August 8, 2010
LFG END OF CHAOS
Harmony of Despair, or High of Definition if you’re so inclined, is a lot of fun. This is despite how poorly put together it is.
Basically, you gather five other people, who pick a Castlevania protagonist, and then run through stages together in a sort of boss rush. The whole thing is timed, so using teamwork to get all the chests and use all the machinery you need to defeat the boss really helps you get done quickly, as well as take the boss down without casualties. Then you go ahead to the next level and do it again. As you play through, you pick up food that gives you permanent increases to that character’s stats, as well as level up their abilities and skills in a way appropriate to the games they were in. For example, Soma must still kill enemies to collect souls to use, while Jonathan has to, once again, use his subweapons over and over in order to upgrade his proficiency in them.
This is all well and good, but it’s unbalanced as fuck.
The five playable characters just aren’t equal. It is such a pain in the ass to collect and level up Charlotte’s spells that you can’t do them during a normal run, for example. You have to level them up to have her be a useful character, but you can’t take the time to level up her spells with other people around, because they’ll either kill the enemies or you’ll just be bringing down the whole team. This means you have to grind in single player, which is much less fun, in order to be effective. At the same time, Shanoa is just obscenely the best character, due to her Magnes glyph. She can use this to go into areas that no other character can reach. She’s the only one with a movement power like this, and oftentimes having a Shanoa or five on your team can make a run go a whole lot better. The other characters fall somewhere in the middle of this scale.
In addition, as I mentioned, the game really isn’t fun by yourself. Sure, there is a single player mode, and you probably could beat all the chapters, if you had the skills, but it’s obvious the game was designed with multiple players in mind. Enemy HP and stuff scales for more or less players, but not enough to make it really viable as a single player exercise. No, Single Player is just there to let you grind skills, as, unfortunately, you just don’t get powerful enough fast enough. Important spells and items have very, very low drop rates, and you’ll have to run through again and again just to pick up the stuff you need in Chapter 2 to make Chapter 3 easily doable. Eventually, you even have to kick up the difficulty to get good drops anymore, which is understandable, but annoying for someone who isn’t hardcore like myself.
All these complaints are completely legit, but I find myself constantly going back to it. The basic Castlevania combat and increasing your skill set is just lots of fun, to the point where something phoned in like this still is enjoyable to some extent. And, as per usual, adding more people makes a mediocre game great, and if you can get a game going with 3 or 4 friends, it is a complete blast. I just wish more balancing thought had been put into the characters and such. It’s so close to being great. As it is, it’s just good, but if you have the money and love Castlevania-style action, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.