Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance

North American box art.

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance is a platform adventure game developed by Konami Tokyo and published by Konami for the Game Boy Advance on 2002-06-06. It is one of many Castlevania games.

I didn't know anything about the game other than it was a later Castlevania game, and that was enough to get me to want to play it. I played it an beat it in 2016. Overall it's just an okay game; worth playing, but nothing new or exciting.

Status

I do not own this game, but I have beat it and seen all three endings, although I needed hints to see the best ending.

Review

• Overall: 4/10
• Best Version: Game Boy Advance

Good

• Having a light and dark side of the castle was a clever way to add difficulty and length to the game as well as introduce some nice puzzles.
• Some of the backgrounds have amazing graphics.
• Some of the puzzles are challenging and took me several attempts, but none seemed unfair.
• I liked how your secondary weapon can be affected by the various spell books to create more special abilities.
• Some of the monsters had a lot of work put into them, like the level 3 skeleton dragon that curled around the columns.

Bad

• The story is pretty garbage and none of the characters are interesting.
• A lot of the sprites are pretty bad, especially the character sprites.
• Most of the monsters were just repeats of earlier Castlevanias with very little originality.
• There are surprisingly few secrets.
• The game has a lot of backtracking.
• Needing to use Maxim's ring to unlock one of the castle's many locked doors took me forever to figure out.
• Why does Juste have an ethereal after-image right from the beginning? It doesn't feel earned, and it's visually distracting.
• The same weak enemies remain for most of the game making backtracking rather pointless.
• I wish the developers had come up with a better way to handle the secondary weapon. I kept accidentally picking up a weapon I didn't want.
• The cross is vastly superior to the other weapons, so, when you get it, all the others are obsolete.
• There aren't any decent hints for getting the good ending.
• The fact that this came out after Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, which is better in every way, is embarrassing for Konami!

Ugly

• Nothing really.

Media

Box Art

• 

  The original Japanese art is very well painted and certainly adds to the Gothic feel.

• 

  All other regions used a more-cropped version of the art with English, and a more tame Castlevania logo. Inferior.

Documentation

• 

  Manual (North America).

• 

  Manual (Japan).

Maps

• 

  Castle A.

• 

  Castle B.

Videos

• youtube.com/watch?v=siIAivGSySs - Longplay.

Titles

Language	Native	Transliteration	Translation
English	Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance
Japanese	キャッスルヴァニア 白夜の協奏曲	Kyassuruvania Byakuya no Koncheruto	Castlevania: Concerto of Midnight Sun

Links

• mobygames.com/game/castlevania-harmony-of-dissonance - MobyGames.
• tcrf.net/Castlevania:_Harmony_of_Dissonance - The Cutting Room Floor.