Castlevania Advance Collection

[b]Review after 100%[/b] I love Castlevania, but in all honesty, I stuggled to decide whether this collection deserved a recommendation or not. The problem is that this is really just [i]Aria of Sorrow[/i] and its Adequate Friends. There are so many good metroidvanias out these days that I can't think of a good reason to play these. And then there's [i]Dracula X[/i]. I'll get to that one. Whether or not you'll enjoy this collection depends on the answer to this question: do you think the idea of grinding for random drops in a 2D platformer is fun? [u][b]Circle of the Moon[/b][/u] This game is just unpleasant to control, because they made dashing into a double tap command. It's actually a power up, albeit it's the first one you find. You usually want to be dashing, which means [i]every single time[/i] you want to move anywhere, you have to double tap the direction you want to go. In a game like a metroidvania where you're exploring a castle, making movement cumbersome just makes the entire game not that fun to get through. Enemies have very simplistic attack patterns, which means you're just running through halls of enemies who are easy to deal with and killing them for exp. The castle layout isn't very interesting. The powerups are also boring. There's dashing like I mentioned earlier, double jumping, and... being able to push boxes, which you only need to do to progress. Cool. The most fun one is the super jump, which you only get when you're about to finish the game anyway. The interesting upgrades come from the "DSS" system. Enemies have a chance to drop cards. You can combine the cards to create a wide variety of spell effects. The problem is that most of them are kind of useless. Also, the cards are random drops, which means you need to grind enemies a lot to get them to drop. Beating the game unlocks the ability to re-play it using modifiers, the first of which being "Magician" which starts you off with all of the cards and a huge mana pool, but weaker combat stats. This sounds cool, but what it will actually translate to is you summoning a giant chicken to do a screen-wiping attack over and over. [u][b]Harmony of Dissonance[/b][/u] This game has a bright, garish artstyle which was made with the GBA's terrible screen in mind. In a modern setting, it just makes the game look kind of odd. I didn't mind it, but a lot of people find it ugly. It improves on a lot of areas over [i]Circle of the Moon[/i]. Moving around is a lot more fun because you can rapidly dash using the shoulder buttons. The castle layout is a bit better, and enemies have actual interesting attack patterns. Also, there is no grinding involved to get spells. In fact, even though this game has a leveling system, you probably won't need to grind at all, because this might be the easiest Castlevania game I've played. What sinks this game is its gimmick. There are two versions of the same castle overlaid on top of each other. The exact same layouts, just with different aesthetics and enemy placements. Which means you need to play through the same castle layout twice, hunt for secrets twice, plus any backtracking you want to do. I was actually enjoying this one a lot up until the halfway point when the 2-castle gimmick is revealed and I realized I'd need to re-play everything I just did to cover the castle layout a second time. Also, this might just be the worst soundtrack in the entire mainline series. Beating the game unlocks Maxim Mode, allowing you to play through the game again with a character who can't collect upgrades, but is so powerful out of the gate that he can advance through the castle however he wants. However, he is a glass cannon, and as a result I died on him more than Juste. It's pretty fun, assuming you can stomach going through that castle layout 2 more times. [u][b]Aria of Sorrow[/b][/u] This is the star of the collection, undeniably the best game in the whole thing. The castle layout is interesting, the enemy variety is fun, the difficulty isn't too easy but also not too hard. The gimmick is also very cool, where when you defeat enemies you have a chance to absorb their powers. Monster powers are almost all actually useful, even if a lot of them do the same thing. It's really fun on a casual playthrough to see what drops for you and strategize how to use it to overcome the game's challenges. You only need 3 specific powers to get the good ending, one of which is a guaranteed drop. What killed this game for me is my quest to 100% the collection, which meant I needed to get all 118 souls. The drop rate on enemy powers is atrocious. The Luck stat does basically nothing at all to help, and the only item to improve the drop chance costs 300,000 gold, which is itself a grind to afford. Farming all souls easily doubled my playtime. Without doing that, you'll probably beat the game in a brisk 4-5 hours. Beating the game unlocks Julius Mode. He's a Belmont, except he has all of the Belmont's classic items and can cycle through them, on top of having the whip. He can also super jump from the start of the game. He only levels up by defeating bosses and can't otherwise get upgrades. It's a fun mode to play through if you enjoyed the game the first time around. [u][b]Dracula X[/b][/u] This is a classic style Castlevania where you're just trying to get to the end of linear levels. I prefer classic Castlevanias to the Metroidvania games. My favorite games in the franchise are [i]Castlevania 3[/i], [i]Rondo of Blood[/i], and [i]Castlevania Bloodlines[/i]. Despite that, I shamelessly savestated my way through this mess. This might be the HARDEST Castlevania game, but for all the WRONG reasons. There is a lot of randomness involved, mostly in the form of almost every screen of almost every level constantly assaulting you with randomly spawning enemies. Bats, medusa heads, flaming skulls, water skulls, you just get relentlessly attacked by these randomly spawning enemies that move in fluttery patterns. I love classic Castlevania games for their difficulty, but their difficulty is usually fair. Once you learn the layout of a level and the enemy spawns, you know what you need to do to win and you just need to execute it. In this game, depending on how enemies move and how the little buggers fly in to harass you, you can just get torn apart and it will feel extremely frustrating and unfair. Special note for this one skeleton guard in the clocktower stage who can just stand on the ledge and block you from getting up, and there's no way to coerce him to move that I found, so you just need to eat a ton of damage to get by him if he happens to stand there. If he (again, seemingly at random) decides to stand on the other side of the platform, you can just bypass him. This is the kind of RNG nonsense you can expect. Towards the end of the game, the bosses also become highly random in their attack patterns. Death is bad, but the Dracula fight is just the worst. If you can beat this game without abusing savestates, I tip my hat to you. You have a lot more patience than me. [u][b]The emulation itself[/b][/u] A lot of people leaving bad reviews for this game note that the emulation is bare-bones. This might be true, but this collection provides a very useful feature for the three metroidvania games. For [i]Circle of the Moon[/i], the game will tell you whether the enemy you're fighting can drop a card and if you've already collected it, and for [i]Aria of Sorrow[/i] it will do the same for enemy souls. Meanwhile for [i]Harmony of Dissonance[/i], the game will tell you how many hidden power ups there are to collect in a region of the map, so you know if you've got them all or not. In my opinion, this makes this collection the best way to experience these games.

To my mind Symphony Of The Knight is the best 2d Castlevania, but it's a moot point given that it isn't included here. What there is included is 3 of the best "modern" Castlevanias, and one that is utterly retro "ancient" dog-sh*t By that I mean, whilst these are all still donkeys years old, they aren't just "plod along and whip stuff", and have non-linear design, more advanced combat and more game-play mechanics. This applies to everything but 'Dracula X', which is just plod along and whip stuff, and feels embarrassingly clunky and simplistic compared to the others. I shall speak no more on that one, as it literally has nothing redeemable about it in my book. Make the sign of the cross and then curse this blandest of demons back into the bland hell-pit that spawned it, foul wee beastie! The other 3 are: Circle of the moon / harmony of dissonance / aria of sorrow, and they are, generally, quite excellent, though unfortunately not all in the same way and at the same time. As far as I recall: that is the chronological order in which they were released, so it's a bit weird that 'Harmony' etc throws out some of the things 'Circle' etc does really well. This, I guess, was because they had two teams working on these titles, or a different director for each project, so the earliest title is a brilliant expansion of SOTN's deeper game-play, whilst the latter one is somewhat stripped back. When you play them in order you get a first game with a modicum of depth to your combat abilities, and an intricate magic system that rewards experimentation, which is then followed by a game that has slightly more expansive combat skills and...uh...not much else. Almost everything good about the previous game is thrown out, with some modest enhancements elsewhere to make up for it. This is then followed by 'Aria' which finds some middle-ground between the two, and as such is a definite improvement from 'Harmony' but still a little ways off being the true successor to SOTN. If only they could take the excellent combat of 'Harmony' and give it the richness of mechanics found in 'Circle' then you would have the complete "modern" Castlevania. But they never did, so you get bits and bobs of greatness spread through-out the three titles. They're fun to explore and challenging, with some epic (at least, for the time) boss-battles that may not compare to actual modern titles for reflex- driven and intricately patterned attacks, but they all look pretty impressive. Some of the music can be pretty cool, and some of it....not, but there you are. Some of the dialogue and story-telling can be good, and some of it...not. That's old Japanese games for you! But, you know, Konami were pretty good back in the day at making engaging games, and that's exactly what you get here. It's just a problem with their consistency that lessens each title, though they're still worth it in my opinion. I guess the problem you have for new players is that you wouldn't really have to try too hard to find games in this genre that go above and beyond what they did here, but there's a gothic charm to these old titles, with solid game-play mechanics and design that has aged very well. If you were a fan back in the day then you probably don't need any persuading and nostalgia isn't clouding the appeal of them. They played well then, they play well now....except for 'Dracula X' of course, which was always some backwards crap even then.

For now I haven't played Dracula X, being solely interested in recapturing nostalgia for my old game collection. But in replaying the beginnings of both COTM and AOS (I'm saving HOJ since it has the least replay value of the three I'm familiar with), I've gotten the general idea of this program. It's not an ideal job of resurrecting these early-2000s classics, there are some issues with the control scheme and such that bug me a little, but overall it's exactly what I wanted, all three of these games being restored to my possession for a trivial price, which would be a bargain even for just one of them. (One tiny nitpick is that the music player is stated below to allow you to create "playlists", whereas as far as I can tell it allows you to create ONE playlist. But I don't have a huge problem with that, it's just misleading ad copy for a product I bought without reading said ads.)

It is a great collection of games. I was not particularly fond of the keybinds or the fact that you cannot change the controls, but I just used autohotkey and that worked fine for me. If you don't care about keybinds or using 3rd party software this collection is great

A good collection of post-SOTN Castlevania games. I enjoyed these when I was younger, and I still enjoy them now.

Went through all of Aria of Sorrow, one of my most replayed games ever and unfortunately out of every console I ever played it on/emulated it, this steam version has got to be the worst one. Now my laptop sucks for gaming but this is a 10 megabyte game atleast, why is there so much fucking lag, jesus christ part of the fun of metroidvanias is in the movement and smoothness of it, the frame rate is constantly tanking and the quality of the audio goes with it as well to the point that it opened an auditory portal of hell. Go emulate the games, unless you want to achievement hunt or have a permanent save file like I wanted.

classic Gameboy Advance Games you will love these Castlevania Games.

Red Lobster approves

Aria of Sorrow.