Juicy Juste and Maxi’s CRAZY Adventure! It’s a Castlevania game for the GBA! Oh… boy…
Nah. It’s not that bad. Or is it?
The year is 1748. That places this game just about smack dab in the middle of Simon’s Quest and Rondo Of Blood. Maxim (who is not a Belmont) and Juste (who IS a Belmont) are out on a training mission. Maxim get wrecked a little bit and managed to make it back home with some bad news. Their friend Lydie has been kidnapped. Maxim has also lost his memory, partly anyway.
Maxim and Juste head to this old creepy castle to find and rescue Lydie. And that’s when things GO CRAZY!!!
The two get separated as Maxim is in a rush to prove that he isn’t a total failure and wants to solve the mystery of the missing lady Lydie and is doing a lot of pretty irresponsible things. Like following in Simon’s footsteps by collecting all of the remains of Dracula in order to resurrect him so he himself can defeat Dracula al over again.
Well this doing go very well, as you might imagine, and Maxim gets himself possessed a little bit and actively fight against Maxim. Eventually Juste solves the problems and saves the day.
It’s a decent enough story but Castlevania really started to lose the plot, literally, at some point because a lot of these games really become kind of the same.
We are introduced to Juste, who later appears in the Castlevania Nocturne series. He’s much cooler there than he is here. He’s kind of… terrible. Not a great hero.
We’re back to the action adventure rpg style game here. Trapped in a spooky castle with enemies and bosses and secrets and all that kind of stuff to deal with on our way out the door to victory.
Juste comes with a whip. THE whip in fact. That’s his only weapon. There are, kind of, sub weapons but the big change in this game is magic. Juste augments his whip with different tips and his sub weapons with magic. Magic comes in the usual flavors. Lime, cherry, banana, blueberry, etc.
Each sub weapon has it’s default “neutral” state so throwing knives and holy water and all that. But if you equip a spell book that is elemental it will alter the weapon. Examples would be the the bible plus the lightning book. This will summon the shield from Gradius. Two kind of blue spinning orbs that will protect Juste from attacks and also deal damage. Later on in the game, this is one of my favorite combos because you can use it to just plow through enemies. Another one I really like is the boomerang and ice book. It summons a floating ice cross that hangs out behind Juste and fires ice shards at enemies that get close. It’s kinda nice. I like it.
Other than the sub weapons and the magic books there are tips for the whip, which I mentioned earlier. These can be used to add elemental damage to the whip, increase its damage, break walls, etc. It’s a neat idea but I feel like a lot of these great ideas in this game don’t end up working well because the game is kind of clunky.
HoD also has a decent selection of accessories and armor. Unfortunately there are no shops in this game so all your equipment is picked up around the castle or you need to grind it from enemies. Not a lot of fun.
Other than that, it’s pretty standard gameplay for this style.
Graphics I think this game is UGLY. Like, it’s pretty ugly. Circle Of The Moon was released a year before this and it looks SO much better. The sprites are blocky and kind of gross. The enemies are same. Colors are weird. Backgrounds don’t really fair much better. This is not a pretty game to look at.
The character portraits are pretty good though. Very Aria of Sorrow, and I’m ok with that.
The music is also pretty terrible. The tracks themselves aren’t bad but that terrible music system the GBA uses just makes them sound bad. It’s very WAVE, ya know? Lots of square wave and sine waves.
At the end of the day it really feels like they took this one out of the oven too soon, know what I mean? Everything is there and it’s solid but it’s just not done yet. Another few weeks for the graphics and the music would have made a huge difference here.
When I sat down to play Harmony and Circle I was sure Harmony was my least favorite of the games, but after playing it I really had it wrong. There’s a lot of potential here, it just needed a little more time.
It’s not as good as Aria, but it’s not as boring as Circle.
| Plot | 7/10 |
| Gameplay | 7/10 |
| Graphics | 6/10 |
| Music | 6/10 |
| Overall | 7/10 |