Monday, July 13, 2009

10 Worst Games I Own - #10 Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance

Box and Cart

Recently, my friend Mike made a list of the worst games he owns on his blog. I was intrigued by the concept and decided to shamelessly rip off his idea and make it my own. You know what they say, “Emulation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

I’m going to kick off my list with Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance. I’m a big fan of the Castlevania series. The wallpaper on my phone is the NES Castlevania box art, for a while my ringtone was Dracula from Symphony of the Night’s discourse on what a man is, and even now I have a brief quote from Alucard as my Facebook notification.

This Castlevania game starts off innocently enough, but goes downhill rather quickly. If you’re like me, you love the music from games, and, while this is a GBA game and I’m not expecting a full symphonic soundtrack, the music is rather… atrocious.

Here’s the theme music for the two main characters, Juste and Maxim.

If you listened to those (especially the second one), you’ll get what I’m saying.

Another major problem that I have with this game is that it is trying to be Symphony of the Night. Your main character, Juste Belmont, is supposed to be a member of the Belmont clan, a family of vampire hunters. However, if you look at him, he looks like Alucard, Son of Dracula.

He looks like Alucard, he dresses like Alucard, he moves like Alucard, but he’s not Alucard.

Chased by Armor Who decided on that name  Vs. Bat

And there’s just some things that I can’t help but notice are a DIRECT RIP from Symphony of the Night. Like the save room. Rip-Off Save Point PSDX6D3D002

And the doors between areas… (it’s hard to see in the screenshots, but they’re *identical*.

 Rip-Off Door PSDX6D3D007

And a large percentage of the enemies. Now, these are from the same series of games, but I would expect differences.I think I've seen this before...

PSDX6D3D010

All in all, it’s like a toned down, low-res, poor port of Symphony of the Night with lousy music and a poor excuse for a main character. And seriously, who decided to make the secondary character named Maxim?

4 comments:

  1. My ears are bleeding. Seriously that music is horrifically low quality. Also, just so you know I don't think Facebook allows Youtube links in the notes section.

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  2. just like aria of sorrow and dawn of sorrow, a bunch of spin-offs of SoTN gameplay wise.

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  3. So! It's suppose to be metroidvania game, what do you think it is a copy?!?! Sotn is the game that started the whole metroid style gameplay. Harmony of Dissonance was one of my favorites and it's not one of the worst in my opinion, I say it was one of the best.

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  4. This post................................................ Shamefur Dispray!!! https://warosu.org/data/lit/img/0035/28/1362446578657.jpg

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