I think my overall negativity is colored somewhat by the bad taste left by the inverted castle. Also, I am a fan of old castlevania. So that is where I’m coming from.
Aria is my favorite of the metroidvania style games. I don’t remember liking Dawn of Sorrow as much, but I don’t really remember why. Probably just because it was more of the same.
Oh, and its not just SoTN! I played a few hours of Super Metroid and was pretty bored as well. After my SoTN experience, I decided not to push through it since I wasn’t enjoying it. I love the original Metroid though.
aria randomizer is mad fun. I’ve gotten black panther from bats before. and other ridic stuff like that. I also found myself using a lot of stuff that I’d never even thought about just cuz it comes really late in the game or something. Randomizing what souls you need for the true ending is a must imo
I think it’s because Aria was released after the GBA SP, which has backlighting. The extravagant contrast levels in HoD are partly there to compensate for the washed-out display
yeah, this accounts for how bright everything is, but the graphics/pixel art/special effects are much more elaborate and fancy in HoD than aria. harmony of dissonance feels like an earnest attempt to follow up the visual splendor of SotN, and it mostly succeeds imo. I’m assuming part of the reason they scaled the graphics back in aria to make room for “high” quality samples for the music.
anyway harmony is incredibly underrated it’s the best portable castleroid thanks for coming to my ted talk
I feel like Portrait and Ecclesia were orders of magnitude better than the 4 portable games before, both because of their strengths and their predecessor’s weaknesses
I would love a DS collection but the ports would undoubtlynbe inferior to the originals, which had maps on the second screen. The second screen integration in the Wonderful 101 remaster was… not great
I had no game I was picking away at currently and it is October so I booted up the Castlevania Anniversary Collection to go play a CV I hadn’t previously tried, so naturally I picked the shortest game.
I’ve played through the first three stages of Castlevania: The Adventure (thank god for console sleep function) and it certainly is… slow and kinda ugly. There are some interesting little bits of stage design here and there I’ve seen so far but it is also very easy to see why its reputation isn’t particularly great. I cheated and put a save state down at a certain checkpoint in stage 3 as I was so tired of slowly doing the first part of the stage over and over again when I had to continue due to something later on in the stage, it is unseemly but I have no regrets. I’ll try the fourth and I believe final stage tomorrow, kinda curious what they would hold back as the final challenge as I thought the third stage was fairly ambitious given the primitive hardware it was designed for.
The second image in each gif is colored better, but I think that’s the “before”…
It takes a bit of hubris to want to improve on Aria’s palette in the first place. One of the reasons Aria aged well is that it was one of the last major games on 256-color hardware and by artists who had fully mastered the strengths and limits of that
Honestly think this looks better from the screenshots…on a modern backlit device with an incredible screen turned up to full brightness i.e. not a GBA. Its kind of fascinating.
That stained glass is the only thing that doesn’t look great in the original game. The visual noise hides the dancers too, which feels unintentional
The recolor makes the place more readable but the stained glass doesn’t look like stained glass at all anymore. It doesn’t feel like a great compromise