Castlevania is a long-running and well-respected franchise from Konami. Throughout its lifetime, it's encountered some difficulties maintaining freshness. When they make a breakthrough, we get games like Symphony of the Night and the Sorrow games. When they're recycling, you get Harmony of Dissonance, better known as "SotN's bastard child on your GBA". Given the success of Symphony of the Night, one would assume Harmony would inherit its strong points. Unfortunately, this is not the case and I would not recommend this game to anyone but the hardcore CV fans.

Graphics

Harmony of Dissonance tries to go in a direction similar to Symphony of the Night, after the backlash Konami received about Circle of the Moon's graphics being "too dark". The result is a hodge-podge of bright, but low contrast graphics. They probably look great on the regular GBA, but on anything that produces its own light, it looks awful. Conversely, Circle actually looks better on a front or backlit screen.

The graphic quality itself is so-so. It feels like less effort was put into the readability of the graphics, so oftentimes things seem to blend together. A lot of the enemy graphics are ripped from Symphony and rescaled to fit the GBA's screen. Overall, it seems like the game tries to be Symphony's little brother, right down to the character design. It's hard to deny the resemblance that Juste and Maxim bear to Alucard and Richter. Among the three Castlevania games available on the GBA, this one has the worst graphics.

Music

Castlevania games are normally known for their music; at least 3 songs stand out in practically every game in the series. Harmony let me down in that respect: the only track I enjoyed was the Entrance theme. The rest of the music was rather boring. It seems that the developers had to cut back on audio quality in order to do what they did with the graphics. At any rate, the music isn't awful; just don't expect music on par with the rest of the series.

Difficulty

Don't expect to have trouble with more than 2 bosses. This lack of difficulty is very strange for a Castlevania game. Gamers of all kinds will have no issues playing or even beating this game.

Gameplay

Harmony of Dissonance plays like a strange mix between old school and new school Castlevania. You will be using a whip through the entire game, but you also get to equip various pieces of equipment. Subweapons are scattered throughout the castle, but you also collect spellbooks that you can use to unleash powerful attacks. It's not a bad mix, but the gameplay can get a little repetitive, with very little variation in how you engage enemies. Aside from that, it's standard Castlevania: action coupled with mild platforming. Sad to say, Harmony is the worst of the modern "Metroidvania" style Castlevania games.

Final Verdict

I was able to complete this game start-to-finish 100% with no guide in under 5½ hours. That's inexcusable in my eyes, since there's very little motivation to play through again. There is Maxim mode, which allows you to play through again with a slightly different character... but I would not want to plod through that castle again. Rent or borrow from a friend, but only if you're a die hard Castlevania fan. You'll be torturing yourself otherwise.

Metadata

Platform: Nintendo GameBoy Advance
Release date (US): 2002-09-16
Genre: Action, Adventure, RPG
Developer: Konami Computer Entertainment, Tokyo
Publisher: Konami
ESRB Rating: T for Teen