Akumajou Dracula: Harmony of Despair / Castlevania: Harmony of Despair (X360, PS3) (2010-2011, 2011-2012)
Developer: Konami

Review by Faididi and Co.

ADHD is better than Wai Wai World and the 6P arcade X-Men combined

Story: Average

Several heroes from different backgrounds and eras magically team up to tackle the latest appearance of Lord Dracula and his big, evil castle. Crossovers like this may not contain a real story, but who cares as long as everybody is having fun?

Gameplay: Excellent

Released as a downloadable game that is originally exclusive to the X360, Konami's Akumajou Dracula: Harmony of Despair (Castlevania: Harmony of Despair) is a cooperative 6-Player action adventure crossover dream. It resembles the installments on the DS, except it's divided into 6 large stages, which are played one at a time per session to accommodate the new multiplayer realities. The limited 2-Player support in Gallery of Labyrinth (Portrait of Ruin) may have already broken the series' solo-Player tradition, but it doesn't compare to the beautiful cooperative experience here.

Aside from requiring Xbox Live's paid subscription service (LAN and splitscreen lovers are out of luck), the multiplayer aspect is no joke. With Players allowed to choose copies of the same character (using alternate color schemes), the heroes can jump, hack, and magic-blast their way through the deeply interactive stages, beating up bad guys and finding secrets together. Trying out the crazy combinations of skills and equipment against the rich variety of enemies and environmental traps is a really fun part of this game. Never before has there been a side-scrolling action platformer that lets its heroes overlap their skills to this degree, whether they're pulling off team magic attacks or boosting each other to extra-high ledges to discover new shortcuts.

Unlike the characters in most other crossovers, the heroes here not only wield different weapons but are upgraded in fundamentally different ways. Soma and Alucard become more powerful strictly by gathering and equipping better items, while Charlotte needs to capture and copy enemy magic attacks. As for Shanoa and Johnathan, their offensive powers increase as they keep hitting enemies with subweapons (akin to earning experience points). Despite the upgrades favoring Soma the most in the advanced stages, the unlike manners in which the heroes are enhanced allow Players of all preferences to easily jump into the game.

Harmony of Despair deals with your characters' deaths in a humorously creative manner, too. Each stage is designed to be finished within half an hour, whether by a lone hero or by a half-drunk horde of Johnathans. Any team members who get wasted remain in play as friendly animated skeletons with minimal abilities. They can be fully revived with a special item, but they incur a hefty penalty on the timer if they get mowed down again in skeleton form. It's Game Over only when all the heroes are turned into skeletons or when they run out of time (hence the additional-dying penalty on the thirty-minute limit), and this is a great way to keep the entire team engaged and challenged, regardless of the members' individual skill levels. Furthermore, the heroes always retain the equipment, gold, and subweapon mastery they obtain, even if they fail to beat a stage. As such, the game never feels like it's wasting your time or being unfair.

Controls: Excellent

The friendly controls are highly responsive and customizable. With every stage being entirely loaded onto the screen at once (in the essence of Namco's Outfoxies, but on a grander scale), you can always zoom and pan the camera view to keep track of teammates. The degree of zoom can also be modified, allowing the game to be played on a tiny personal screen or on a high-definition monitor with equal ease.

Graphics: Excellent

If this game takes the crossover spirit too seriously in one regard, that may be its recycled character graphics. For example, Lord Dracula's animation frames are the same ones from Dracula X over a decade ago. Fortunately, the visuals are still gorgeous, thanks to the ever-fluid animations and the painstakingly decorated backgrounds. The rooms are filled with sumptuous levels of detail, be they the bottles of kitchen goods being knocked off from their pantry shelves in the fourth stage or the overflowing piles of gold and jewels littering the treasury in the sixth stage.

Audio: Excellent

The sound effects whoosh and roar out with force, and the catchy, rocking tunes perfectly fit the game's fun, high-action atmosphere. As for the vocal effects, there is an option to switch between the original Japanese acting and the dubbed version.

Overall: Excellent

Akumajou Dracula: Harmony of Despair is 6-Player action adventure bliss. Its unique heroes are played and upgraded in genuinely different ways, while its clever multiplayer dynamics keep the whole team constantly engaged. Its controls are both responsive and friendly, and its colorful visuals are jam-packed with myriad tiny details. Whether fans of the series or not, those looking for cooperative online action that's unlike anything else before should definitely come experience this awesome crossover.

Expansion: Excellent

Over the months following its initial release, Harmony of Despair has seen several significant updates, making important adjustments and practically doubling the size of its content.

Among the most visible additions are the extra playable characters. Julius comes with his eight-way whip attacks and his ability to latch onto and swing from grappling points (best compared to 16-bit Simon in the first SFC/SNES installment). Yoko wields the sheer magical firepower of her Fernandez (Belnades) heritage. Young Maria has her bullshit loli animal attacks and her smaller profile. Richter gets his fancy acrobatic moves back from his last outing, but with a few upgrades that make him an even funnier accident waiting to happen. 8-bit Simon is about as retro as you can get. Finally, there's Fuuma (from Getsu Fuuma Den), the samurai hero who continues to accompany his whip-swinging pal since the Wai Wai World series, and who presents another slice of Konami's 1980s history. (The two 8-bit heroes don't have any vocal effects.) Unfortunately, all of these extra characters are of the subweapon-mastery type and don't add as much variety in play style.

Luckily, the new stages give more bang for the buck. They contain nifty new items to uncover, along with far deadlier foes who resist certain old tactics that can be exploited to quickly plow through the original set of levels. The final two stages are particularly eye-catching, being scaled recreations of 8-bit Simon and Fuuma's original games, and they also feature lag-tolerant bosses who aren't affected by the crappiest of network conditions.

Just as important as the purchasable perks are the refinements to the core game. The magic costs for several special attacks are decreased to improve their usefulness. Skeletonized heroes can now crouch and slide, giving them a better chance at evading enemy attacks. The items yielded by bosses are now awarded to skeletonized heroes, too, which is a fantastic way to encourage the team to keep pushing forward under heavy casualties, without worrying about depleting all the Water of Life.

If you still haven't gotten the idea, we'll say it now: Harmony of Despair is the baddest-ass cooperative crossover action game ever, and it's just become even more wonderful.

Port: Above Average (PS3)

At first glance, the PS3 version of Harmony of Despair should give the X360 original's fans much cause to gripe. Not only does it bundle in three of the old DLC items for free (Julius, Yoko, and the seventh chapter), but its offline mode is also expanded to support up to 4 Players at once, with the screen zooming in and out as appropriate to keep the heroes in view. (All progress here is pooled together under the save file of the profile owner, or Player 1.) The voice language option is now retained after the end of a chapter, so Players who wish to avoid the dubbing don't need to reselect the original vocal effects after every stage.

However, proof of an imperfect porting from the game's X360 roots can be found in the general loss of smoothness. Most serious is the lag in the controls of the menu interfaces (from the book-themed equipment pages to the communication wheel). The original display rate of thirty frames per second is dropped to twenty four, and loading problems with the characters' vocal effects result in distracting delays in the audio. The online mode takes a nosedive in terms of connection quality. Unless you have high-quality connections to your PSN teammates, you'll frequently get disconnected or suffer from fatal desynchronizations (rendering gates impossible to open, or bosses continuing to kill your allies an entire minute after these bosses are defeated on your own screen). We're not kidding about everything being dragged down; even the staff credits are ridiculously lengthened, to the point where the ending music needs to loop.

The offline 4-Player support has limitations worth noting. It doesn't extend to the survival (versus) mode, and it doesn't allow copies of the same character to be selected. All of the Players' controls there must be the same as Player 1's, with the camera panning controls also being limited to Player 1. Considering that the PS3 console can read up to 7 local controllers at once, why the offline mode doesn't support the full set of 6 Players is baffling.

Where the overall picture is concerned, this port is worth picking up for those who are interested in Harmony of Despair but haven't bought the original X360 version yet. The local 4-Player support alone renders this a stronger game on the offline side, but those who already have the X360 version and don't play locally with friends will find little reason to bother with this unpolished port's lag issues and inferior online stability.