racketboy.com

I have to echo what Gunstar said earlier... 100% accurate or not, it's good to get Rondo on something other than the Wii (impossible to buy now too I believe with the shop offline) and the PSP, I still have a 1000 model PSP and that d-pad is atrocious. I'll gladly get this on the PS4 to have access to a good version of Rondo.

I'm playing Circle of the Moon for the first time, and holy shit the Underground Waterway area is hard!

Circle is excellent and decently challenging compared to the others. Most importantly though, it has one of the hardest final bosses in any of these by far. Be prepared...

Not to dissuade you from continuing though, haha. I love how it has a gritty feel to it unlike all the others that just seem to rip sprites from Symphony of the Night. To me Circle kind of feels like a remnant of the SNES/Genesis era if they ended up doing the Metroidvania format back then. It has a great vibe/personality and some of the best GBA tunes.

For even more fun, try it on classic mode. Use an original GBA and see how many near-invisible Medusa heads nail you in the clock tower before you're blinded with destructive rage.

Xeogred wrote:Circle is excellent and decently challenging compared to the others. Most importantly though, it has one of the hardest final bosses in any of these by far. Be prepared...

Not to dissuade you from continuing though, haha. I love how it has a gritty feel to it unlike all the others that just seem to rip sprites from Symphony of the Night. To me Circle kind of feels like a remnant of the SNES/Genesis era if they ended up doing the Metroidvania format back then. It has a great vibe/personality and some of the best GBA tunes.

Gritty... On one hand, it's kinda cool to get such a mashup of Castlevania old. But on the other hand, it sometimes feels more like a really well made fan hack then a well polished official release. It's kinda neat hearing so many remixed tunes, but after a while it just feels lazy. I'm not a big fan of the castle layout, either. It doesn't seem so well polished. That and enemy placement can make some areas frustrating. Not hard, as in a good and fun challenge. But frustrating because it's cheap and annoying.

That's not to say that I'm not enjoying it. I've made it this far. I'm just hoping the rest of the GBA and DS games step it up a little.

Omerta wrote:For even more fun, try it on classic mode. Use an original GBA and see how many near-invisible Medusa heads nail you in the clock tower before you're blinded with destructive rage.

Oh God, I could only imagine playing this on an unlit OG GBA. Honestly, I'd probably stop playing.

That's why they made the sprites in Harmony of Dissonance have super bright colored outlines.

To me, Harmony is by far the worst of the 6-Metroidvania handheld titles. The music sucks too for the most part, guess they REALLY wanted to go for that "dissonance" in spots. I finally played and beat this one on the WiiU VC a few years ago but yeah, won't be touching that one again.

That rough edge is what I love about Circle, but yeah if you're a bigger fan of Symphony being smoother and all that... from Aria of Sorrow and on they're pretty much just like SoTN. Though Portrait of Ruin has some levels divided up instead of a full on singular huge castle and then some weird buddy system with two characters I think, can't remember... Order of Ecclesia is amazing and easily one of the hardest of the Metroidvania's.

1. Circle of the Moon
2. Aria of Sorrow
3. Order of Ecclesia

In no particular order these are my favorites of the 6 GBA/DS Metroidvania installments.

Also I love SoTN, but I appreciate that the handheld ones were actually challenging. lol

Despite being a huge Castlevania fan, and SotN being one of my favorite games of all time, I've never really given these 6 games a chance. A few years ago I tried Portrait. I forget exactly what I didn't like about it, but I wasn't really enjoying it and stopped playing. Recently, I decided that I really should play these games though. I decided to play them in release date order, so I'm starting with Circle of the Moon.

While I'm totally use to tough-as-nails old school Casttlevania difficulty, the difficulty in Circle of the Moon is throwing me off. I think I'm too use to SotN, having plowed through that so many times for so many years. And let's face it, there's really no challenge in that game. I'm trying to play Circle of the Moon the same way, forgetting that my health is more akin to the NES games.

Speaking of the difficulty of SotN, has any one ever played the 99 luck mode? That's when you name a save file "X-X!V''Q" and you start with 99 luck and a Lapis Lazuli, but the rest of your stats are severely gimped. It actually is pretty challenging from the start. But once you get to the Library, if you concentrate on buying better gear it gets a lot easier. And by the time you get to the inverted castle, you don't even remember that this is the hard mode.

Harmony of Dissonance is a fun game, but yeah, the graphics are a bit garish on any GBA models after the original. The music has some nice tunes and good compositions, but the instrument selection is utter crap, and they largely stuck to working with the original Gameboy audio channels. They may have done that to preserve CPU power for the game itself and to conserve storage space that might otherwise be taken up by higher quality audio data. And yet with Aria they demonstrated you could indeed eat your cake and have it, too.

Circle of the Moon is a good game with a lot of neat ideas, but it shows it was a rushed production. It was a new team that hadn't worked on a Castlevania title and it was put together for the launch of the GBA, in a relatively short span of time. Despite the music being remixed stuff, at least they're good remixes.

Aria is the only one of the GBA titles that doesn't seem to make massive compromises in order to fulfill its vision.

Dissonance isn't horrible. I just finished that one again yesterday at 200%. If that one is considered the worst and CotM is the best, there really isn't much distance between the entire GBA/DS series in my eyes.

I get where you're coming from on CotM. It ultimately holds a special spot in Castlevania gaming history because of the different feel from the Koji Igarashi installments. I'm pretty sure it got left off the list of canon titles, so it deserves to be defended in that regard, too - damn it!

Unfortunately, it got a lot of bad press (with Iga piling it on) and SotN was still fresh in everyone's mind as an all time great. So Konami brings back Iga and a bunch of his crew for Dissonance. That's why that one feels like a SotN remix. The enemies are all almost the same, the protagonist - though a Belmont - looks and plays like Alucard, etc. But it's not a bad thing to me. I still had a blast trying to feel my way through it again.

Speaking of SotN, yeah it's super easy... but did anyone else get worked over by it all those years ago? Before YouTube speed runs and every single game-breaking bug being discovered, that one ate my lunch on the first go around. I smacked Richter around and figured that Dracula wasn't a boss anymore with the new Metroid style. Found out there was another castle quite some time later.

Agreed. If Harmony is the worst on offer (and that's an 8/10 at least), then you really can't go wrong playing them all. Plus, movement tech in Harmony feels awesome.