I can't sit here and tell you that "I don't know how I got to this point," because that's both a stupid writer-y thing to say, and obviously false. The last 8 months or so of my life has been living Castlevania like one might live Buddhism, so the idea of playing some of the latter IGA-produced games was a logical next step. It is fair to say, though, that I didn't really think I would be doing it so soon into this whole odyssey. I guess after playing Harmony of Dissonance last month that I would try to hold out until the ASOTN series was much further along before going ahead with the later stuff. But, you know, there's a new Final Fantasy coming out tomorrow and I had some time to kill beforehand, so...
I mentioned before that I can recall buying Aria of Sorrow very clearly, and I wasn't making that up. What I didn't get into was how weird of a time in my life that was. Released in May of 2003 worldwide, I was six months removed from college at that point, and about to finish my first year of teaching at a middle school in northern Ohio; a job that terrified and delighted me. I was good at it, (I mean, I think I was), but was never sure if it was the right career path. Also, since I knew that I wasn't going to stay at this school next year --unilateral budget cuts meant a lot of teachers weren't returning that fall-- and deciding that I would move to Cleveland sometime in the summer after the school year ended, I was in a peculiar emotional place. Do I keep teaching after I move? Is it a good plan to leave the place where I grew up to be closer to my then-girlfriend? Am I doing the right thing at all, here?
In hindsight, all of that matters very little and a whole hell of a lot with equal weight. What immediately mattered in May of 2003, though, was that I had a lot of disposable income. Going from a perpetually broke college student to a person with even the meager salary of a first year school teacher was a dramatic lifestyle change. So, yes, when new video games came out that I wanted to buy, no longer was I forced to pine over them for weeks or months to eventually save the dough to purchase them or wait for a far off birthday or holiday gift. I could just walk into, say, a Target at 9pm, dig through a store, and drive home with a new Game Boy Advance cartridge. And that's what I did. It was great.
[Aside: You might also remember the last time I brought this up that my girlfriend, whom was happy to reap the benefits of this newfound infusion of 23 year-old semi-wealth, felt the need to heckle and judge me for this purchase. No, we didn't last.]
The battery memory on this Aria of Sorrow cart, then, tells me that I had completed the game in its entirety twice, with a middle file indicating that I had started the bonus Julius Mode and got bored with it at roughly 4 minutes and change. That makes sense. After playing Richter mode to hell and back in Symphony as a teenager and found that there really wasn't that much to it, I never put much stock into these extra modes, so I just sort of picked at them in subsequent games (though, this would change eventually. We'll get to that some other time). Maxim mode in Harmony of Dissonance was similarly messed with for a requisite 15 minutes or so, and this was no different. Yet this Julius mode file will remain on the Aria cartridge for some sentimental reason I can't really fathom now. I don't get it either. Let's just talk about the game.
The first thing that struck me all of these years later (aside from the cooler color palette as opposed to Harmony's more warm red and purple tones) was just how confident the whole game feels as compared to its predecessor. While still produced by Igarashi, Aria's director was Junichi Murakami, whom replaced Harmony's Takeshi Takeda, and the games fell noticeably different in scope from the opening cut scene. The graphics are clearer, the system mechanics are more intricately designed, and it feels as though IGA had either taken more of an active hand in development, or that he and whatever overlapping members of both games' teams learned plenty from their first experience with GBA hardware that they had a handle on things.
It really boils down to castle design. Gone were most of the empty rooms full of platforms in favor of level designs that were more Symphony-like, meaning open spaces for flight and plenty of breakable walls that lent to a sense of mystery that the previous game lacked. But it's not completely in-line with Symphony's best designs, though. As I play through Symphony for the Annotated series, the subtle ways the game directs you to the next destination are very meticulously placed. Some, like the Library Card in the Colosseum, are more overt, while others, like the Stopwatch subweapon in the Long Library right next the Form of Bat relic, take a bit more inference on the player's part to connect the dots, which is awesome. Aria only really does this once that I could tell, and that was right at the beginning of the game when Soma kills his first Peeping Eye enemy. If you're stupidly lucky, you might score the soul of this monster on your first time killing it, and if you find yourself equipping the soul right away, you'll quickly deduce that there's a hidden room behind a breakable wall in that same spot. This enemy placement was obviously purposeful, then. Very neat, but not enough as I didn't detect anything else in the game that gave me this same sense of direction, just the normal innate encouragement that I better map everything and just take mental notes of where to go after finding X ability.
I'm venturing to guess that this was done very intentionally. Aria, honestly, is a pretty short game, and now that the concept of two somewhat different castles from both Symphony and Harmony was becoming old hat, the conceit was wisely dropped in favor of a singular, more interesting area to conquer. How do you keep people from bulldozing the game, then, and give the player bang for their buck? Grinding. Tons of grinding. And worse (or, depending on your perspective, better, I guess), it's required grinding for 100% completion. If you're reading this, you probably already know full well about Aria's enemy skill collecting system. What you probably haven't really cared to put together is that it's not completely necessary to finish the game by mindlessly running in and out of rooms to respawn enemies to farm abilities. If you just want to run the game and get an ending, you can probably do it in 3-5 hours. Not a lot of time for a game back then (I can do Symphony in 3ish hours at 200+% completion, but that's because I know it backwards). If you really want to dig through every nook and cranny, you need to collect a few specific enemy powers to do so. Screw clever clues to guide you to the next destination, then. IGA and the team wanted you to spend hours killing mooks and experimenting with their powers. Roadmaps weren't necessary.
The trade-offs between Aria and it's predecessor, then make a whole lot more sense now that I'm writing them down. For one, Harmony is a much faster-moving game. Even though I feel that Aria can be shorter from an hour count perspective, actual castle-mapping crawls in comparison. There's no easy dash ability baked into the protagonist, and enemy soul abilities to speed things along are few and far between. This also feels intentional because with all of that grinding to be done, the game needs to set a certain sense of pace. It's honestly kind of a pain, but not nearly as much as Aria's less-favorable hit boxes on weapons. In the last several games (and this includes my recollection of Circle of the Moon, but I could be wrong), the point of animation that actually damage enemies is far more generous, so even though Alucard may be swinging a sword horizontally it will cut a monster directly above or below him. That's not the case for Soma in Aria of Sorrow. Weapons and the way they're wielded are now specific to where the attack lands in this game, and that takes a lot of getting used to. At least it did for me after such a steady diet of easy striking in other games.
What Aria has over the last several franchise entries, though (and this includes Symphony), is a satisfying sequence of endgame boss fights. The duel with Julius Belmont is tense and challenging, but completely fair. The final showdown to get the real ending is way more fun than I recall. Having ditched the usual last encounter with Dracula for plot reasons turned into a blessing in disguise.
But maybe Aria's biggest failing and smartest design choice is the soul collecting mechanic, and that's something that we can debate until we're blue in the face, but it doesn't really matter. Aria of Sorrow is a good GBA game insomuch is that it ditches things from Harmony that didn't work and replaced them with a better designed castle to explore with consequences to movement and combat. That's fine, and a fair enough evolution to what had become the formula for the series by this point. I've begun playing Dawn of Sorrow, but this hasn't happened in earnest yet. My guess is that it will be more of the same, and my memory of it is that it's exactly that. But compared to Harmony, a pretty good but by no means spectacular stepping stone, I'll take that any day of the weak.
