking Old Sanctuary. Stuff like the opening revival and summoning of Dracula (complete with Camilla simping hard for Vlad), Hugh going Full Sasuke, the brutal challenge rooms, and having to fly high up in the air to avoid the devastating attacks of the final boss had also dug themselves deep into my memory.

As for the game itself, it’s a post-SotN 2D Castlevania game, so of course it’s one of those Metroidvania games that helped popularize the genre and justify the “vania” part of the name. Thinking about it, CotM must have been the first Metroidvania I ever played (it was my first 2D Castlevania, while Fusion was my first Metroid, and that came out after CotM), and I certainly remember finding the concept of a non-top down 2D adventure game that’s set in one big world intriguing.

Even today, it’s clearly a very solid Metroidvania, where you start out very slow and weak, but quickly start making serious progress and opening up more and more of Dracula’s castle. The primitive RPG elements are a good fit for a Metroidvania, making you feel you’re constantly making at least *some* progress even as you’re just running around killing enemies, and the chance that enemies will drop rare loot once in a blue moon further makes fighting them feel worthwhile. There are also plenty of secrets, even lots of breakable walls hiding useful upgrades.

I never really had a problem with being stuck in CotM, the map makes it easy enough to see where the sections that will lead you further into the castle are, so whenever you get a new ability it will be easy enough to locate relevant previously blocked-off passageways. Making the time spent exploring all the more enjoyable is the wonderful soundtrack, which reminds you of why the Castlevania series is so renowned for its fantastic music (for many people, the most exciting part about Simon and Richter being added to Smash Bros. was all the Castlevania music that accompanied them).

The classic Castlevania mix of whipping and flinging various subweapons at your enemies works well, but the more sophisticated enemies require decent spacing and timing to handle, and the game is on the challenging side, which of course is no bad thing. Hell, the great variety of enemies that you face become the defining obstacles of the various sections of the castle you visit, which otherwise aren’t all that varied or visually interesting (CotM looked fine for a GBA launch game, but not much more). Different enemies will have to be dealt with in different ways (a nasty Wasp enemy even gave the otherwise dogshit throwing knife subweapon a chance to shine), and later on more and more enemies start inflicting nasty status conditions on you, in a game that’s very stingy with healing items in general.

The bosses are of course a highlight: Big (some of them outright fill the screen), tough and strong, they’ll definitely challenge you, though part of the challenge is the suboptimal controls making it harder than it should to dodge certain attacks. Don’t get me wrong, most of the time the controls work fine, but especially the fact that you can only run by double tapping the d-pad (because apparently Nathan Graves is handicapped and requires a special items to be able to run) can trip you up in the heat of battle. There are also a couple of boss attacks throughout the game that don’t really seem avoidable if the RNG isn’t in your favor, which is definitely annoying, especially given the relative lack of healing items. That said, none of the bosses are outright bullshit, there is a reasonable margin for error allowed, and it’s not like you don’t have powerful tools at your disposal – for starters, the cross subweapon can do absolutely amazing damage with proper spacing, due to how it continually hits enemies in its path.

Another ace up your sleeve is the magic cards that can drop as you kill enemies. Combining cards from the 2 major categories can give you all sorts of different buffs and effects, like improving your stats, having protective weapons circle you or changing your main weapon into a flame sword or a massive hammer. There are a lot of neat and useful effects the cards can have, and apparently there are a whopping 100 different card effects in total – the problem is that getting cards seems largely luck-based, and you’ll probably finish the game without getting many, if most of them, meaning you’ll be missing out on plenty of much-welcome gameplay variety. There is one form of New Game Plus that lets you play the game with all the cards unlocked from the start, but that’s just excessive – making more of the cards available earlier in the regular game, especially the ones that aren’t so much overpowered as just plain fun (like changing your weapon or giving you elemental powers) would have been a better solution.

 

[Christi Junior]

Harmony of Dissonance



Overall though, I enjoyed playing Circle of the Moon a whole lot, so much in fact that I instantly wanted to try out the second GBA Castlevania game, Harmony of Dissonance, after finishing CotM. Now, HoD isn’t nostalgic for me at all, my first exposure to it was on the Wii U Virtual Console, and I stopped playing around the halfway point after getting lost. But I’m sure that won’t happen this time, with my 2D Castlevania de-rusting….

Harmony of Dissonance controls quite differently from Circle of the Moon, jumps are FAR floatier, and your whip keeps dealing damage for a lot longer once you swing it, making it far easier to hit small, fast flying enemies like bats. It does seem like a change made to appease the Casuals, because if the Belmonts’ whip had this kind of extremely generous and long-lasting hitbox in Smash Ultimate, I suspect the characters would be top tier despite their shit recovery. That said, the floaty jumps do make it easy to accidentally jump into an enemy’s attacks, and being so slow and floaty in the air doesn’t exactly feel great.

Thankfully, on the ground the game controls FAR better than CotM, due to the new dash feature, enabling you not only to dash around far faster than you could run in the previous game, but letting you quickly dash up to any enemy and strike it, before just as quickly dashing backwards to dodge its attacks. This gives you a whole new level of speed and control, and makes fights a whole lot more fun.

There are plenty of other improvements: Not only are the environments far more varied and interesting, including such sights as a crystal cave and some pretty trippy, surreal locations, but the game in general is far more colorful. Now, you might argue that a spooky game like Castlevania shouldn’t actually be colorful, but these are GBA Metroidvanias that aren’t really gonna be that scary anyway, so you might as well make them more visually appealing. The castle you explore is overall far bigger too, not least in part due to HoD’s defining Castle A/Castle B mechanic (think Light World/Dark World from Zelda: ALttP), as well as more open, with tons of boss battles. There’s also a little more to the plot than the absolutely bare bones story of its predecessor.



So HoD is basically a bigger, prettier, more open version of CotM that plays better and gives you more of a plot to sink you fangs into? Well, yes, but there’s much more to it than that. You see, this game also has some major disadvantages compared to the first GBA Castlevania. For starters, the map in this game has outright disastrous shortcomings that leads to tons of aimless wandering, because HoD blocks off plenty of areas not just with the typical Metroidvania obstacles that can only be overcome with a new ability, but also straight up locked doors….only these locked doors don’t actually show up on the map at all, on the map it just looks like completely open passageways you can go through as normal, and which are just begging to be explored. And some of these locked doors are blocking crucial passageways that connect huge parts of the castle, where you naturally try to go if you’re trying to backtrack (which you’ll be doing plenty of in this game), only to be met with a locked door. And for some ungodly reason, you only get the ability to open most of these locked doors during the final 10% of the game or so.

Additionally, some out-of-reach upgrades and even important items are placed in such that a way that while you can’t actually reach them, you will fill up the section of the map they’re on while trying to nab them, making it look like the place they are has already been fully explored. What you end up with is a map that alternatively tricks you into repeatedly running into dead ends, while failing to show you numerous worthwhile places to backtrack. And even beyond that, the game seems kinda clumsily designed, several times seeming to actively lead you somewhere, only for it to be a dead end, and the *actual* path to progress involving heavy backtracking.

Moreover, the difficulty in this game is pretty much broken due to the abundance of healing items. Resource management becomes a non-issue after like the first third of the game is done, because of just how many healing items you can get, and when there also turns out to be a merchant who sells healing items really cheaply…yeah, if you want you can just beat every single boss from then on first try by just berserker attacking like a retard while spamming healing items whenever needed. The game’s economy is another thing that’s broken, because it’s extremely quick and easy to farm tons of money due to moneybags in candles always respawning the instant you leave and re-enter a room.

Look, I’m not saying the HoD needed to be as Jewy with its healing items as its predecessor, but there are right and wrong ways to go about this: In the N64 Castlevania games you get plenty of healing items too, including healing items you can buy from a merchant, but at least there said healing items are really expensive, methods for money farming were less obvious, you actually get punished for relying excessively on the merchant, and the True final boss could literally wipe out most of your health with a single attack as he literally nukes the battle arena. I remember usually NEEDING to go through plenty of healing items in those games. By contrast, in HoD I managed to beat the True final boss on my second or third try without ever healing, and with enough healing items in my inventory to be able to heal 100% of my health at least 10 times over. All this just from playing normally. And let’s not get even into how the new spell system (which replaces the cards from CotM) eventually ALSO becomes completely broken, with a few mana restoring items enabling you to completely trivialize pretty much any boss as you keep spamming devastating spells out of their attack range. Remember when Castlevania games were supposed to be challenging? I remember it like it was last week….



Speaking of things you’d normally associate with Castlevania, the music….is just okay in this game. I didn’t find it terrible or anything, and at least it’s not the kind of completely unassuming, minimalist fare you so often hear in modern games, but it’s probably a step below the already much-criticized Metroid Dread and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Mirror of Fate soundtracks, and completely outclassed by not only the music in CotM, but also by Bloodstained's soundtrack. An indie spiritual successor to Castlevania so thoroughly outdoing an actual Castlevania game in the music department is kinda embarrassing to be honest.

All that said, I actually still enjoyed HoD, due to its fun combat, abundance of content, nice visuals and really cool world. Maybe I would have been a lot harder on the game if I hadn’t just played CotM, but as DrRyan said, the games complement each other really well, making HoD’s flaws and shortcomings easier for me to swallow.

I have yet to play Aria of Sorrow, but I keep hearing good things, so I’m looking forward to it!

 

[Christi Junior]

Aria of Sorrow



So, purely based on the hype, it sounded like Aria of Sorrow was regarded as the best of the GBA Castlevania games, and after playing it, I can definitely see why. The controls largely combine the best of the two previous games, your main character can now run properly (or leisurely jog at any rate), while not having a ridiculously floaty jump, AND you still have that awesome backwards dash, even if it’s somewhat nerfed and you can no longer dash forwards. The visuals are colorful and very appealing like in Harmony of Dissonance, with some really good-looking monster enemies and bosses, and the music is actually quite good this time around, still not quite as great as in Circle of the Moon, but certainly a damn sight better than in HoD. Meanwhile, healing items don’t seem quite as overabundant as in HoD, while still being way more common than in CotM, and despite the early bosses being really easy, the later sections of the game become quite a bit more challenging.

One significant improvement over both of the previous GBA games was the story and the characters. There’s quite a bit more to the plot this time, with numerous interesting mysteries, some notable twists and a decent cast of characters – while both previous games had minimal plots and basically just featured the Hero, the rival, a kidnapped character, as well as Dracula and his simp-of-the-day, AoS is more like the N64 Castlevania games, in that it’s a good bit more story-driven and features a good number of plot-relevant characters. The story is hardly intrusive, it just keeps things more interesting, adds important context to the events of the game and makes you more motivated to progress further, which is pretty much ideal for a Metroidvania like this.

There’s also a huge gameplay change that pretty much defines AoS, namely a Monster Soul system that’s not only this game’s answer to the Cards in CotM and the Spells of HoD, but also completely replaces the traditional Castlevania subweapons. You got like 100 different monsters in this game, and each one you kill has a chance to randomly drop its Soul, which gives you an ability related to it. Usually the ability will be a unique attack themed around the monster the Soul belonged to (very much comparable to a subweapon – it even consumes hearts just like the subweapons did), such as throwing a bone like a skeleton, spitting water like a merman, or shooting feathers in different directions like a harpy. While rarer, there are also two other categories of Souls that give you different abilities, one letting you transform or otherwise enhancing your movement, the other giving you various buffs, special passive abilities or protections.

This new system is great for a number of reasons: First of all, the old subweapon system and its available weapons, while iconic, was very limiting and unbalanced: You only had a single subweapon at your disposal at any given time, it wasn’t like an ordinary item or piece of equipment which could be swapped out, but still remain in your inventory, if you replaced one subweapon with another one, the old one was lost, and had to be found and picked up again later to become available (which of course meant you lost your *current* subweapon). By contrast, a Soul once collected will always be at your fingertips.

Moreover, the subweapons were horribly unbalanced, with the cross almost always being the best option, its comparatively high cost still being a total bargain when its potentially monstrous damage output was taken into account. And since switching between subweapons was so clunky and inconvenient, once you got the cross you’d probably just want to stick with it and use that one weapon throughout the entire game. Meanwhile, it’s not only less obvious which Soul is the best (not to mention there are 3 different categories, so you can and should have 3 different Souls equipped at the same time), but you’ll keep acquiring brand new, more powerful yet more expensive Souls throughout the entire game, so the balance between them remains in a constant flux.

Now, the fact that Souls randomly drop is a bit of a bummer, but with so many enemies and so many different enemy types you will probably gain new souls at a decent rate, and there are even a number of Souls that are guaranteed as rewards for beating story bosses, so it’s really not so bad, and you’ll probably always end up with a decent selection of attacks and abilities, even if you might miss out on most of them, comparable to the Rare Blade system in Xenoblade 2. BTW, this is the way I wish Cards had been handled in CotM, especially the part about a number of Cards being available as story rewards, as opposed to RNG-dependent enemy drops. There are also far fewer Cards in CotM than there are Souls in AoS.



Because of course, the greatest advantage of the Soul system is the sheer number and variety of available Soul attacks and abilities. Sure, some of them are basically reskins of old subweapons, but there are tons of new and original attacks too, like a giant axe that nearly fills the whole screen, and a fucking killer yo-yo! Add to this plenty of different main weapons (though I never found an actual vampire killer whip, interestingly enough…), and combat ends up being really fun and varied.

AoS is also way less clunkily designed than HoD, with a lot less aimless wandering as a result (thankfully the developers realized that those locked doors were fucking retarded), as well as a better warping system. At the same time, like in HoD the castle boasts plenty of variety, including a number of underwater sections, complemented by an ability that lets you sink down to the bottom of a body of water, as well as an ability that lets you walk on water. Switching between the two on the fly will be necessary at times, but I didn’t mind it too much, maybe because I grew up navigating the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time while repeatedly taking on and off the Iron Boots. I’m also one of those weird people who in general really appreciates underwater sections in games, partly for the atmosphere, partly for the change of pace and variety.

Annoyingly, this game, like both HoD and its own DS sequel, locks the True Ending behind cryptic bullshit (Update: Dawn of Sorrow's true ending condition isn't actually that bad, 2005 Christi was just being dumb), so the sequel DID improve on this), meaning the first ending you encounter will be seriously anticlimactic. I guess the conditions are slightly better communicated here than in HoD, but it’s still an annoying aspect of the game. The true late-game is pretty cool though, even featuring a new area and some really nice story moments, and while the true final boss is nothing special, the battle before that (a duel involving a badass human opponent with lots of familiar attacks) is fucking awesome.

Overall, I would definitely say that Aria of Sorrow is the best of the GBA Castlevania games, building upon what was previously established, as well as daring to make some pretty big and successful changes. After Harmony of Dissonance proved an overly ambitious, yet often tremendously enjoyable mess, it was nice to see the devs strike the right balance and preserve most of HoD’s strengths with barely any of its weaknesses dragging the experience down.

 

[Christi Junior]

And since my earlier vidya writeups didn't tend to cover culture war topics, I might as well take this opportunity to update this writeup and give these games a Based Morality Score as well:

As might be expected of classic GBA games, there's no leftist propaganda or any other political bullshit to be found here, and the Castlevania Advance Collection seems to have been a a set of extremely faithful re-releases, to the point of even giving you the option to choose between different regional versions of the games. And Castlevania as a series naturally leans in a positive moral direction, seeing how the series pits Christian warriors up against the forces of Hell, and almost always has the good guys prevail. Beyond that there's not too much to say - as I briefly touched upon, both CotM and HoD are very light on story, and certainly don't feature anything like the heavy, countercultural themes that so impressed me in Castlevania 64. Aria of Sorrow *does* however raise this one weird theological concept, about how for God to be good, evil is an absolute necessity in this world, and while I'm merely a Cultural Christian, that definitely rings false to me (for starters, it put a limitation on God that really doesn't make sense). That said, in AoS it's basically just a throwaway line said during the true ending, and really doesn't seem intended to be subversive or otherwise hostile to Christianity's understanding of God - and while this concept IS revisited in Dawn of Sorrow, here it's actually portrayed as a questionable, if not outright wrong and dangerous idea.

For me, whether to grade these games as Neutral or +1 is pretty much a tossup, but there definitely isn't any content here that would cause me to think twice about recommending the GBA Castlevanias to any of /ourguys/, they're basically just good, wholesome games that reflect a better, more sane age.

 

[Narmy]

I wish Dawn of Sorrow used the same art style as Aria.

 

[PhantomXero1x]

I really would love to get the physical copies but ew limited run games tho.

 

[Alucardthegreat]

I wish Dawn of Sorrow used the same art style as Aria.

there is a mod for that! The original was made by the guy that drew Death note, so I tought it was super cool back in the day, but the modded one is good too!