My thoughts on Castlevania: Harmony of Despair

[rorshacma]

Aug 5, 2010 18:36:43 GMT -5 tearsofash said:

Nostalgia is a weird thing. Devs think they're doing a good job making a game with nostalgic characters and different things like sound effects, but it seems like they struck a nerve with this one.

That's the thing, though. There's a difference between catering to nostalgia, and just being flat out lazy. Having a bonus mode in Harmony of Dissonance where you play as an 8-Bit Simon Belmont Sprite is a cute nod towards nostaglia. Having a game that is made entirely out of recycled material from over a decades worth of old games falls into the lazy category.

Its not just the fact that the game is bad that's touched so many nerves, its more what this game represents for the future of the franchise. Making a game with virtually no new content and then selling it for fifteen bucks just shows they don't really care to put effort into it anymore. And if it winds up being financially sucessful, that's just giving them free reign to continue to not try, since they know people are just going to give them money no matter what they throw together with minimal effort.

[Warchief Onyx]

I would say Judgment, Haunted Castle, and a couple of the Game Boy games are worse than HoDe. (just so we don't have acronym confusion, I will use HoD for Harmony of Dissonance, the GBA game. And HoDe for Harmony of Despair. Alternatively, I might call it CHoDe. >_>) But those were just bad games. Judgment was so awful it ended up being hilariously so, probably because I was half-drunk with friends playing it. But none of them feel as insulting as HoDe. Probably because HoDe actually had potential to be good, but dropped the ball in a lot of ways. Also, those games actually had some effort put into them. Even Judgment had someone put a lot of work into taking Obata's hideous designs and translating them into in-game models.

HoDe feels like some kid's Game Maker project where he just took every asset from the DS games and cobbled them together into some mishmash of a game.

[Deleted]

Aug 5, 2010 19:27:36 GMT -5 Weasel said:

I hear that's the game Castlevania 64 should have been. Granted, I haven't been able to check it out, because my emulator does not like it, and the cartridge costs far more than I can afford lately.

Perhaps I'm in the minority on this one, but I felt that both N64 games were lousy. The soundtracks were maybe passable, but that's about it.

[Lash]

I love Castlevania 64, but Legacy of Darkness less for some reason. I'm not used to anyone liking the two Nintendo 64 games. Legacy of Darkness IS more complete though.

[Snarboo]

The N64 'vanias played fine IMHO, they were just awkward early 3D which tends to age badly. They also didn't quite feel like Castlevania at times, but both are very playable.

[Deleted]

The N64 games aren't the best in the series (and the bit where you have to not jump or get squished by gears while holding the nitro bottle might have triggered some game-related form of PTSD in my mind), but I find them interesting and something different for the series. A bit of an archaic mess to play nowadays, but... honestly, I think I prefer them over Curse of Darkness.

[Deleted]

www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/08/castlevania-leaks/

Is this strike 3, mike?

Seriously, if this is real and Konami charges for it, fuck em.

[Snarboo]

[Warchief Onyx]

It's hard for me to be outraged over this when I had no plans on spending money on this POS anyway.

Also, man, I think that pyramid level is BLATANTLY taken from Portrait of Ruin. Like, identical layout and all. Which is somewhat hilarious.

[thethird]

I hated that goddamn pyramid level in Portrait. Of all the ones that they'd use to make another map out of, why the pyramid motif?

[Ike]

One last interesting image suggests that all of these additions will be separate downloads and that the new chapter will only be 4 megabytes of data. A file size that small could mean that much of the new content is already sitting on users’ hard drives waiting to be unlocked. That’s likely to irk more than a few potential customers, especially given the $15 price tag of the original game.

Personally, I welcome the extras: As much as I’ve enjoyed the game so far, I’ve already seen everything it has to offer.

What fucking bizarro world am I living in here?

[susanismyalias]

It's called Hell, Ike. It's called Hell.

[Deleted]

The pyramid isn't the only thing from Portrait to get recycled. The subway-ish area makes up the bottom floor of one of the levels in HD. Lazy. As. Fuck.

[Feynman]

My biggest complaint isn't even related to recycled assets... I find the basic concept of the game as a whole to be riddled with failure.

The gameplay and level design is based on the popular metroidvania format. The metroidvania games in the series are not at all notable for their combat. They're slow-paced and not even remotely challenging. The reason those games are entertaining comes from two primary factors:

1. Exploration. Finding secret passageways, hunting rare drops, gradually coming to understand how the castle is laid out, etc.

2. Progress is determined by the player. You aren't necessarily forced to do certain areas in a certain order. Even if you can't clear the area you're exploring, you may be able to find powerful items you can use in another area. Further, if you want to make your character an unstoppable monster, you're perfectly capable of grinding out levels. You can blitz through the game, hitting every objective in the ideal order, or you can leisurely take your time.

Harmony of Despair pretty much shits on both of those. Exploration is out of the picture, as the game is level based, and you can see the entire room layout of the level you're playing, removing any sense of discovery or exploration. Then it forces you to deal with a time limit, which is a huge kick in the balls to the leisurely player-based progression of the metroidvania games that Harmony of Despair lifts all of it's content from.

Now, having a time limit and mostly linear stages wouldn't be such a big deal if not for the fact that all of the stage design and gameplay is carbon copied from the metroidvania games. So you get the slow-paced, boring combat of metroidvania shoehorned into the mechanics of an action platformer, with none of the exploration or player-oriented progression that made the source material enjoyable.

Is it any wonder that the game is a complete mess? The entire concept is terribly flawed at the most fundamental level! I'm going to quote sotenga here, because he put it in such a delightfully succinct manner:

sotenga said:

Strike two, Konami. Do not fuck up again.

Edit: Sentences should begin with a captial letter dur dur durr.

[kitten]

Aug 6, 2010 22:07:50 GMT -5 Warchief Onyx said:

It's hard for me to be outraged over this when I had no plans on spending money on this POS anyway.

It's what this bodes for the future of Castlevania that is so truly infuriating.