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The only thing is... Harmony of Dissonance is damned short. It was a fortuitous decision, in this light, for Igarashi to have jammed so many secrets into the game. I accidentally ended up finishing the game in less than ten hours, with nearly 200% map completion, all but two items for Juste's room, somehow without two of the magic books (one of which I simply put off getting for a while, since it was kind of stressful to race the marble (you'll... see what I mean), and without two of the relics.
Circle of the Moon by contrast, I'm probably well over thirty hours into by now -- and I'm still missing the Black Dog card. I beat the game at around twenty hours or so (although I admit I took my good time in doing so), but since then I've still been wandering around, collecting things, and generally powering-up far more than necessary. In comparison to this nigh-pointless time vacuum, HoD is amazingly self-contained.
After the game is over, Juste's friend Maxim becomes a playable character, turning the game into an interesting mix of Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden, and Strider. There is also a fairly enjoyable time attack mode, versus a stream of the (astonishingly easy) bosses from the game. The widely-reported secret hidden within this mode (look anywhere on the internet except here if you don't already know to what I'm referring), really is firing up my jones for a GBA compilation or remake of the original NES trilogy.
I guess it's better to have a condensed hunk of gaming goodness than a sprawling fifty-hour affair stuffed with needless filler and busywork. (Why are so many games full of tedious chores these days, designed only in order to artificially increase playtime? Who started this trend? Wasting my time is not the key to my heart, people. Let me finish the fool game already, so I can move onto something else! If the game is enjoyable, I can always replay it.) There is barely a moment in HoD which felt superfluous to me, with the exception of some nasty backtracking in the last third or so. Once I located all of the teleporters, this wasn't as much of a problem, but -- oy.
And y'know, people always make what seems to me to be way too big of a deal about backtracking in adventure games. So far as I'm concerned, revisiting earlier areas is all part of the exploration aspect in a game like Metroid or Zelda or even Soul Reaver. But remember what I said a few paragraphs back about the castle's layout in this game? There are two sides to everything. The first time through, it's great and really focused-feeling. The problem is, whenever you want to go back to someplace you've been, you usually have to go far out of your way to return. Much of the time I just put off some smaller tasks that I knew I could finish in another part of the castle, because I didn't want to put in the effort to slog all the way back there through ten minutes' worth of rooms and corridors.
The game is pretty good, though, at directing the player back to each part of the castle in turn. So generally you won't have to do a ton of backtracking, if you're patient enough to wait until you're naturally back in the right neighborhood. But the thing is, there are a ton of shortcuts which, despite being present from the beginning, are locked until very late in the game. The "skull doors", for instance, seem to exist mostly to keep the player from being able to revisit earlier sections of the castle (at least, without putting a ton of effort into winding one's way back through one's own footsteps). I don't see why this is in many cases, except perhaps to keep the player from being distracted from whatever the current task might be. This is fine in retrospect, but at the time, not understanding how the game was structured, it was kind of frustrating.
And yet this kind of a limitation has its interesting effects. Indeed, it kept me from bothering to revisit the start of the game until about eight or nine hours in. And there's something... well not exactly poignant, but at least interesting, about finding one's self preparing for the end by going back to where one began. Everything just went full circle, in a sense.
And come to think of it, isn't this kind of the point of the series?
Eric-Jon Waugh thinks so...
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