Castlevania: Regurgitation of Despair

Recently, I played a stage in Psychonauts 2 where you're tasked with cooking gourmet meals for a trio of sock puppet goats. (It makes more sense in the context of the game. Well, as much as that scenario could, anyway.) Once you're finished, the goats who are really footwear but who are really figments of a disturbed man's imagination vomit up what you've served them, and demand that you make them more delicacies with the chunks of what they've already partially digested. That goes about as well as you'd expect, and to put it bluntly, it goes a lot like Castlevania: Harmony of Despair.

Why in the hell would you want to see the
entire castle in a Castlevania game all at once?
Furthermore, why is this the default view?
I feel like I'm fighting demons in a Petri dish!
(image from Castlevania Wiki)

As you may have already gathered, Harmony of Despair is repurposed vomit. Konami took elements from the Castlevania series, stitched them together, and sold the tattered quilt, precariously held together with spools of dime-store thread and the occasional staple, to desperate fans. "Here's an all-new Metroidvania game!," they said. "And this time, you can play it with your friends!" What they DIDN'T tell you is that the new level designs don't make much sense, or that there's now a timer which adds to the frustration of hitting dead ends, or... much of anything, really. If you want to re-equip weapons and items, you have to find books hidden in each level, then make your selections while the timer continues to count down. If you want to actually see where you are, you'll have to click the right analog thumbstick to change the camera view from Outer Space Vision™ to the room where you're currently standing. If you actually want to enjoy yourself, I'd suggest turning off your Xbox and playing one of the games in the Castlevania Advance Collection instead. Not Harmony of Dissonance... somehow games in this series with "Harmony" in the title uncannily end up being the crappiest ones. Call it Dracula's Curse, or more accurately, Kozuki's Curse.

Maybe this game would be better with multiple players, which seemed to be Konami's intention. Then again, maybe a slower paced, more methodical action title with RPG trappings like a Metroidvania isn't well suited as a party game. Maybe the critics were right when they dismissed Harmony of Despair as a lazy, incongruent jumble of past ideas, swept off the floor and stuck together with generous squirts of Elmer's glue. Maybe there's a damn good reason Konami had to give it away as part of Microsoft's Xbox Live Gold program. It was either this or scrape the whole mess into an air sickness bag.