Vital Stats

Genre: Platformer
Players: 1-6
Online: Multiplayer

Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
ESRB Rating: T
Release Date: 8/4/10

Platforms

• XBLA

Castlevania HD is the nerdy girl in a teen romantic comedy: just one makeover away from prom queen, but a pariah until it happens. There’s a fun multiplayer platformer in there, but it’s obscured by usability issues and you can miss it entirely. However, Harmony of Despair is the first cool thing to happen to the Castlevania series since Symphony of the Night, and no amount of kludge can hide that.

Reanimation
Somebody once said that post-Symphony Castlevania has been a parade of successively hollower approximations. It started when Aria of Sorrow gained recognition for recapturing some of Symphony‘s magic, and it lurched along for three sequels and seven years thereafter.

At a glance, Castlevania HD won’t look new either. It’s a Frankenstein’s game: stitched together of spare parts from its forebears. The art was ripped from the past three DS games. The playable characters have all wrecked Dracula’s castle at least once before. You’ll still hop and slice your way through 2D gothic corridors, eat meat you find in the walls, and equip cloth tunics for their defensive advantages over casual clothes.

If this picture doesn’t instantly make sense,
you aren’t the target audience.

However, the addition of multiplayer has transformed Harmony of Despair into something different than its constituent parts. Up to six players can cooperate to complete a level, and most levels start with them scattered at all corners of the castle. So instead of playing through a network of isolated rooms, the entire castle is active all the time.

An always-on castle has far-reaching implications. The simplest is that you can zoom to varying levels of magnification as you play (you were probably wondering what DS graphics were doing in a HD Xbox game). At the tightest zoom, the camera hovers at a one-room scope, but you can zoom out far enough to see the entire castle as you wind your way through it.

A broad perspective makes large scale gameplay. You’ll drain water between rooms and map circuitous paths between switches and their doors. Scalable perspective also means that bosses don’t wait politely in their rooms for righteous death. Even the first boss snipes at you with laser blasts that span the entire castle, and subsequent bosses only get cannier as they hamper your progress. Fortunately, while they’re distracted with that, good planning will allow you to sabotage each one. You’ll do all that while you’re managing the workaday pendulum blades and unsociable medusa heads native to Dracula’s castle. It’s a lot to keep track of, but it’s engaging in a way that has ebbed in recent Castlevania games.

When I was your age,
Castlevania games had Belmonts in them.

Castlevania HD also makes some strides to facilitate cooperation among players. The game outright obviates ninja-looting by awarding treasure to every player when anyone opens a chest. Bosses scale with the number of players, and most are dangerous enough that you’ll want the help to take them down. The game even replaces the traditional experience-driven advancement system with loot-based equivalent. So there’s little gain to soloing the game’s six levels when you could be sharing the load with other players.

As entertaining these features may be, they’re crippled by the game’s accessibility. Castlevania HD is built on the assumption that you’ve religiously followed the past seven years of Castlevania games and taken notes. The five playable characters hail from three different games, each with its own mechanics and conceits. Each of those games came with a twenty page manual, so Castlevania HD‘s thirteen page manual doesn’t quite cover the nuances of the playable characters, let alone the mechanics of the present game.

The manual never quite mentions that the witch Charlotte has to block and absorb incoming spells to learn them, which is her primary growth mechanic. It mentions that regular subweapon use will improve your basic weapon, omits the difference between Shanoa’s magical glyph swords and Alucard’s regular storebought ones.

If you lack an encyclopedic knowledge of the franchise, things get worse. Uninitiated players will have to learn the sharp way what happens when you let a spider marionette place a puppet inside an iron maiden. They’ll have to intuit what a magnes attach point looks like and that the glyph works like a slingshot. They’ll have to work out that even when they’re doing everything right, the bosses really are just that much harder than the levels they live in.

The Dead Keep It
Castlevania HD is too busy hoarding all its good ideas to share them with you, but if you’re willing to visit GameFaqs, there’s a worthy game to play. Unfortunately, that level of dedication and Stockholm syndrome is usually limited hardcore gamers, so this may be Castlevania’s first and last foray into reinvention for many years. And all for the want of some polish.

What It Costs: $15

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: 10 (demo first)
•To The Genre Fan: 10 (demo)
•To The Casual: 0 (skip)