After thoroughly enjoying my playthrough of Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, I was looking forward to playing the final entry in the trilogy of Game Boy Advance Castlevania games. When I preordered the Retroid Pocket 3 Plus, I knew Aria of Sorrow would be the perfect game to play on my new handheld emulator as traveled for the holidays.
I wasn’t disappointed.
When I first played Symphony of the Night four years ago, I knew that I had experienced a very special video game. I was equally surprised to see much of what was special about Symphony successfully (mostly) crammed into a handheld package with Circle of the Moon. I did not expect the follow up to that game to be noticeably superior. Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance is the 251st video game that I’ve finished.
When I played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the first time a few months ago, I was looking for some grand thematic statement about good and evil. That is exactly what I found as I made my way through the castle, though not in the way I had assumed. Mostly devoid of exposition, Symphony expresses its archetypal conflicts almost entirely through its mechanics. The protagonist Alucard is always on the edge of destruction, fighting against a vampire and his horde of nameless baddies.
Medium Quality 