Wow. Only thing is… Harmony of Dissonance is damned short. It was a fortuitous decision, in this light, for Igarashi to have jammed so many secrets into the game. I accidentally ended up finishing the game, getting what I think must be a luke-bad ending, in less than ten hours, with nearly 200% map completion, all but two items for Juste’s room (one of which I’ve since found), somehow without two of the magic books (again, one of which I’ve since got — it’s the one I put off getting for a while, since it was kind of stressful to race the marble (you’ll… see what I mean)), and without two of the relics (one of which I believe must be Dracula’s eye).

Circle of the Moon, to mention, I’m probably well over fifty hours into — and I’m still missing the Black Dog card. (It’s in the battle arena.) I beat the game it at around thirty hours or so (though I took my tubular time, as I tend to), but since then I’ve still been wandering around, collecting things, and generally powering Nathan up far more than necessary. In comparison to this nigh-pointless time vacuum, HoD is amazingly self-contained.

There are only two isolated map squares which I can’t seem to access, one in each of the two castles. One of them’s behind a big lump of rock (which isn’t there in the other castle), and the other one is in the marble-racing room. It’s just that there doesn’t appear to be any obvious entrance in the A castle.

I’m guessing if I’ve got all of Dracula’s parts and have the maps completely filled-in I’ll get a better ending than the one I received — not that it was really too bad, mind. And during the ending credits I was treated to one of the two high-res bits of music in the game. Might as well not spoil which one, but it was what I thought one of the better themes anyway. If audio was working properly on Edgar here, I’d probably have dubbed the tune off a while ago for referencing in my post the other day.

I’ve toyed around a bit with Maxim, and it seems like his game has been completely reformulated from Juste’s. While playing through the first time I noticed that HoD had a very classic, almost action-oriented layout to its stage design. Although there was a lot of wandering, whenever I needed to go somewhere it tended to be along a pretty straight route and usually through some new territory. What happens in Maxim’s game is that nearly all of the adventure elements have been removed. You can save, but that’s about it. Otherwise, it’s more or less become a classic Castlevania game. What’ve been mixed up are the paths available to you and the order in which you play through the castle. So far (though I’ve barely played into Maxim’s game at all) it looks like you’re constrained to a somewhat linear path.

Also, Maxim plays like a ninja. That’s about the best description I can give. He’s got Juste’s dashes, but on top of that his running, jumping, and attacking speeds are all about fifty percent greater. He’s got a triple-jump, a slide kick, and a normal ducking kick from the outset, and his normal attack is a quick sword swipe. He only has one special weapon, which is a strange and elaborate cross-like contraption. Maxim is just a speedy, strong character. His game ends up playing something like a cross between Strider and Ninja Gaiden (though without the wall-crawling). Considering that Ninja Gaiden and classic Castlevania play almost exactly the same, this seems appropriate.

The boss mode is actually fairly interesting, and the widely-reported secret contained therein, really is firing up my jones for a GBA compilation or remake of the original NES trilogy. (I mean, it’s perfect down to the sound effects. Even the irreplacable “whoop!” sample.)

Muh. So. There that is. I guess it’s better to have a condensed hunk of gaming goodness than a sprawling fifty-hour affair stuffed with needless filler and busywork. (God, why are so many games full of tedious chores these days, just in order to increase playtime? Who started this trend? Wasting my time is not the key to my heart, people. Let me finish the fool game already, so I can move onto something else!) There was barely a moment in HoD which felt superfluous, with the exception of some nasty backtracking in the last third or so. Once the teleporters are all located this isn’t as much of a problem, but — oy. And y’know, people always make what seems to me to be way too big of a deal about backtracking in adventure games. So far as I’m concerned, it’s all part of the exploration aspect in a game like Metroid or Zelda.

But remember what I said about the castle’s layout in this game? There are two sides to everything. The first time through, it’s great and really focused-feeling. The problem is, whenever you want to go back to someplace, you usually have to go far out of your way to return. Much of the time I just put off some smaller tasks which I knew I could finish in another part of the castle because I didn’t want to put in the effort to slog all the way back there through ten minutes of rooms and corridors. The game’s pretty good at directing you back to each part of the castle in turn, though. So generally you don’t have to do a ton of backtracking if you’re patient enough to wait until you’re back in the neighborhood. But the thing is, there are a ton of shortcuts that are present from the beginning but which are locked until very late in the game. The “skull doors”, for instance, exist mostly to keep the player from being able to revisit earlier sections of the castle without putting a ton of effort into winding his way back through his own footsteps. I don’t see why this is in many cases, except perhaps to keep the player from being distracted from the tasks at hand. This is fine in retrospect, but at the time it was kind of frustrating.

And yet this kind of a limitation has its interesting effects. Indeed, it kept me from bothering to revisit the start of the game until about eight or nine hours in. And there’s something… well not exactly poignant, but at least interesting, about finding one’s self preparing for the end by going back to where one began. Everything just went full circle, in a sense.

And come to think of it, isn’t this kind of the point of the series?