>never played Castlevania
>have a GBA and a flash-cart with all 3 GBA titles loaded
>heard Aira of Sorrow is by far the best of the 3 but they're all good
>interested in Harmony of Dissonance for the music and art style
Which one should I play first? If I play Aira of Sorrow first, will it kinda spoil me and make the other 2 GBA Castlevania games shit for me?
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CotM and then AoS
pass on HoD
this
Not op but why pass on HoD? Just bought the physical double pack and never played it
Play aos last
no reason to skip HoD, there are only so many competent games in the genre and HoD is one of them
OP play all 3 in production order, then move on to the DS games. the DS titles may have ugly generic anime art but they're some of the best in the franchise. you can skip order of ecclesia though, i'd honestly rank it below the GBA titles. probably one of the worst in the franchise and i've never understood the meme of pretending it's good.
It's the weakest of the 3. It's the worst metroidvania in the series.
that's ooe you're thinking of
HoD first then AoS
CotM should be your last because its hard as fuck
It's mechanically the least interesting and its music is super compressed and shitty sounding. Also uses a way too bright color pallette that looks so cartoony that it's wrong for Castlevania
Worst of all, the huge, game-spanning sidequest is... decorating a room. The reward for its completion is The girl in the story holds onto Juste's arm for a few seconds in the ending.
It's a very dumb game.
>you can skip order of ecclesia though, i'd honestly rank it below the GBA titles. probably one of the worst in the franchise and i've never understood the meme of pretending it's good.
For the love of god ignore this guy.
Ignore him hard.
>never understand the meme of pretending it's good
rapidus fio, that's all
order of ecclesia seems like it was branded castlevania as a last minute decision to sell better
HoD has an unique style, it feels pretty weird, from the graphics to the enemies and the music, everything is just fucking odd, but not bad at all, heavily underrated.
AoS is very polished and nice overall, the best of the GBA ones by a long shot.
CotM is rough at the edges and clunky as shit, everything feels stiff but is still a nice game.
Play them all in any order AoS might spoil you because of how better it feels compared to the other two but they still have their own merits and Juste is F A S T.
na, they are quite different in gameplay.
aria is a really good game. if you dont try it first, make sure to play it sometime.
i never had that thought but i kind of agree. the world map where you literally select a level and the overall linearity of everything really didn't help that feeling.
like portrait of ruin was chunked out pretty cleanly but the areas still had all kinds of stuff to find in them. half the areas in the early game of ooe are just "walk right"
to be fair i don't know how they ever even dreamed they could meet the bar that PoR set though. that final boss is one of the best vidya finales of all time.
>Ignoring OoE
what are you? stupid?
>music is super compressed and shitty sounding
Not really, it's not that bad though most GBA games had audio issues.
Honestly it has one of my favorite Castlevania soundtracks for sure. I think more people were turned off by the literal dissonance in the songs. It was kinda 2deep4u
ooe isn't metroidvania
Harmony of Dissonance is awesome but gets a bad wrap because the gba sound quality is kinda bad
DoS is even worse than HoD though
OoE actually has a decent gameplay system. I hated waiting around for all my MP to recharge in the other games so much
Do the DS Castlevania games run well on PC? I heard the DS emulator sucked horribly or something?
dos aint bad at all, but i have a soft spot for soma's gameplay style so i'm probably biased. doesn't help that it has that stupid touchscreen gimmick for boss battles. it's still better than ooe tho
HoD soundtrack is unique, they chosen to use some really fucking strange instruments to do it, never listened to something similar.
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DeSmuME works fine
dont mind the map, its randomized
I enjoyed CotM even after playing AoS (my favorite Castlevania). Never been able to get through all of HoD, always lose interest somewhere along the way.
i made a sprite comic a long time ago using recolors of AoS sprites
>3 screens
???
>somashit is the best
>HoD has good music and art
Does anyone, by chance, have a dracula version of the skinner pathetic meme?
Based and randomizerpilled, surely you are playing with the enemy stats to the max while your equipment, etc stats are at the lowest so the game becomes actually challenging.
I don't view it like that. I view it kinda more like OoE was trying to throw a bone to games of classic Castlevania games. It was released around the time they were doing Adventure Rebirth, it actually had you spend most of the game outside the castle and it is easily the hardest of any of the nonlinear games because Shanoa can take about as many hits as Trevor even at max level and can easily get oneshotted.
DoS is literally just Aria with a lot of bullshit grinding added because of the forge system and souls having levels to their effectiveness and then changing the physics to be more like PoR, which shittifies the damage output of heavy weapons by making them too slow and doesn't even allow you to compensate with precision like Aria did. It's bad. Meanwhile you haven't even pointed out a single flaw of OoE.
OP here, part of why I'm drawn to Harmony of Dissonance is the fucking soundtrack, I've been listening several songs in, and I have no clue how you couldn't think this shit is gold. It's fucking incredible.
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Yes, it sounds like GBC music, but that's partially what makes it so fucking good. Beats all the songs I've heard from the other GBA songs so far
Is an acquired taste, only real chads can appreciate it's magnificence.
based. brainlets will never see the appeals of HoD, especially the music
The music and art style of HoD were a response to the problems of CotM.
This was all before nintendo started doing backlit handhelds, so the darker and more subtle art of CotM was nigh impossible to see; HoD remedied this by making everything brighter, and giving important things an additional outline.
Music was simplified because the system could only play so many notes at once. In CotM, occasionally too many sounds would play at once, and something would get cut out. By simplifying the music, HoD could avoid this in all cases.
This isn't to say CotM doesn't look WAY better on a backlit system, but that doesn't really matter if you can't see anything because of the lack of a backlight. As for the music, I felt that was a much lesser issue to begin with, and would have preferred a better score, even if it meant sound effects occasionally being omitted.
Fuck that cryptic bullshit in CotM, though. You'd miss half the content if you didn't know where it was to begin with.
Play them in this order:
>Rondo of Blood
>Symphony of the night
>Aria of Sorrow
>Dawn of Sorrow
>Portrait of Ruin
>Order of Ecclessia
CotM is semi-classic Castlevania, AoS is full-on "modern" metroidvania. HoD is a subpar mixture of both, but still decent on its own.
If you play cotm (it's fine to skip it and go straight to aos) be sure to use the cheat code so you don't need to double tap to run
I will say, I don't care for CotM's soundtrack either because it is almost entirely composed of remixes of older Castlevania tracks that all sound worse than their original versions. But I don't really like HoD's either. None of the melodies are really served well by the chiptune other than literally the one you posted, which is the just level 1 theme that they actually put effort into. And even that track still sounds way better when you hear it with actual instruments in the credits
it's been a long-ass time since i played ooe but i just don't remember being impressed by any given moment of the whole damn game, that's all really. i remember the crab fight (who doesn't) and that's pretty much it. maybe i should give it another try some time but it's just generally not an interesting game to me.
Nah there are a ton of bangers, don't get it twisted:
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What I really appreciate about the soundtrack is it's literal use of dissonance, which you almost never hear in 8-bit music. It's really challenging and unique for a video game soundtrack. Nothing else sounds like this.
I really feel like the criticisms at the time in 2002 are just kinda game journalism criticism that "old is bad", since the GBA just recently came out, and the GBC was dying. At the time hearing music that has sounds and tones similar to GBC music is kind of low hanging fruit for criticism. Nowadays since retro is cool, nobody would make these criticisms.
Don't listen to any of them.
OoE > DoS > literal shit >>>>> PoR
guys when are we going to get another proper Castlevania game for the first time in about 10 years?
There are lots of great Castlevania games, but it feels bad knowing nothing will ever come close to SotN in every possible way
I don't really like most of those, but I will admit, they do sound a lot better in a vacuum than they do when you're actually playing HoD. When you're playing Castlevania, you tend to want something that sounds a little more distinctly... gothic, you know what I mean? And I mean, it does try to do that in a few tracks, but I dunno, the bleep bloops and the bright colors are just a real atmosphere killer.
That's some shit taste you got theme m8, allow me to educate you.
SotN>OoE>PoR>AoS>DoS>HoD>CotM
There's really no point in any of the handheld games after you've played SotN.
Bullshit, if anything SotN will make you want more.
SotN isn't as good as either Aria or OoE
Reverse castle alone is worse than all of OoE's area reuse combined, and neither of those games force you into awkward transformations as your main method of getting around. There are also not a million and a half ways to destroy their difficulty before the endgame point. In general both of them have much more focused and cohesive gameplay systems that don't do a million things at once and leave you with a plethora of half-baked, unbalanced mechanics. SotN is a good game and deserves its status as a classic, but let's not pretend it's way far above the rest
>you can skip order of ecclesia
Did you dislike it because it's not super easy and you suck at video games?
What don't you like about PoR, user?