There are few game series with a longer and more distinguished pedigree than Castlevania. Many now-adult gamers fondly recall playing the first game on the original NES when they were but wee vampire hunters. Decades later, a string of exceptionally well-crafted titles bearing the beloved Castlevania name graced the more portable screens of the GBA and DS and captured the hearts of old school gamers again. And of course, who could forget Symphony of the Night, the seminal entry that gave rise to the “Metroidvania” sub-genre. Simply put, Castlevania games carry lofty expectations.

Unfortunately, not every game in the franchise quite lives up to the prestigious family name (especially when they try to go 3D). So where does the Xbox Live Arcade exclusive Harmony of Despair fit into this large (and often dysfunctional) family? Hit the jump to find out, and fear not, gentle reader — I won’t bite.

First of all, let’s get what Harmony of Despair is not out of the way. It is not a new, full-fledged Castlevania title, complete with new characters and plot. In fact, scrutinizing fans will find very little new or original about this game — but that’s the whole point. Rather than crafting an entirely new castle romp, Koji Igarashi (famed Castlevania producer) recycled as much content — characters, items, level design, and more — as possible from the recent DS games, and mashed it all together into a patchwork Frankenstein monster of a game. That’s good news if you liked the DS games; 90% of what you’ll find in Castlevania HoD comes straight out of those titles.

The bad news is that you can’t very easily recycle story content, meaning that Harmony of Despair is utterly bereft of any sort of plot. Not that story was ever the strong point of the Castlevania franchise, but hey, something is better than nothing, right? I have to admit, I was somewhat put-off when I started the first chapter and the game made absolutely no attempt to explain who I was, where I was, or what I was doing. It was simply, “You’re a vampire hunter, there are rooms full of bad things, and you need to kill the hell out of them.” Each chapter is a single contiguous level that spans an enormous amount of space. There are literally dozens of rooms full of monsters, traps, and treasure that you must navigate before reaching the chapter’s boss and beating it up for its lunch money. Sadly, expansive as each chapter level is, there are only six of them, and considering they all impose a thirty minute timer for completing them, that doesn’t add up to a lot of game.

Unless you die. A lot. Most of the levels themselves are easy enough to survive, but the bosses are exactly what you should have come to expect from Castlevania: they’re large, powerful, and often underhanded in their tactics. For example, I recently found myself dead after the second chapter boss — who moves around the level and forces you to fight him from room to room — climbed across the screen to a room that I couldn’t access from my current location and performed an attack that teleported me into an iron maiden. Nobody said vampire hunting was fair.

Death isn’t all that bad, though. You still get to keep whatever loot you found throughout the course of the level before you died, so the only real penalty is being sent back to the beginning of the chapter. This mechanic basically forces you to replay each chapter until you’ve memorized each boss’s attack patterns and amassed powerful enough equipment to get the job done. Sadly, the bulk of the good loot comes from random monster drops, which creates an artificial need to spend excessive amounts of time grinding through earlier levels in order to farm better gear.

The other way to make things easier on yourself (or even possible at all) is to round up a few friends for some co-op action. Multiplayer gameplay is perhaps the only original element in Harmony of Despair, and it’s clear that you’re meant to play through the game with some partners. For instance, there are some treasure-blocking puzzles that can only be solved by having multiple characters present. Furthermore, rather than outright dying, characters who exhaust their life bars in multiplayer games turn into skeletons that can still move and fight, and can be revived with a special item. There are a few other small perks to cooperative multiplayer, such as the ability to perform powerful “Dual Crush” attacks when two players are in close proximity, and the fact that loot is shared between characters. Enemy HP scales with the number of players in the game, but by and large, the game gets a lot easier when you have some help. Starting out, I was having trouble with the very first chapter, but after finding just one person to play with, we easily blasted through the level and got to the second level boss before my new friend had to leave.

Co-op action (up to six players!) is definitely fun, but it would be a tad bland if everyone was running around as the same character. Never fear: Harmony of Despair offers a generous selection of five unique vampire hunters, culled straight from your favorite Castlevania games. Players can choose from the stylin’ Soma Cruz, Dracula’s unimaginatively named kid, Alucard (!), and… well, I guess there are some chicks and some other dude from the DS games, but honestly, I don’t know why you’d need more than just Alucard. In case everyone in your party does just want to play as Symphony of the Night‘s misunderstood hero, you also have the option to choose from a dazzling array of palette-swapped costumes. Just try to resist the urge to say, “Red Alucard needs food badly!” when you’re on the brink of death.

Each of the characters is also surprisingly faithfully represented here, down to their special attacks and abilities. Soma absorbs monsters’ souls and uses their abilities as his own; Shanoa, I am led to believe, casts magic spells and such; and Alucard is, well… Alucard. It’s worth noting that the experience-based leveling system present in virtually every game since Symphony of the Night is conspicuously absent here. Since character progression is almost entirely dependent on your equipment, you’re pretty much at the mercy of random drops. That end-level boss might drop a powerful new ability for your character when you kill it (Yay!). Or it might drop a mediocre weapon that you’ve long since outclassed (Boo!).

I won’t say much about the graphics, because if you’ve played the DS games, you should know what to expect. All of the backdrops and character models have been lifted straight out the portable games and transplanted onto your TV screen. It doesn’t exactly look gorgeous — they’re basically DS graphics, after all — but the visuals withstand the HD upgrade fairly well and suffer very little from the upscaling process. Sound, on the other hand, I had some issues with. The background music was just fine, but I kept getting a lot of distortion on some of the sound effects (such as fire) and voice-overs. Granted, Castlevania’s voice-overs have always been infamously bad, but I was surprised at the overall low quality of the sound effects in-game. Multiplayer was smooth, and I never had any issues with lag when I was playing co-op online. It’s a shame that the game doesn’t allow for local multiplayer, but given the scale of the levels, I’m not sure it would really be feasible to fit multiple players on one screen, anyway.

Harmony of Despair is one of those games that is going to be many things to many people. Some will find a lot to enjoy in its delicious blend of challenge and fanservice; others will be turned off by its repetitive gameplay and shamelessly recycled content, and will denounce it as a mere shade of a Castlevania game. Still others, who have never played a Castlevania title, will wander around, lost in the first level, get slaughtered while they’re still trying to figure out the controls and unintuitive menu system (none of which is explained at any point, by the way), and never touch the game again. If Aria of Sorrow was an elegantly penned love letter to Symphony of the Night fans, then Harmony of Despair is a drunken text message to fans of the DS games. It could be something beautiful, but instead it’s a quick and dirty attempt to cash in on a fanservice-laden booty call.

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Things We Liked: Fanservice (Alucard!). In-depth inventory system. Characters have been faithfully recreated, down to their unique special abilities. Co-op is definitely a blast to play.

Things We Disliked: No leveling system. Reliance on random drops for progression. Uneven difficulty in places (especially single player). No local multiplayer. Clunky menus and no explanation of controls. The game basically assumes you’re already familiar with all things Castlevania. $15 is a little much to ask for what’s on offer here, considering SotN is only $10.

Target Audience: Diehard Castlevania fans. Hardcore gamers seeking an old school challenge. Grinders and farmers.

(Castlevania: Harmony of Despair – Developer: Konami. Publisher: Konami. Available on Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade. A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for review purposes. Unfamiliar with CFD!’s review system? Read our newly revised explanation here.)