I have been a serf to Nintendo's handheld products. Somewhere in my house is the steady evolution of the Gameboy, from the brick to the lame novelty billfold to the thirty different versions of the color to finally the GBA and I don't even want to talk about the fucking DS.
The GBA is sort of the odd duck of the game boy franchise. While people praise the DS and regular game boy (the latter through nostalgia glasses, admittedly) and decry the Game Boy Color entirely except for Capcom's actually pretty fucking good Zelda titles, the GBA is just sort of a forgotten weird thing. Mostly its known for being the point where Nintendo realized that no one was ever going to take its primary console RPGs seriously, so instead now we're showered with the same fucking three kinds of JRPGs for all eternity. Of course, there were some pretty innovative action games, but most of these have been only remembered by the gross gamers that I referred to in my last post. But there were exceptions.
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon was the first game I got with my GBA, so it has a certain degree of sentimentality on its side. At the time, like most people of my age, I had not actually played Symphony of the Night, though I had sort of heard of it offhand (roughly a year later, I would borrow a friend's utterly wrecked disc of it, which managed to hold together through a single, embarrassingly easy play through of it). Despite Symphony's infamously bad failure commercially, there was already enough bleatings from the beginnings of internet game journalism about how Symphony was a game that the normals would never understand that it was decided that the whole non-linear rpg stat Castlevania thing would be reborn on the GBA as a launch title. But, in a move that I'm sure made sense to sweaty Japanese majordomos hiding copies of Metal Gear Solid in their armpits, they moved the production of the game to a section of Konami that had nothing to do with Symphony of the Night. The producer for the new game, Shigeru Umezaki, had only worked on Castlevania 64 (a game that's probably due in for some nerd revisionism, but it's still shit), and was primarily known for working on the original Contra games.
Of course, I'm not some gaming journalism retard who's going to pretend that video games are like movies and one person can influence the course of a game entirely. I'm sure the production staff played through Symphony carefully, queried programmers about how best to optimize things, and generally borrowed alot of "under the hood" elements for Circle of the Moon. But despite all that, CotM remains the most distinct game in the portable Castlevania franchise, for better and worse.
The most obvious difference is in the graphics. Starting with Harmony, and probably continuing with whatever comes out on the 3DS, all portable Castlevania titles are pretty shameless in borrowing, if not outright using, the graphic art style from Symphony of the Night. It's impossible to say whether CotM's decision to draw and use their own sprites was due to a genuine attempt to separate the game from Symphony, or simple hardware limitations, but playing CotM after any of its sequels is a pretty chilling experience, because let's face it, the graphics are, at best, a weird homage to the original graphics of the NES Castlevanias, and at worst, primitive etchings of what may or not be monsters. What you can paint over with cries of "ITZ RETRO" is the almost comedic amount of monster recolors. No sprite in CotM survives without at least one "update" version later in the game. The worst sufferer of this is the noble "Armor" sprite:
There are literally THIRTEEN RECOLORS of this fucking enemy. While they do have different attack animations, even Dragon Quest isn't this shameless. Other recolors aren't as legion, but you can rest assured that any new enemy you face is going to return in a new, possibly more annoying form later. Combating the forces of programming laziness is your hero Who Fucking Cares About the Storyline in a Castlevania Game. Who Fucking Cares's defining characteristic is being possibly the ugliest sprite in the game, powerwalking through the game and always getting thrashed by bads because, in a possible fuck-you to SotN, he don't have no backdash.
The only positive graphical aspects of the game are the bosses. And while there is alot wrong with how enemies were implemented in CotM, the bosses in the game are easily the most impressive of the original GBA trilogy. The first few are fairly unimpressive shrimps (including an astoundingly blatant recoloring of Shaft G-G-GHOST FORM), but then you get to a giant goat in bondage and some zombie dragons and a hot demon chick riding a skull (which is not just a cover of Rondo's Carmilla, thankyouverymuch). They're great, iconic bosses, especially compared to the parade of terribles that the other two GBA games gave us. They even had fairly interesting, challenging attack patterns that would have forced the player to adopt old-style castlevania tactics in order to succeed, bucking the trend introduced by Symphony of boss battles testing to see whether you had a working pulse.
Astute readers may have noticed my use of the words "would have" in that sentence. You see, for all the difficult patterns that some of CotM's bosses exhibited, all of it was for nothing, thanks to one particular little gameplay flaw: the fucking cross/boomerang. Now granted, the cross has always been one of the better subweapons in the Castlevania universe, capable of getting multiple hits and simple mechanics and whatnot. However, the cross here is not just a handy tool, it is a goddamned nuclear warhead rendering all game challenge null and void, due to it:
1) Doing substantially damage than a normal whip swing
2) Hitting around four times if you hit something at the end of the cross's range, which is never a problem with the usually very stationary bosses of this game
3) Automatically being able to throw multiple boomerangs at the same time.
The nature of the cross simplifies any boss strategy to "throw crosses at bad for 20 seconds, savor your diminished victory." Perhaps sensing at the last moment what a fucked gamebreaker the cross was, the actual placement of the cross is in rare areas and using one takes a good number of hearts, but all this means is that the biggest challenge of the game is paying attention to the screen while jumping across identical hallways whipping candles to refill your heart supply after each boss battle.
Now granted, every RPGish Castlevania has a number of terrible gamebreaking weapons or magic items. But the cross in CotM is really the grand emperor of them all. For example, yeah, the Lightning Doll in Aria of Sorrow is pretty disgusting, but unless you're lucky, you may not have acquired that ability the first time through unless you really enjoy grinding on the baddies, and even then, you might not even think to test it out. You're probably gonna run into the Cross early on in CotM, and unless you're some terrible neophyte Castlevania player, you're probably gonna test it out and the results are going to be like one of those 90s Nintendo commercials. There are other problematic abilities within the poorly designed DUAL CARD SYSTEM (such as the easily gained dual fire shield that does the same damage as your whip, or the nearly impossible to find summon family that renders final bosses into a bloody puddle), but the cross is so fucking powerful that unless you're doing a low level run of the Arena (CotM's most lasting contribution to the series, a series of rooms with ridiculous enemies whooooo), you don't even have to bother with the magic system.
I'm giving CotM a hard time, and I feel bad for that, because I've played the shit out of the game. As long as you can resist cheesing everything with the cross, it's probably the hardest game of the entire portable Castlevania run, and has one of the more creative endgame options, in basically making you replaying the game, but with dramatically different stats. It also knows roughly when it's worn out its welcome, quitting after about nine bosses spaced nicely from each other. The best part about the game is the music, which is a love letter to the nerds who downloaded Dracula Battle Perfect back when it was on that one classicgaming site, featuring almost nothing but beautifully rendered remixes from different games in the series, even relatively forgotten ones like Bloodlines. And again, while I mock its challenge, it's still a harder game than Symphony, which constantly forces you to renounce constant advantages to avoid feeling like a giant gamer baby. Level design isn't completely inspired (the final proper area specifically features the most monotonous enemy placement imagined), but there are interesting ideas thrown around, such as a puzzle area that only forces you to complete the puzzle once before retaining the correct configuration and a Clock Tower area that doesn't subsist on destroying your soul.
Ultimately, if your experience with open-ended Castlevanias went from a downloaded copy of SotN and then jumped directly to the DS titles, you should probably try Circle of the Moon if just to see a vision of WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN and be (mostly) thankful that Konami switched back control of the series to the people that wrote SotN.
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