In a board meeting somewhere within Konami's headquarters, someone said they should just make Symphony of the Night again, and shrink it small enough to fit on a little cartridge on a system with literally no soundchip worth uttering a single syllable about.

...and well, they sure did. They made Symphony of the Night again, while exasperating my least favorite aspect of the second half of that dear entry in the franchise. They made an insanely dull version of the same castle, down to the point where one of the side quests is literally tracking down some furniture that got loose, because Dracula forgot to set up auto-pay for his maids and skeleton butlers while he was busy shoveling dirt in his mouth. The skeleton hangout with the cool Crocomire skull can only do so much as to alleviate the pain of constantly mashing shoulder buttons like I'm a Smash Bros Melee player to traverse two whole castles filled with some of the most annoying navigation, and nyquil-laced boss fights you ever did see.

In the meantime, we got "Just Belmont" over here who's actually Alucard gaslighting me and everyone else, because I guess he's just hilarious like that. The blue sexual energy he radiates along with his allergic reaction to water does little to sway me away from the fact that this is some kind of ruse, especially when he's using a name like that compared to the one he'd take while a part of a Japanese secret agency specialized in killing Draculas. I just wish he could bother to use more than just the whip, where in a standard playthrough you're only going to bother using the more damaging ones and only switch to the charging one when you need to destroy walls. This is probably prior to needing to take another scenic route to trek through the same areas like groundhog day, because without a walkthrough you're constantly smashing your face into roadblocks and locked doors. Locked doors that literally don't start opening, until about 80% through the game maybe judging by my terrible perception of time.

Okay, so we successfully made Symphony of the Night and slapped it on a Game Boy Advance cartridge. We got all these fancy shmancy effects popping off on that tiny-ass not-backlit screen, and even made them garishly bright so those little shits at IGN and Gamespot can stop complaining about the darkness imprisoning them and all the horror that they see. Oh man, oh god! We don't have enough capacity to get actual music going on here though, because the system runs it's music through software! Well let's phone up our old friend the Game Boy Color soundchip, truly they could help a sister out in need. It's a fun little soundchip that can make some pumping tunes when utilized properly. The word of the day is "properly", because to this day HoD is the only mainline Castlevania to never see it's soundtrack downloaded onto any of my storage drives. This isn't because the music is lower sound quality, it's because the compositions are straight up garbage. When it's not making me raise my eyebrow at it via it's terrible note selection, it blends with the background with tedious droning and becomes unmentionable. This is a seriously damning quality to have as a Castlevania, because that's something I couldn't even say about Haunted Castle, The Adventure, or Judgment.

That said, I can understand the artistic quality behind such a fumbly bumbly cacophony that makes up the noise in this game. I know what the subtitle is, and I understand completely. I'm one of the few people who will go down with the ship with Yuzo Koshiro and the RNG machines he used for SoR3, and I can see why kid's love Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The fact of the matter though, is that I did not enjoy it's company, especially when I'm constantly getting mixed up by a double map where the differences were essentially just some coats of paint, and a different swath of minions to deal with. For how much it could've done with atmosphere, it ended up just being another annoyance that I could've lived without, I'm sorry to say.

HoD is one of those games I remember getting acclaimed on G4 back then, at least by Victor Lucas of Judgment Day. It makes sense, the public wanted more SotN and they indeed got more of it. As the days march onward with us now having four more IGAvanias we could play on GBA or DS, and the ability to play SotN itself on basically any thumbtack if you know what an emulator looks like, HoD feels like it starts to slide more and more down the pole of quality and crashing to the bottom of a staircase. It's role as a training program and stepping stone towards Aria is appreciated, but as a Castlevania, it's one that I think I won't be replaying again for quite some time. It has almost nothing to show for itself that isn't just "SotN, but kinda crap", and the qualities it does have to stand out are unwelcomed to my eardrums.

Go home Alucard, you're drunk. Get off that synthesizer, you're embarrassing yourself. GET OFF THE DANG ROOF!