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[absolute8]

So I made this timelapse of a asset pack I did. It'll be up on itch.io soon:

[JutsBeaumont]

nice tileset -- the shading and coloring feels reminiscent of the gameboy advance.

here's a portrait I finished recently.

[Samaras-Sama]

nice tileset -- the shading and coloring feels reminiscent of the gameboy advance.

here's a portrait I finished recently.

Simply beautiful, it reminds me of the bishounen style used in the Castlevania games, also your name totally reminds me of Juste Belmont? (:3)

[JutsBeaumont]

thank you! that was definitely purposeful: juste belmont was always my favorite of the belmonts.

[Samaras-Sama]

thank you! that was definitely purposeful: juste belmont was always my favorite of the belmonts.

I can't blame you, he had the strength of a Belmont, but the speed and magic of a Belnades, being of mixed blood. I can't help though but feel that his attire and appearance too closely resembled Alucard's. Maybe that was intentional.

[Cobralad]

that was intentional and he is a recolor and people who worked on this game did not know what they are doing.

[Carrion]

Thought I lost the file for this a while ago, recently came across it and finally got around to finishing it. <3

[JutsBeaumont]

that was intentional and he is a recolor and people who worked on this game did not know what they are doing.

i mean, he's definitely not a recolor... & i guess the second best iga-castlevania was made purely by accident? seems like a weird statement to just come out with.

[Samaras-Sama]

i mean, he's definitely not a recolor... & i guess the second best iga-castlevania was made purely by accident? seems like a weird statement to just come out with.

They really didn't.

The development team behind Harmony of Dissonance tried to fit so many high quality uncompressed graphics directly from SoTN into the GBA ROM and ended up with no space for audio, and many of the tracks, such as Successor of Fate had to be played back using low quality instruments because there hadn't enough space to fit the graphics and the sound in memory.

Circle of the Moon, another GBA title did the exact opposite, with bland graphics but great music. It received much better ratings.

If you're in a room full of Castlevania fans who think HoD is the best game for the GBA, you're probably standing in a sparse room of people . It was a unique game though, I find most people who like it only do so because they've grown up with it.

(If you want to make a fan game for Castlevania, I'd love it if someone finally gave Julius his own game! He's my favorite Belmont!)

[JutsBeaumont]

I'm familiar with the history and the specifics of why the technology was chosen. However, I don't quite agree with the description!

They didn't use "low quality instruments", they used the soundchip built into the GBA that was meant to handle gameboy instrumentation. That's nothing more than a historical context, though, it has nothing to do with the actual composition of the music or its relationship to the game, and likewise, asserts a qualitative component to an instruments emulative quality. That is, the idea that an instrument is "good" or "high-quality" if it resembles a realistic representation of an existing instrument like a piano or a woodwind. But this false; it isn't addressing any self-specific quality. It doesn't let instruments speak for themselves. The instrumentation in Harmony of Dissonance isn't ~really~ striving to be anything else, barring an organ, nor does it need to be: the instrumentation ~is~ the music. There's a reason that arrangements (or, i guess, more specifically transcriptions) involving emulative instruments often either fail to translate the character of the song, producing something else entirely, or sound lackluster.

We also shouldn't assign musical quality based purely on pleasantness. We should be addressing the composition of the pieces, and if we're to be placing them within a context, we should define that context as the experience of the game itself. Compositionally, the music in HoD is brilliant; complex, unnerving, pulsating and a little bit garish. I mean, pay attention to the way that melodies arise and disappear in quick succession, how even internally songs strive to combat themselves in their structure, densely packed with counterpoint and unexpected nuances and deviations. (or, compare the level of rhythmic diversity between tracks like Old Enemy and Name Entry 2k2.) It's a level of detail and peculiarity that no other Castlevania has touched, and only Super Castlevania IV has ever dared to come close to (tho SCIV precedes HoD). It's garishness matches the garishness present in the game, and it's pulsating, unnerving character matches the bizarre logic of the castle, it's comparatively labyrinthine structure (made moreso by the Castle A and Castle B system) and the way that the games movement is built on quickly dashing and sliding about, rather than walking at a leisurely pace. Heck, we could even talk about how Offense and Defense and Aqueduct of Dragons both choose to convey momentum. The former chooses an adventurous and wild approach, befitting of an area as broad and open as the Marble Gallery, and the latter is contained and tight, also befitting an area as small and comparatively claustrophobic as the Aqueduct.

I like things that dare to challenge and perplex me, that have layers hidden deep within other hidden layers.

Circle of the Moon's ost, on the other hand, mostly consists of arranges of existing songs from previous games, which unfortunately usually sound kind of whimpy precisely because of the GBA's default soundset's attempts at emulation -- "Trick Manor" sounds like a joke compared to the original, and "Sinking Old Sanctuary" (an excellent piece in Bloodlines) becomes tired due to overuse -- or the rare decent-but-fairly-standard original piece like "Awake" or "Fate to Despair".

I've never found a person who grew up even aware of Harmony of Dissonance. I didn't play it until well after Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin. Everyone I've found that has appreciation for the game discovered it later and appreciated what it did on an experiential & analytic level.

[Samaras-Sama]

I'm familiar with the history and the specifics of why the technology was chosen. However, I don't quite agree with the description!

They didn't use "low quality instruments", they used the soundchip built into the GBA that was meant to handle gameboy instrumentation. That's nothing more than a historical context, though, it has nothing to do with the actual composition of the music or its relationship to the game, and likewise, asserts a qualitative component to an instruments emulative quality. That is, the idea that an instrument is "good" or "high-quality" if it resembles a realistic representation of an existing instrument like a piano or a woodwind. But this false; it isn't addressing any self-specific quality. It doesn't let instruments speak for themselves. The instrumentation in Harmony of Dissonance isn't ~really~ striving to be anything else, barring an organ, nor does it need to be: the instrumentation ~is~ the music. There's a reason that arrangements (or, i guess, more specifically transcriptions) involving emulative instruments often either fail to translate the character of the song, producing something else entirely, or sound lackluster.

We also shouldn't assign musical quality based purely on pleasantness. We should be addressing the composition of the pieces, and if we're to be placing them within a context, we should define that context as the experience of the game itself. Compositionally, the music in HoD is brilliant; complex, unnerving, pulsating and a little bit garish. I mean, pay attention to the way that melodies arise and disappear in quick succession, how even internally songs strive to combat themselves in their structure, densely packed with counterpoint and unexpected nuances and deviations. (or, compare the level of rhythmic diversity between tracks like Old Enemy and Name Entry 2k2.) It's a level of detail and peculiarity that no other Castlevania has touched, and only Super Castlevania IV has ever dared to come close to (tho SCIV precedes HoD). It's garishness matches the garishness present in the game, and it's pulsating, unnerving character matches the bizarre logic of the castle, it's comparatively labyrinthine structure (made moreso by the Castle A and Castle B system) and the way that the games movement is built on quickly dashing and sliding about, rather than walking at a leisurely pace. Heck, we could even talk about how Offense and Defense and Aqueduct of Dragons both choose to convey momentum. The former chooses an adventurous and wild approach, befitting of an area as broad and open as the Marble Gallery, and the latter is contained and tight, also befitting an area as small and comparatively claustrophobic as the Aqueduct.

I like things that dare to challenge and perplex me, that have layers hidden deep within other hidden layers.

Circle of the Moon's ost, on the other hand, mostly consists of arranges of existing songs from previous games, which unfortunately usually sound kind of whimpy precisely because of the GBA's default soundset's attempts at emulation -- "Trick Manor" sounds like a joke compared to the original, and "Sinking Old Sanctuary" (an excellent piece in Bloodlines) becomes tired due to overuse -- or the rare decent-but-fairly-standard original piece like "Awake" or "Fate to Despair".

I've never found a person who grew up even aware of Harmony of Dissonance. I didn't play it until well after Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin. Everyone I've found that has appreciation for the game discovered it later and appreciated what it did on an experiential & analytic level.

Lol, all you have to do is compare the music in the ending credits to the music in the beginning of the castle. You'll see there what they were intending to do with Successor of Fate.

Quality wise, better yet, compare the music in the beginning to the music in Aria of Sorrow. This is a much better example of better use of better instruments. I mean..  

I see nothing wrong with CotM using arrangements from previous games when HoD used graphics ripped almost entirely from SotN!

CotM ended up with better scores because it had a better design because the team balanced usage of proper instrumentation with modest usage of RAM. These lessons would later go on to be used in Aria of Sorrow, which is seen by most to be the best Castlevania on handheld. I guess this is just subjective though.

[Cobralad]

whats your favorite game by igavania

[nanoriver]

@Carrion Really, really love your style. Would be perfect for a point and click adventure and since i am a big fan of that genre you totally got me with your style

[JutsBeaumont]

Don't ignore the section of my post on description and the use of language in describing instrumentation! You responded to the least important parts of everything I wrote. Would you refer to all chiptune-adjacent music as "low quality"? The version of Successor of Fate at the very end of the game is different: it lacks the basswork, it lacks the percussive elements and the arrangement is necessarily different. It isn't superior, it's a different interpretation of the base songs essence, and it wouldn't work as well as the original does in the area. I'd rather listen to the non-string one, frankly.

The problem with Circle's music is that overwhelmingly the arranges fare poorer than the original compositions. They're mishandled, and with few exceptions (trick manor, sinking old sanctuary) the original piece wasn't particularly thrilling to begin with.

I find most of Aria unlistenably bland. Hokkai's title screen intro is nice, though. I can't think of a reason to listen to the only other 3 decent tracks off the soundtrack when I could just listen to vastly superior arranges from the Lament of Innocence ost.

Cobralad: Symphony of the Night is my favorite. Harmony is a close second. Order of Ecclesia is a distant third. I don't care about any of the others, they're not really worth much anymore. After Harmony, the series lost most of its quirk and nuance which made movement & exploration enjoyable; emphasizing instead a leisurely smoothness with little depth beyond that. The level design also flattens at this point and the game loses any meaningful notion of set-piece or place, with Portrait of Ruin being one of the worst offenders in this respect. Order of Ecclesia manages to succeed a little bit only because of the strength of its Glyph system and it's strong enemy placement.

 

[Ashedragon]

We seem to be going very off-topic now so here's a thing.

[Cobralad]

Cobralad: Symphony of the Night is my favorite. Harmony is a close second. Order of Ecclesia is a distant third. I don't care about any of the others, they're not really worth much anymore. After Harmony, the series lost most of its quirk and nuance which made movement & exploration enjoyable; emphasizing instead a leisurely smoothness with little depth beyond that. The level design also flattens at this point and the game loses any meaningful notion of set-piece or place, with Portrait of Ruin being one of the worst offenders in this respect. Order of Ecclesia manages to succeed a little bit only because of the strength of its Glyph system and it's strong enemy placement.

I was asking other person but thank for opinion

[JutsBeaumont]

you sound very sincere

[Cobralad]

dude

[JutsBeaumont]

i mean, if you are, that's cool. no worries. it just didn't come off that way, especially without anything other than "thanks for your opinion" as a response.

[aamatniekss]

Made some more creatures