Notable interior designer, Juste Belmont, has a beautiful stride in this drab castle. Harmony of Dissonance tries hard to lift the best parts from Symphony of the Night and put on to the noble GBA. The movement is snappy, the enemies are compelling and varied, the nonlinearity allows for so much room to explore before following the main objective. In many ways it should be the perfect follow up and a great showing from Igarashi's new team, but really it's kind of a mess. Bosses are uninteresting, take place in the same arena each time, and are far to plentiful. The experimental 3D backgrounds are nice, but make it hard to tell what's going moment to moment in multiple areas (this is likely why they put a trail on your character). The magic system makes it so you have to constantly change both your spell element as well as your whip element in the middle of combat.
There are so many fundamental grievances with how the game is designed that all of the good parts fade into the background.

The game feels sloppy. Not horrible, but very sloppy. In many ways this is just a new team trying stuff out on a deadline and coming up a bit short. Not the worst, but also nothing unique enough here to make it recommendable. I only wish the interior design side mode was more in depth