Konami is competing with emulation here, especially trying to sell you games you could have emulated and running in faster than the time it takes to get a purchase complete and download finished, and they did a pretty good job. No visual filters, so you only have crunchy pixels and crunchier pixels, but they have in-game encyclopedias, 10 save states, 5 replay slots, concept art, a rewind feature, and roms of all regions, as well as improved sound quality (All of this should have been in the LAST collection, idiots.), but there's nothing you can do to make HoD's music tolerable. Overall, this is a really well done pack of only one really good game and a few other okay ones. If you are looking for Metroidvanias to replay and are not picky, you might be better off rerunning Bloodstained or Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom or Hollow Knight or Rabi Ribi, all stronger overall packages. However, there is almost nothing that can scratch the nostalgia itch if you are specifically itching for the aesthetic of Castlevania, and there is nothing wrong at all with being nostalgic for another go at Aria of Sorrow. If you know that's what you want, by all means, jump right into this collection. If you are new to these games and want a trip into gaming history, climb aboard. But if you're just shopping around and not really committed to these games and they are not new to you, there are better games that deserve replaying more.
Brief reviews of the games:
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon - Recommmended: Probably the most bog standard Metroidvania ever made. The traversal powers are just awful. You have a wall jump and a double jump but everything else is just break blocks or slowly push blocks and there is no sense of flow. Collecting a new power just means you have to go randomly check every half finished room on the map hoping you find the next level and not some useless Heart Max Up collectible. Following up SOTN, this game did add one feature that SOTN lacked: A game over screen. You actually stand a good chance of dying in this one unlike SOTN. The enemies hit hard and on average have more interesting patterns than the average metroidvania red light-green light time waster, even if the same 4 sprites are reused nearly a dozen times over the course of the game. The magic system involves an unwieldy system of card combining but almost everyone just uses the glitch to get the cards they want because the drop rates are a complete insult. The bosses are on average pretty decent though most have probably about 20% more HP than they deserve. The exception is final Dracula who is utterly ridiculous. Nearly impossible if you play him straight but trivial if you abuse one of the many overpowered magic cards.
Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance - Not Recommended: IGA's ego is on full display here. The music reduced to a nauseating dvvv dvvv dvvv midi mess as the castle's many colorful and zany backgrounds take the stage and space on the cart. HoD goes back to the SOTN format of it being nearly impossible to die and within 30 minutes of play you have magic abilities that the game just cannot deal with. Traversal is improved by having spammable dashes in both directions. The enemies are less interesting but the sense of speed is its own brand of fun. The atmosphere is the king here, as the castle takes on a horror movie unsettling dreamlike atmosphere. Room connections and architecture make no sense in an appropriately unsettling and horror movie way and they meant it like that because the plot of the game explains that. What they clearly did NOT mean is for the bosses to be complete trash. There are too many of them and most of them are totally trivial, almost complete insults to the player even not factoring in the overpowered magic. Unfortunately, by the third act of the game the many, many pointless empty corridors you must dash and backtrack and loop across identical castles through become INCREDIBLY tedious. The open exploration HoD encourages gives way to bunch of pointless "Go here then backtrack all the way and go through this other place to get an item you then have to go back and use at the place 1 to pass through the door at the end to get ANOTHER item that you have to cart back from place 3 to place 2." The ambition to try to be SOTN2 here on the GBA did not help, as the game is loaded with so many worthless extra routes, bosses, and collectibles (Boy heart max ups were bad enough in COTM but now you have them AND furniture to find.) in a futile attempt to try to capture the magic of that game. HoD leads with a terrible first impression, becomes fun for a good chunk of the game, and then falls off a cliff the more you play it.
It is very interesting seeing CotM and HoD side by side as two games with completely different design styles. In many ways, they are complementary of each other, their strengths and weaknesses aligning almost perfectly. (Though CotM only had like two good songs whereas HoD has whatever MP3s you are playing in the background.)
Castlevania Aria of Sorrow - Recommended: It's the best of this pack for almost too many reasons to name. Not only is this seminal game in advancing the OG Metroidvania, actual Metroid-style Castlevanias, to the next level of quality that eventually led to us getting Bloodstained, it still holds up quite strongly as a good example of this genre today. The bosses are good, the art, level design, music, weapon selection, all the little gameplay stuff is wonderfully balanced and realized. Of course, it's not perfect, portions of the game drag (The water level is about 60% of your playtime and seemingly never ends and when you think you've cleared it you just get another power to explore another unending arm of it.) and the story is kinda goofy even by CV standards. Plus the Metroidvania competition is incredibly stiff but it is still a classic. This simply is, without question, THE reason you're buying this whole pack. That said I still hold a grudge that the game gives you double jump and literally the first five places you think to try it, you cannot actually advance that way with JUST double jump.
Dracula X - Not Recommended: >implying I'll play an inferior version of Rondo
It's not Rondo it just uses Rondo's sprites, but it in every way feels like a mediocre also-ran game especially considering the era it was released in. Even for the average Amerilard who knew nothing of Rondo at the time, this was still an inferior Castlevania game. It's not terrible but it's hard to say it stands up to almost anything else in the franchise except for the total garbage.
