“To the Heart of the Devil’s Castle” is the most action-packed piece of music in the game, using chiptune as a strength. “Offense and Defense” is an almost ethereal track that clashes powerful melodies against each other into one of HoD’s most dynamic songs. Limitations often bolster art and Harmony of Dissonance embraces a unique musical identity to get around the GBA’s technical faults.Ī lack of Castlevania staples and the sound quality means Harmony of Dissonance’s soundtrack won’t appeal to everyone, but the actual compositions are superb. None of this is to say that HoD’s soundtrack is actually bad, however. The soundtrack is an acquired taste that can sound like whiplash coming off of Circle of the Moon, which featured several strong remixes of classic Castlevania tunes. As a result, Harmony’s score is reflective of an 8-bit title and considerably more chiptune than its GBA brethren. According to Koji Igarashi, Harmony of Dissonance had to “ sacrifice the music” in benefit of the graphics. It’s worth keeping in mind that these graphical flourishes do come up at the price of sound quality. Since sprites are larger than they were in Circle of the Moon, they’re afforded greater detail that lends the game a high level of visual polish where models can discernibly have multiple joints or even rotate in a way that wasn’t possible in CotM.
HARMONY OF DISSONANCE WINDOWS
Thunder flashes through the windows clouds move across the sky fog sets in over the castle’s seedier sections, and an abundance of tilesets helps to give even the smallest areas personality. It’s easy to take for granted just how much is happening on-screen at any given time, from background details to enemy & player animations. Harmony of Dissonance also features a bright blue border around Juste Belmont’s sprite, which (while jarring at first) helps him stand out against the busy art direction.īeyond just being easier to see on an original GBA, Harmony of Dissonance’s graphics are quite ambitious for a handheld game. The color palette can almost be garish at times, but there’s a vibrancy evocative of the NES trilogy’s eclectic coloration. Harmony’s castle is noticeably much brighter, using a wider range of colors than usual for Castlevania. Circle’s aesthetic coupled with the GBA’s hardware limitations led to a game that could only be played with the correct lighting. While CotM emulates and looks perfectly fine on modern hardware, the original Game Boy Advance’s screen struggled to clearly display darker visuals. One of the biggest issues with Circle of the Moon was its art direction. While that doesn’t make for a bad experience overall, it does undermine Harmony of Dissonance’s greater qualities.
HARMONY OF DISSONANCE SERIES
What’s otherwise one of the most stylish and mechanically polished games in the series can’t help but be derivative. What’s especially a pity is that Igarashi did succeed in overcoming CotM’s flaws through HoD, only for Symphony to distort Harmony’s identity. The end result is very reminiscent of SotN, but hardly comparable in quality.
Where Circle of the Moon embraced classic franchise conventions too closely, Harmony of Dissonance nests itself in Symphony of the Night’s shadow without shame. The fact of the matter is that Harmony of Dissonance doesn’t warrant such hype nor is it a better Castlevania than Circle of the Moon: just different. This was an industry veteran criticizing an entry in his franchise while hyping up the second coming of one of the greatest games ever made. Circle of the Moon was produced without Koji Igarashi’s involvement, which likely gave his comments at the time even more weight. Igarashi’s criticisms of Circle touched on protagonist Nathan Graves’ sluggish controls, the dark color palette that could be barely seen on launch GBAs, and tonal inconsistencies with the rest of the franchise. While Circle of the Moon received high praise critically, Igarashi was less kind to the game in interviews leading up to Harmony’s release and specifically wanted to remedy CotM’s flaws in HoD. Following the release of Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, series producer Koji Igarashi began development on Harmony of Dissonance intending to replicate his success with Symphony of the Night.
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