What a strange mess of a game. For every good side it has it's counterbalanced by something dumb. The disgusting amount of backtracking alone is enough to make the game plain not fun, and even then on top of it you also have to deal with piss easy bosses, needlessly vertical level design, and lack of any reasonable way to track collected items. Not to mention, furniture collection is yet another blatant form of padding out the playtime.
Circle of the Moon right before this one had major problems, but even it didn't try to be nearly as annoying.

Like the previous game, Harmony of Dissonance is a solid game that's one little issue cripples the overall experience.

I hated the castle design in this game, more than any other Castlevania I've played yet. I think there are memorable elements to the level design. I'll outright defend the way the castle looks (and the color pallet in general). Navigating around the castle isn't even that bad in theory, with how nice the movement feels in this game (it's a very good thing I played CotM first, it would have been very hard to go back).

This game just doesn't respect the player's time in terms of navigation. Even with a map, I was constantly lost, hitting a dead end, and mashing my head against every wall I could trying to find the one rock I didn't turn over in order to progress. I don't think that, even with double the amount of warps around the map, the lack of signposting and flow would have been acceptable. It cheapens every unique location that the game has because either:

1) You've ran through it twenty times trying to find a different colored keycard in order to progress.

2) The thought of having to hike across the map to check it out will give you indigestion.

It's still a sizable improvement over CotM, and while it's probably on the "too easy" side of the spectrum, that's still preferable compared to the inexcusable difficulty spikes of the previous game. Harmony of Dissonance's issues seem unique to itself, and what it refines would be welcome going forward. It's just not a game I'd like to return to anytime soon.

Rounding off my adventure through the Japanese versions of the GBA Casltevania games by playing this also on my Japanese Wii U's Virtual Console, with its very cool Japanese title "Concerto of Midnight Sun". I've always like this game better than CotM, and while I still do after this playthrough, I don't think it's by quite as large a margin as it used to be. It took me around 7 or 8 hours and I got the best ending.

Where Circle of the Moon was handled by another team, Harmony of Dissonance put Igarashi back in the driver's seat (where he would stay until the last Metroid-y Castlevania game was released), and it really shows. Where CotM kinda plays like a refutation to Symphony of the Night's design in many ways, HoD feels more like a refinement by necessity. They obviously couldn't put something of SotN's scale and visual quality on the GBA, so they took the elements from that game that were most key to the experience and made an experience that, while still feeling like a more simplified version of the experience, feels far closer than SotN than the NES Castlevanias.

The narrative is similar to CotM, but the presentation and dialogue feels closer to SotN. It's once again a story about two friends who come to take down Dracula and save someone they care about but who Dracula manipulates to drive apart, but there's a bit more dialogue in this. Not THAT much more, but Juste and Maxim have a more interesting (albeit slightly) dynamic than Nathan and Hugh, and Death makes for a much better supporting villain in this than Camilla did in CotM. It's really nothing special either way, but I felt it worth mentioning here. I could definitely understand if some people feel that after this point the series becomes a bit long in tooth in terms of how much story it puts into the games, but I like how games after this (especially Soma Cruz's games) take the lore in weird places rather than treading over the same ground over and over.

The biggest reason I like this game over CotM is the controls. No double-tapping to run, the whip goes off a bit faster, and they added dashing back into the game. And not just back-dashing, but forward-dashing as well, with L to dash left and R to dash right. It makes going through the castle way faster, and allows you to maneuver much easier in boss fights. That said, I do have a couple of tiny complaints compared to CotM. First, Nathan (in CotM) has a little bit more play control over his jumps than Juste does, as Juste really commits to a jump once he makes it and you often can't change direction mid-air. The second would be that you ALWAYS get knocked back from a hit in HoD, where in CotM if the damage is minimal enough, it doesn't break your stride.

Presentation-wise, this feels far more like SotN than CotM. HoD's music isn't as good as CotM, as it opts for more original tracks than remixes of old tracks, but that's really the only place where it falters. CotM almost looks like a GBC game on a GBA at times, and that is far from the case with HoD. The game runs way better, Juste has a lot more frames of animation (his movement is SO Alucard it's almost comical) as do all the enemies. Sprites are also much more detailed and the enemy variety is also higher. There are also a lot more bosses in this game, some even entirely optional (in a SotN-kind of way), and although a fair few are very easy, the game itself is far from a cake walk if you don't take time to utilize your front and back-dashes correctly.

The only real criticism I have on this game design-wise is the castle. The gimmick of this game is that the castle has a front-half and a back-half (not unlike SotN's two castles, but these ones are just different versions of the same areas, not upside down). The overall castle designs are much better than CotM's corridors upon corridors, and areas feel different to traverse in a way that's interesting to go through. It's a good thing they're interesting to go through as well, because this castle has no warp system the way the other Metroid-y Castlevanias do. There are a couple one-way warp points between a spot in Castle A and a spot in Castle B as well as several spots to change between the same point in both castles, but no castle-wide warp system exists. This can make back-tracking for collectibles a real pain in the ass, even if the addition of the frontwards dash does make traversal a little bit faster. The game also has one or two really poor bits of signposting, especially one where it is not at all obvious that a certain item is in fact a key, but only if you equip it.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. There are certainly better Casltevania games to occupy your time with, but this one is a fine entry. It's not really innovating anything particularly interesting, and it shows its early place in the series pretty easily with its rougher bits of design. That said, it still plays really well and has some great boss fights and visual design, so if you're in the mood for some Metroid-y Castlevania, this is one that isn't too hard to enjoy.

Como um jogo consegue ser tão bom e tão ruim ao mesmo tempo?

Os pontos bons: Dar dash é uma delícia, sistema de magias muito divertido, juste é gostoso, tu tem um quartinho fds.

Os ruins: A exploração é uma MERDA. os caras meteram dois castelos na metade do jogo. "nossa, igual o symphony, que legal" NÃO CARA. É confuso. você tem que fazer coisa em um castelo pra liberar algo no outro, e só descobre isso depois de fuxicar 3 vezes o castelo inteiro. Eu precisei de um detonado pra descobrir onde tinha que ir. isso é de longe o pior defeito do jogo. tem outras coisas chatas como a facilidade. na boa, tu fica imortal dps q pega a cruz, bolt e wind book e estoca high potion. boss final? entrei nele e spamei crucifixo. ta morrendo? usa tuas 100 high potion e big mana prism e continua spamando magia.

Fora isso, da pra se divertir.