Ack wrote:Wow, I don't recall Circle of the Moon nearly so harshly, but then I played it upon release and never really delved into the handheld games that followed. I'm guessing it's more of a stepping stone to what would come later, both for the series and for the GBA in general. Would you say it's more of an experiment to see if that style would work on a handheld?
I would call Harmony of Dissonance (the next game that Igarashi produced after SotN and the next GBA game in the series) is more specifically a narrowing down of SotN specifically onto a handheld. It removes a LOT of the fluff, no familiars, smaller castle, heck it doesn't even have breakable walls, while adding only really the ability to forwards as well as backwards dash, to try and fit a nicely animated SotN-style experience onto a GBA.
Circle of the Moon comes off to me as not just an attempt to get Castlevania on a handheld, but a different kind of Castlevania onto a handheld. I was being serious when I said that this feels like someone looked at Castlevania III and wanted to inject some Metroid-y elements into it. It's almost like a refutation against SotN against what this new style of Casltevania can and should be presented as. I'm sure plenty of compromises around CotM's design can be chalked up fairly easily to a dev team still getting used to the GBA and on a time crunch by Konami to have something ready to go for launch, but some aspects I don't think are quite that simple to dismiss. Given the large number of fans the game still has on here (AJ played it not that long ago and quite liked it), I think it's more down to stylistic preferences why I don't like it. This isn't at all what I like Castlevania to be, and I'm happy that Igarashi was given the chance to continue the series in a more SotN-esque direction rather than the slower CotM-style.
And a note that Maru brought up in the Slack chat: It's very possible that slowdown issues are something down to the Wii U's emulation. He says the GBA version doesn't have any problems with that, so it could just be down to a sloppy port job by Konami. I've never had slowdown problems like that with any other GBA game I've played on the Wii U, so I have to assume it's down to the specific port in this case.