Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

Platform:  Game Boy Advance
Developer:  Konami
Released:  2003
Genre:  Metroidvania (Action Adventure)

The Game
During an eclipse in the year 2035, Soma Cruz and Mina Hark- er, Hakuba get sucked into Dracula's castle.  Finding themselves trapped, Mina stays by the entrance while Soma explores the building, trying to find a way out.  He meets several people tied to the mystery of the castle along the way, begins to display powers he never knew he had, and gets inexorably drawn into a dark destiny that's been waiting for him his whole life.

Aria of Sorrow is the second GBA Castlevania made by the folks who created Symphony of the Night, and it is the third and last Castlevania game made for the GBA overall.  It has a sequel, Dawn of Sorrow, which was made for the DS.

The Characters
Soma Cruz is our protagonist, ladies and gentlemen.  He's your typical white-haired Japanese pretty boy type, but he still manages to be a pretty interesting character for all that.  He's got the powers, the destiny, and the dark secret that even he doesn't know, which all gives him some pretty decent inner and outer conflicts.

Mina Harkne- dangit, did it again, I mean Mina Hakuba is his childhood friend (there seem to be a lot of those in Castlevania) and one of the keepers of the shrine from which the two of them get transported to the castle.  She spends most of her time giving hints (provided by one of the other characters) and healing Soma when he stops by to see her at the castle's entrance.  Basic two-dimensional support character.

Graham Jones is the primary antagonist for most of the game.  He tries to buddy up with Soma at first, but once he realizes that the younger man is absorbing the powers of the castle's monsters, he gets ticked.  Why?  Because he was born on the day that Dracula was last defeated (supposedly forever) back in 1999, and he intends to be the one to absorb all those powers, as well as the very essence of Dracula in the hopes of becoming Dracula himself.  He's kind of a jerk for the rest of the game, but even then he's pretty affable, since he believes his ascension is inevitable and that Soma is a minor speed bump at most on the path to his destiny.

Then there are a few minor characters wandering around . . .

Yoko Belnades is a member of the church who meets up with Soma a few times to encourage him and help keep him focused.  Genya Arikado is a dapper man in a suit who provides Soma with information about the castle, mostly by passing along hints through Mina.  He's also Alucard, Dracula's son.  I'm not really spoiling anything there . . . very early in the game, Yoko (I think it was Yoko, anyway) nearly calls him Alucard before correcting herself.  The shortly named J is an amnesiac wandering around the castle.  The only thing he's certain of is that he has some connection with what's going on, and he's right.

And then . . . there's Hammer.

Hammer is quite possibly one of the worst human beings in existence.  He's an American Army guy that was ordered to go to Mina's shrine, but once he gets trapped in Dracula's castle, he almost immediately abandons his ill-defined mission and decides to start selling crap that he's found to Soma for a profit.  So to start off with, he's a greedy wuss.  And he's also something of a stingy greedy wuss, since everything he sells is swords and spears and the like.  You're an army guy, dude!  Where's your machine gun?!  Your grenades?!  I'll buy 'em all!  Sure, I might need some sort of magic sword when I'm fighting Dracula Jones or whatever, but when I use the single Handgun in the game, it seems to perforate the regular monsters just fine!  Hell, the Zombie Soldiers throw grenades!  What, you couldn't find any extra grenades to sell me?!

And to cap off his being a useless greedy wuss, he's also got rape face.  I'm gonna show you a picture to prove it, but don't look too long or he might steal your soul . . .

There is absolutely nothing about that expression that doesn't say "YOU GOAN GET RAPED".  And yes, I know that might be profiling or whatever, but after Yoko gets injured and has to sit out the rest of the game unconscious at the main gate where Hammer's set up his shop, he asks Soma about her and says that she's his "type".  Yes, Hammer.  I'm quite sure that the unconscious woman who has a nasty knife wound is definitely your type, you sick fuck.

Sweet Jebus.

The Writing
Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and say the story is good.  Betrayal, dark destinies, good vs. evil, some enemies become friends and some friends become enemies, blah blah blah.  But it all seems to move so fast.  It might be a translation thing, I dunno and I'm quite willing to believe that's all there is to it, but a lot of the characters just seem to jump to certain (correct) conclusions pretty damn quick.  At one point, one of the characters asks Soma if he knows anything about "the predictions".  Exactly that.  Absolutely no clue as to exactly which predictions out of the millions or billions that have been made in the past, or even which of the lesser but still substantial numbers of very famous predictions made.  But Soma automatically divines that they mean the future insights of Nostradamus and is told "Exactly!".

And this sort of thing happens several times throughout the game, to the point where I started to believe that everyone in the castle had somehow gained either telepathic or precognitive powers.  A minor thing, but annoying nonetheless.

The Gameplay
Soma is sloooooooow, ohmigaw he is slow.  Not so slow that it's frustrating or annoying, really, but still slow enough that I noticed it almost constantly.  He doesn't get a proper dash maneuver until almost the very end of the game, so most of the time I was walking every damn where.  Fortunately, there are portals spaced somewhat evenly throughout the castle, allowing quick and easy transport from one area to another.  Also fortunately, his lack of speed doesn't adversely affect the combat for the most part.

I like the weapons system of Aria.  The Vampire Killer whip is cool, don't get me wrong.  But after playing around with nothing but that whip in Harmony of Dissonance, it felt good to get a nice variety of weapons to choose from.  Soma gets to choose from hammers (powerful but slow), spears (swung from underneath), and two kinds of swords (stabbing straight out and swinging down from above), as well as a nice selection of specialty weapons that work in various ways, such as the Whip Sword (acts like a whip, natch) and the Handgun (which shoots things from a distance, also natch).  The spears and hammers annoyed the hell out of me, so I stuck mostly to the swords which, thankfully, were the most plentiful weapon type in the game.

While I liked the weapons and most other aspects of the game's combat, I'm kind of on the fence about the soul system.  Much of Soma's abilities come from absorbing the randomly dropped souls of the monsters he kills.  There are three types, those being Red (one-shot attack abilities, activated like subweapons in other Castlevanias), Blue (sustained abilities, with a mixed bag of results covering attacks, defense, and movement), and Yellow (support abilities).  While I certainly like the depth of the system, allowing you to have a wide variety of power combination, I don't like that circumstances in the game often force you to change these abilities on the fly.  I don't know about anyone else, but I feel that if you end up spending as much or even more time in your menu screen switching out abilities as you do fighting monsters and, y'know, actually playing the game, there might be a small problem with the way the system is set up.

The Challenge
Aria of Sorrow sits right on the good side of frustratingly difficult for me.  There were a few times when I started to get truly annoyed at the cheap shit that kept getting thrown at me (the Disc Armors, green Medusa Heads, and most of the flying enemies were especially nasty about this), but overall I found the game to be decently challenging, especially after the slaughterously easy Harmony of Dissonance.  I found myself having to actually come up with different sets of tactics for each new monster I faced . . . hell, the fact that I had to come up with tactics to take any of the monsters out is in itself pretty cool, and points to good AI programming.  They weren't just buffing up monsters later in the game with more HP and MP, they were actually giving them unique abilities and behaviors that I had to take into account in order to get ahead.

So kudos on that!

The Graphics
It may be just me, but it looks like this game took a step back from Harmony in the graphics department, especially in the lighting effects of the lamps, candelabras, and the like.  There's also a few odd bits here and there that I noticed, such as the wavy fog cutting off oddly at walls.  As a trade-off, the character models - which was one of the few things I faulted Harmony on in the graphics department - have been much improved.  Soma isn't surrounded by a neon blue aura, his walk cycles make it look like he's moving with a goldurn purpose, and everyone actually appears like they belong in a Game Boy Advance game.  I really think-

GAH!  Jeez, okay, that's one graphic I definitely could have done without.

The Music
I decided to actually try and pay attention to the music for this game, and I found it very easy to do here, 'cause I like it!  If I was the type to buy soundtracks to things, I might possibly someday perhaps consider maybe buying the AoS soundtrack.

The Bottom Line
Yah, I complained about a few things, but they were mostly minor.  Overall I feel that this is a good and definitely very solid game.  Played once, would play again.

Metroid Fusion

Platform:  Game Boy Advance
Developer:  Nintendo R&D1
Released:  2002
Genre:  Action Adventure

The Game
Some time after the events in Super Metroid, Samus Aran goes back to SR388 (the home planet of the metroids, which she scoured clean of the little buggers back in Metroid II: Return of Samus) with a group of scientists from the Biologic Space Laboratories (aka BSL).  She encounters and is infected by an organism that becomes known as an X Parasite.  The X attacks not only her but the organic parts of her suit, several sections of which the scientists have to surgically remove and later send off to one of their labs for study.  Just as Samus is about to shuffle off this mortal coil, someone hits on the idea of using some Metroid cells to whip up an antidote, and it works!  Samus can never be infected by X again, but it has irreversibly changed her cellular structure.  After she has mostly recovered, she gets a call from the Galactic Federation, sending her to the BSL space station on which her infected suit parts were being studied.  Seems there's been some sort of mishap, and they need Samus to go check it out . . .

Metroid Fusion is the fourth game in the primary Metroid series (despite the "Prime" in their name, the Metroid Prime series is a side story that happens in between Metroid and Metroid II), and the second to be on a hand-held system.

The Characters
Samus does a lot more gabbing in this game than she does in most Metroid installments, though we still don't get too much info on just what she's like.  We know that she's basically pragmatic, resourceful, determined, and has a problem with authority . . . but that could be said of virtually any action hero.

Fusion introduces a new character into the Metroid universe, an artificial intelligence that Samus eventually nicknames "Adam", after a commanding officer of hers of which she was somewhat fond.  He's an interesting character, and I actually look forward to seeing more of both him and his namesake, the latter of which is slated to appear in the upcoming Other M.

The best character in the game, however, has to be the X Parasites themselves.  They've turned out to be a very interesting new foe for Samus, a worthy successor to the space pirates and metroids of the previous games.  I found the way they work to be very well thought out and executed.  After infecting and absorbing the cells of a host creature, killing it off in the process, the X has the ability to duplicate the form and abilities of that creature.  In their natural form, they appear to be a giant floating mass of plasm.  If this had been another series - say, System/Bio Shock instead of Metroid - I could see how they could have turned into something extremely dark and creepy, which gave them a nice edge.  Not that they aren't kinda creepy anyway.

Speaking of creepy, and representing the best of the best, is SA-X.  SA-X is the X Parasite which infested the organic parts of Samus' original suit, and it has used that and the bits of Samus' DNA that it absorbed to turn itself into the ultra ass kicking machine that Samus was at the end of Super Metroid.  This scary bitch truly is creepy, and dangerous, and every time she comes on the screen, the game lets you know it.  She is also, of course, the final boss (or at least the last one to really count), and extremely good at it.

The Writing
Fusion's story is great.  The struggle against the X is well done, and the sequence of events through the course of the game is well plotted.  Though Metroid isn't really a series that particularly needs a lot of plot, this one makes the absolute best of what it's got.

But while the story is great, the writing is not.  Props on a good idea, but several million points off for terrible execution.  Firstly, I feel that the game would have been better serviced if the intro had been playable.  It would've helped give the player a better connection to Samus' predicament if her infection by the parasite had been part of a playable battle sequence instead of about three seconds in a cut scene.  As it is, the whole intro just kinda feels like "Okay, sooooo, a bunch of stuff happened . . . and now it's game time!"  Why couldn't it have been game time while that bunch of stuff happened?  I mean, we got to play the part where the infant metroid was taken by Ridley at the beginning of Super Metroid, after all.

And second, much of the backstory stuff in Fusion feels extremely tacked on.  I don't mind backstory exposition and I don't mind flashbacks or references to it, but I do mind it when it feels like it's just coming out of nowhere and sounds like it was just made up on the spot and doesn't fit in with anything else.  As much as I would like to know more about Adam and the Adam AI, both elements have just that sort of feel to me.

The Gameplay
The controls are spot on.  Steering Samus around in this game feels smooth and comfortable, very close to the way it was in Super Metroid.  The rooms are nice and spacious, allowing for even better movement and fine control.  It shocks and dismays me that they took this wonderfully constructed engine and turned it into the lurching horror that is the Zero Mission engine.

There are changes both big and small in the way Samus' abilities work from previous installments in the Metroid series.  The changes - such as the Ice Missiles instead of the Ice Beam - took a little getting used to, but it's not so bad or so different overall.  I look forward to seeing how the new suit's powers develop in future games.

The Challenge
Fusion manages to hit that sweet spot that so few games seem to do.  It doesn't take the super-easy route where walking from one end of the map to the other is a cakewalk and I barely even notice that I'm trodding on the gashed and bleeding backs of my enemies.  It doesn't take the super-hard route where I die time after time after time and feel that there is no Earthly way of getting past a certain point.  Instead, I died every once in a while, but in ways that I could see were my own fault, and that if I tried just a few more times, I could eventually get past it.  Winning involved neither luck of the draw nor simple button mashing; it involved learning the skill necessary to advance.  And I like that.

The place where this was most evident to me was the final battle with the SA-X.  I believe I tried beating her at least twenty times, but none of those deaths left me feeling discouraged in the least.  I gradually got further and further with each fight, learning the moves needed to keep one step ahead of the SA-X as I went along.  There wasn't any hoping that she didn't randomly use this particular ability and wipe me out with one shot, there wasn't any relying on a particular glitch or weakness that the game designer hadn't anticipated . . . it was all me, baby.  And that's the way it should be.  No cheap outs for the game's AI or for the player.  No attempts that end within three seconds of the fight because Samus got hit once and THERE ARE NO ROOM FOR MISTAKES, DAMMIT!

I wish more game designers would learn to set the challenge rating of their games like this.

The Graphics
Mostly based on those of Super Metroid, so verrah nice.

I didn't think I would, but I'm digging the design of Samus' new suit.  In the end, it doesn't really look that much different from the original, anyway, except for having a more organic than technological look.

I love the level design of Fusion.  Running around underground in caves and planet-based pirate bases is great and all, but the shift to a space station is a nice change of pace.  I really enjoyed the more logical, structured form of the station compared to the sprawling, organic feel of the previous game maps.  When the computer first opened up the elevators for the six main sections, all lined up in a tidy little row, I though, "Oh, hey . . . this is gonna be neat."

The Music
No complaints here.  Sounded a lot like Super Metroid music to me.

The Bottom Line
I have to admit, when I first started reading about Fusion way back when it originally came out, I was a bit leery.  Samus is in a weird new suit?  She's fighting some kind of Parasite organism that isn't a metroid?  Eeeeeeh, I dunnoooooo . . .

I'm thankful to say that as I progressed through the game, these feelings were quickly abandoned by the wayside.  The whole "new suit" thing wasn't nearly as much of a departure from the original as I had built up in my head, and I won't mind seeing it again in Metroid 5 or whatever.  The X Parasites were also pretty dang snazzy, and I find myself hoping they might pop up again later on.

In the end, I'm gonna place Metroid Fusion as my second favorite in the series, right after Super Metroid.  It's a damn good game in my opinion, and one that I'll most likely end up playing through again at least a few more times.

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance

Platform:  Nintendo Game Boy Advance
Developer:  Konami
Released:  2002
Genre:  Metroidvania (Action Adventure)

The Game
Juste Belmont, grandson of Simon Belmont, is drawn into the fight against Dracula when his friend Maxim returns from a long journey having lost both a huge chunk of his memory and Lydie, his and Juste's childhood friend.  Together, the two men retrace Maxim's steps until they come across a strange castle filled with monstrous beasties.  Over the course of the game, Juste comes to find out that it is Dracula's castle (duh) and that the spirits within now threaten not only Juste and Lydie's life, but Maxim's very soul.

This is the second game created by the people who made the widely acclaimed Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, making it one of the earliest installments of the Castlevania series to help bring about the fan term "Metroidvania".  It also pulls some thematic inspiration from Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, as you go around the castle collecting the same body parts of Dracula that Simon grabs up in that earlier game and they are intimately tied into the mystery behind the bond between Maxim and the castle.

The Characters
Though there is an interesting story to be had, like most Castlevanias, characterization is fairly sparse, the worst instance being Lydie, who doesn't really progress beyond being your typical damsel in distress.  Juste is more or less your standard hero type, his emotional range staying pretty well within the "angry-concerned-jovial" trilogy of action hero acting.  Maxim is the one who comes closest to approaching interesting, since he's the only one to have any real motivations and internal conflict, but he's only seen on a handful of occasions throughout the game.

Still, the lack of real characterization doesn't really detract from the game, as it's more or less just a basic framework upon which to hang the other elements of the game.

The Writing
As with the characterization, the story is a fairly basic tale of rivalry, betrayal, action, heroism, self-sacrifice, and good vs. evil.  Nothing to get too excited about, but it does its job adequately.

The Gameplay
The gameplay is where Harmony of Dissonance truly shines.  Juste moves extremely well, and gains several power ups that improve his maneuverability even more.  Considering the scale of the castle and that you'll be spending a massive amount of your time just moving from one section on one side of the map to another section all the way on the other side, this is a good thing.  Without the dash and slide abilities, I would most likely have given up after the third or fourth time having to walk through any given section.

Though Juste's primary attack (the whip, natch) stays more or less the same throughout the entire game, I like the depth they gave to the subweapon system.  You've got all your standard Castlevania mainstays such as the Dagger, Axe, and Holy Water, but you can also mix and match them with the five spellbooks you can find throughout the castle for varying effects.  The one I ended up using for the most part was the Wind Book + Cross combo, which caused a shield of flying crosses to whirl around Juste in a wide circle, damaging any creature hit by it.

The equipment system is pretty basic, but solid.  Most items are rare, but you rarely ever even use them, so it's not a big deal.

The Challenge
If there's one spot I can point to and definitely say "I'm not happy with this" without any qualifiers, it would have to be that Harmony of Dissonance is too damn easy.  I explored 200% of the castle (there's two castles, by the way, just like in Symphony of the Night), got all three endings, found almost every single findable item in the game, beat every mini-boss . . . and I died a total of two times.  And it wasn't even because the guys I was fighting were particularly difficult.  It was because I'd gotten so used to just flying through every obstacle that I stopped paying attention to my health meter most of the time.  Things jumped to being a little bit tougher in the second castle and I hadn't been prepared for just how much life each hit would take from me.  After these two deaths and after just a few minutes of collecting better gear, I was able to go right back to coasting through the entire rest of the game.  Even the end bosses ended up going down like little bitches.

Yawn.

The Graphics
Stellar.  The castle is beautifully atmospheric, looking just like Dracula's castle should in a Castlevania game.  The monsters, both the classic and the new, have wonderful designs and well-made sprites.

Unfortunately, this cannot be said of the human character sprites.  Juste, Maxim, and Lydie are all very muddy and ill-defined, looking more like they belong in the NES era than the SNES look that the GBA usually achieves.  Further, Juste is inexplicably surrounded by a blue aura that trails behind him as blue afterimages of himself.  Now, I know that Alucard had a similar shadowy effect on him in Symphony of the Night, but in SotN, it looked cool and wasn't very obtrusive.  In HoD, it's this terrible flat neon blue that looks horribly out of place and is, frankly, an eyesore.  An eyesore that follows you around the entire damn game because it's attached to the player character like some sort of super-resilient bioluminescent fungus.

The Music
I typically don't pay attention to game music unless it's particularly bad.  Since I didn't really pay that much attention to it here, I've just gotta assume that it wasn't bad enough to attract my notice.  The only points at which the music did catch my ear was during the file naming screen (a funky beat that I rather enjoyed) and in the save rooms (there didn't seem to be any music, and the sudden lack of audio output caught me off guard and annoyed me every single time).

The Bottom Line
The creators of Harmony of Dissonance, it seems, wanted to try and make lightning strike twice by crafting what would basically be a portable version of Symphony of the Night.  For the most part, I would say that they succeeded.  It's of a smaller scope and naturally limited by the platform that it was created for, but still a very entertaining play and, in my opinion, worth wasting a few hours on.  I just wish that it had been a little more difficult and that the hero wasn't lined with dayglo shoelaces.