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chuckroOne of the few Castlevania games not to star a Belmont or one of Dracula’s relatives, this chronicles Nathan Graves attempting to rescue his best friend and his mentor from a revived Dracula’s evil influence.
I used the Card Mode hack to spice up the experience a bit. This hides the cards around the map so they’re guaranteed, rather than making enemies drop them. In practice, I think this makes the game faster but harder—when you’re grinding for card drops, you don’t necessarily realize how much time you’re also grinding for XP. I ended up wildly underleveled for several of the later areas because I wasn’t doing any grinding. I suspect I also never really got the knack of the DSS system, as I clearly was under-using magic.
This game also is just generally on the higher end of the Igavania difficulty scale. The fact that you can’t change weapons and there’s no economy (armor and healing items only come from enemy drops) means that a lot of the control that makes Symphony or the Sorrow games easier isn’t here. There’s also no backstep, which I didn’t think I’d miss but it really would have helped with a few enemies. And the knockback is particularly egregious; enemies bounce you all over the place. The holy water is particularly broken in this game, though, as it deals significant and rapid damage, and there are a lot of knight and demon enemies who barely move.
I actually started playing this on my RG350 when I first got it in May, but burned out on the difficulty until I figured out how to install the GPSP emulator and use cheat codes. I don’t think I’ve ever completed this “honestly”; I apparently played it with cheat codes in 2014 but have no memory of the experience.
Overall: In a lot of ways, this game is a weird one out: The magic system is unique. There’s no hidden ending or extra hidden game section. The characters never appear before or since. I suspect that they were testing out new directions and features based on what worked in Symphony, and then backstepped on a bunch of them for Harmony of Dissonance.
I used the Card Mode hack to spice up the experience a bit. This hides the cards around the map so they’re guaranteed, rather than making enemies drop them. In practice, I think this makes the game faster but harder—when you’re grinding for card drops, you don’t necessarily realize how much time you’re also grinding for XP. I ended up wildly underleveled for several of the later areas because I wasn’t doing any grinding. I suspect I also never really got the knack of the DSS system, as I clearly was under-using magic.
This game also is just generally on the higher end of the Igavania difficulty scale. The fact that you can’t change weapons and there’s no economy (armor and healing items only come from enemy drops) means that a lot of the control that makes Symphony or the Sorrow games easier isn’t here. There’s also no backstep, which I didn’t think I’d miss but it really would have helped with a few enemies. And the knockback is particularly egregious; enemies bounce you all over the place. The holy water is particularly broken in this game, though, as it deals significant and rapid damage, and there are a lot of knight and demon enemies who barely move.
I actually started playing this on my RG350 when I first got it in May, but burned out on the difficulty until I figured out how to install the GPSP emulator and use cheat codes. I don’t think I’ve ever completed this “honestly”; I apparently played it with cheat codes in 2014 but have no memory of the experience.
Overall: In a lot of ways, this game is a weird one out: The magic system is unique. There’s no hidden ending or extra hidden game section. The characters never appear before or since. I suspect that they were testing out new directions and features based on what worked in Symphony, and then backstepped on a bunch of them for Harmony of Dissonance.
