Brick By Brick

Kotaku recently ran a piece called Circle Of The Moon Is Secretly The Best Castlevania Game. My own opinion is that Circle of the Moon, although serviceable, lacks flavor and an identity, coming across really as a competent fan project, and I hadn’t given much thought to the series for a while, so I was interested to see if the article presented any novel points. Instead, it regurgitated a bunch of lukewarm takes I’ve seen for a decade or more. Pretty disappointing (hire me, Kotaku; I’ll write decent stuff for you on Castlevania)!

None of them, though, bugged me as much as this bit:

The dark color palette drew criticism for being too difficult to see on the original Game Boy Advance’s screen, which lacked a backlight, but one only need look at the overly-bright technicolor sequel Harmony of Dissonance to see how effective Circle of the Moon’s palette was in creating an imposing game space.

I don’t wish the author any ill will and I recognize that it’s not worth getting too worked up about, uh, videogame palettes. At the same time, it’s disappointing that it’s been fifteen (fifteen!) years since Harmony of Dissonance’s release and its appearance is still regularly treated as a radioactive object, as if an appreciation of the series about meaty men hitting Dracula to death in a hell-zone for the hundredth time requires a polished, antiseptic sense of Good Taste. Why! I’d never be caught DEAD enjoying such a garish object! Remove it from my sight – at once!

What irritates me here is how it ties into the associated argument – just as lukewarm as anything else – that Circle of the Moon’s darkness was a return to form, an evocation of what Castlevania was, and what it should be. Harmony of Dissonance is cast as an overreaching aesthetic betrayal, ugly in itself and ignorant of what came before it in its quest to be visible. I’m not even going to get into the whole ‘[Entry] is TRUER to [Series’] Eternal Spirit, and is thus Superior’ pile of bullshit (I know I could do it myself with the Lords of Shadow games, and how I believe they strayed too far from the series’ defining particularities), but I am going to get into the mess that is this idea that Circle of the Moon is visually closer to the older Castlevania games than Harmony of Dissonance is, so that the former argument can be preemptively rendered moot.

Thing is, some people have developed an imaginary idea of what has traditionally constituted the Castlevania series’ aesthetic traits. My only guess as to how or why this has happened is that these same people have taken the abstract, “dark” conceits of Vampires + Castles + Maybe Satan Somewhere and superimposed that onto the games, rather than letting the games’ actual content inform the character of those conceits, while also neglecting to replay the games in question for years. This might also be a weird manifestation of that Nerd Syndrome whereby an aging populace decides to imaginatively recast some old, kitschy subject matter to fit into an anxious conception of what being an adult is (and it obviously means consuming Adult Entertainment: consumerism is the point of life, after all, and what could Adult Entertainment be other than “dark”?).

Anyway, if you pull up almost any screenshot of the first four “main” Castlevania games, this is what you’re bound to see:

Fact is, classic Castlevania was very colorful! Super Castlevania 4 adjusted the mood to something more somber, and its artists still couldn’t help inserting bunches of vivid greens, purples, and oranges, and making its darker portions remarkably polychromatic regardless. It would be disingenuous to claim that Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest’s look is akin to that of Kirby’s Adventure; but it would also be outright false to claim that, even its large portions of pure black noted, it is not a richly colorful, perhaps even – oh, no!!! – gaudy, game; and the same is doubly true for Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse (whose fiercely clashing visuals, as far as I can tell, have never received any flak; in fact, it tends to be treated as one of the NES’s handsomest titles). And if you want to move onto Akumajo Dracula (X68000), Rondo of Blood, or Bloodlines, there are just as many instances of brooding darkness as there are surprising, generous applications of bold, bright colors. It is really only with the SNES remake of Rondo of Blood, entitled Castlevania: Dracula X, where the overall palette assumes an earthen tone, and it has also never been the standard to which other titles in the series have been compared in any regard.

So when people say that this

is closer to {R E A L Castlevania} than this

all I can do is shrug and say, “I hope it at least feels good to be wrong!”

Well, now I can also link this post. And you can too! Spread the word! Harmony of Dissonance has an in-series precedent, and it is gorgeous to boot! I love it!

P.S. I would also point you to these older pieces on Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow, among the very few criticisms I’ve read that recognize and compliment Harmony of Dissonance’s formal ties to the NES trilogy.