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Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance – NGP Hack (GBA, Replayed on ReGBA on RG350)
This game doesn’t offer a New Game Plus…unless you use the hack that provides it. It rearranges a bunch of items so you get the best equipment and most of the mobility relics early, opening up more of the game and dropping the difficulty for most of it.
Because I had pretty much all of the mobility items so early but it’s been a decade since I played this, I lost track of the second teleporter that returns you to Castle A…and accidentally cleared out the entire eastern half of Castle B way before I was supposed to. By the time I figured out my mistake and found the teleporter back, I had defeated the Shadow and seen enough Maxim scenes that he just gave me his ring on my first visit to that room. This also meant I didn’t have the split map when this happened and was edging on 100% map completion before I’d even visited most of Castle A. (The plot got kinda confused, is what I’m saying.) And the Lure Key and Skull Key ended up being two of the last things I found because of the weird order I did everything in, so there were locked doors thwarting me right up to the end, and I never managed to use a teleporter in a helpful way.
As I noted when I reviewed this the last time I played it, this game neither points you in the right direction enough nor really allows you enough freedom, so you end up backtracking a lot. You can’t access any of the additional warps between castles or any of the “overlap” early areas until you’ve followed the plot to the right point. The locked doors then force you to circle the map a lot more than really feels fair. If I’d followed a walkthrough and done this in the “correct” order (besides grabbing hidden items you’re supposed to backtrack for when I first pass by), I probably could have cut my play time in half.
(Odd quirk: My personal log of my playtime showed 7 hours. The in-game clock showed 5, and I only died and lost time twice. The game didn’t seem to be slowed down; I’m wondering if in-game clocks are just messed up on the RG350.)
A noteworthy thing about the NoGlo and Palette Fix hacks included as part of this is that they make Maxim sometimes become invisible during the final battle, which is an issue. (I decided I didn’t feel like grinding to get enough levels and potions to handle Dracula; I fought Maxim and took the lesser ending.)
Overall: Like any New Game Plus, this was a fun way to replay the game, though it also broke it open enough to make the flaws more evident.
Because I had pretty much all of the mobility items so early but it’s been a decade since I played this, I lost track of the second teleporter that returns you to Castle A…and accidentally cleared out the entire eastern half of Castle B way before I was supposed to. By the time I figured out my mistake and found the teleporter back, I had defeated the Shadow and seen enough Maxim scenes that he just gave me his ring on my first visit to that room. This also meant I didn’t have the split map when this happened and was edging on 100% map completion before I’d even visited most of Castle A. (The plot got kinda confused, is what I’m saying.) And the Lure Key and Skull Key ended up being two of the last things I found because of the weird order I did everything in, so there were locked doors thwarting me right up to the end, and I never managed to use a teleporter in a helpful way.
As I noted when I reviewed this the last time I played it, this game neither points you in the right direction enough nor really allows you enough freedom, so you end up backtracking a lot. You can’t access any of the additional warps between castles or any of the “overlap” early areas until you’ve followed the plot to the right point. The locked doors then force you to circle the map a lot more than really feels fair. If I’d followed a walkthrough and done this in the “correct” order (besides grabbing hidden items you’re supposed to backtrack for when I first pass by), I probably could have cut my play time in half.
(Odd quirk: My personal log of my playtime showed 7 hours. The in-game clock showed 5, and I only died and lost time twice. The game didn’t seem to be slowed down; I’m wondering if in-game clocks are just messed up on the RG350.)
A noteworthy thing about the NoGlo and Palette Fix hacks included as part of this is that they make Maxim sometimes become invisible during the final battle, which is an issue. (I decided I didn’t feel like grinding to get enough levels and potions to handle Dracula; I fought Maxim and took the lesser ending.)
Overall: Like any New Game Plus, this was a fun way to replay the game, though it also broke it open enough to make the flaws more evident.