First comment:
I gonna be that guy and say that I actually really like Harmony of dissonance (HoD), never got lost once (without using any guides/maps), and really didn't mind the two castle system they used in it. But, I'm more than willing to admit bias in that HoD is probably the gbavania that i played the most to the point where I'm pretty sure I've played it at least 6 times (3 normal playthroughs 1 on Maxim mode, 1 on Hard mode, and 1 on no spell mode.) I pretty much entirely dislike Circle of the moon (CotM.) I had a recent playthrough where I was having a hell of a time getting through it. I think it's generally because i approached the game like other metroidvanias. I went through each area no grinding from entrance of the area to the boss. Problem was you NEED the cards for the DSS system to get through the game reasonably. Items like potions and other curatives don't heal for shit, the only thing getting me through bosses was face tanking bosses and just out damaging them using the cards but, it got to a point where i was going through the underground waterway where the enemies did around 1/10 of my health with their attacks and i would die about halfway through the area between the two save points in the waterway because i used all of my healing items getting to the first save point. Couldn't get deeper in and couldn't get out to go get healing items. As an additional annoyance I hadn't gotten any card drops outside of the ones at the beginning that i think are scripted. I just gave up at that point because before i left for the waterway I had grinded for healing item drops for at least 3 hours only to use all of them halfway in because they don't heal for shit. Potions heal ONLY 20 hp, meat heals 50 hp, spicy meat is rare drop only and heals a measly 100 hp, high potions are they only reasonable healing item at 250 hp but, its common drops are in the battle arena (a post Dracula area) and the rare drop is wind armor (which is only available after the waterway) and legion which are placed in area's where you need the roc's wing which is guarded by Camilla the boss of the waterway. As for perspective as to how much hp you have at that point of the game at lv 50 without hp max ups is 570 and I was around Lv 30-35 and had probably a good amount of the max hp ups. Aria of sorrow is by far my favorite of the three. The soul system was interesting and added a lot of variety to the game. Soma himself is a really well developed character and his struggle with his true self are a really neat way for the story to go. TL;DR Screw Cotm, HoD was pretty fun for me, and AoS was unquestionably the best of the 3 for me, and i spent over 30 minutes thinking and typing all of this shit.
Second Comment:
Figured i would do a part 2 to this seeing as how after my tirade against CotM I decided instead of trying to continue the playthrough i mentioned i would just restart from the beginning and instead of being almost entirely blind I researched EVERYTHING plus i wanted to mention a few other gripes i have with CotM.
First i want to start with some complaints i have that i left out of the previous part. There is no shop or gold in CotM. I don't know why this omission was made for CotM but, the game could desperately use one. No shop means all curatives need to be dropped from an enemy which means if you want them you need to farm enemy drops. This means either knowing from experience which enemies drops the curative you want or using google which back in 2001 probably wasn't very effective. The next thing is there are no static armor drops (outside of the armor rewarded for beating the battle arena.) Which again means getting any armor requires knowing and grinding monster drops... again. Props to the strategywiki though, wouldn't have beaten the game without it.
Now for the new complaints from playing through it WITH researching everything. TOO MUCH GRINDING. I could just end it there by mentioning the above points about monster drops again but, I have a great example of this point that happened the day I posted this. I was in the observatory tower (the last area) and started to notice that the enemies damage had ramped up immensely from the underground waterway (the area before the tower.) So i took a look at the armor i was using which was the platinum armor (which i had farmed for a rare drop of a holy armor in the Warehouse.) The platinum armor was out of date and no longer enough protection from incoming damage so i looked to see what other options I had. The rest of the armors better than the platinum armor were all dropped by monster either on par or stronger than the enemies in the tower and all of them (except for the magic robe) were rare drops ONLY.
So since they were all rare drops instead of going from 1 slight upgrade to another i decided to just go for the objectively best armor from the drops. I had no idea what i had gotten myself into. The best armor from a monster drop is the dark armor which is dropped from a Lilim which is a monster that just randomly appears in a hidden wall area of the machine tower after beating Death (who by the way HAS NO SIGNIFICANCE IN COTM. You just kind of walk into the boss room get a few seconds of dialog and then you fight.) Small edit: If it wasn't obvious I didn't really like this game despite loving the rest of the GBA and DS metriodvanias. To just add another nail to the coffin i confused Death with the necromancer in a section down below. Death has ZERO dialog or build up he just kind of shows up you kill him and that's it. So i went there and It took like 9 whip lashes to kill her with my best equipment on. Meanwhile its flying through the air surrounded by orbs that it can shoot at you and she did so much damage that I would die to her in 10 hits. So after fighting her just once she had almost killed me so, i had to sit there and use the card combo that gives a small regen hp effect overtime for standing still.
So i looked up some advice for killing her without spending almost 2 minutes fighting her once and almost dying. So i read on strategywiki that they recommended using a specific card combo that lets you summon a thunder bird to do a thunder element screen wide AoE. I had the thunderbird card but i didn't have the summon card so, as you can probably guessed I went to go get the summon card which is a rare drop from a scary candle which is another case of an enemy randomly appears after getting past a certain point(thankfully it is also in the machine tower so it wan't to far from the Lilim). So after grinding for that card (which took roughly about a hour) I ran back to the Lilim to use the combo to beat grind her. EXCEPT that for whatever reason I couldn't figure out how to use the summon. So back to google and i found out that to use the summon you have to input from down a half circle( down, down forward, forward, up forward, up) and then hit the attack button.
Summoning the thunderbird killed the Lilim in 1 cast so that was great but, summoning the thunderbird cost about 1/4 of my magic and there is only 1 Lilim in the room which is the only place where Lilim spawns. This created my grinding cycle for the next 4 HOURS. Enter the room, get to Lilim, summon, kill Lilim, wait for the rest of the summon animation to finish (because it usually killed Lilim about halfway through), exit the room, repeat until running out of mp, then stand there at the exit of the room to refill mp. If i was lucky every once in a while Lilim would drop a mind high which restores 50% of mp which alleviated some waiting for mp regen.
The final nails in the coffin for this is that while I grinded for 4 hours to get the damn armor upgrade. I went from level 42 to level 58. Want to guess how that affected the rest of the game? Well the high level plus the thunderbird summon combo BROKE the rest of the game. I beat Hugh and both forms of dracula without even taking a quarter of my health in damage. There was ZERO effort left for me to put in, all i had to do was just chain summons and win. I felt empty. I felt that i had beat the game because i had spent an arbitrary number of hours grinding to get the items and stats necessary to beat the game instead of just playing smarter.
The only thing unlocked from beating the game by the way is using a password to play as a different class (not even another character you still play as nathan he just has different stats.) Beating that playthrough would unlock another, and beating that would unlock another etc. Oh and 1 last thing... The playtime i had at the underground waterway for the first playthrough with no grinding (outside of the 3 hours of potion grinding) was about 5-6 hours. They playthrough where i grinded to make sure i got enough card drops and armor to make sure i got through the game. At Dracula's door-step i was at 15 HOURS and at least 8 of them was grinding for drops. FUCK COTM.
TL;DR Even going through CotM with researching and a wiki in a tab at all times, the constant grinding for card/equipment/curative drops, the lacking of a store/static item drops, the almost non-existent story, and clear spike of power from getting that damn summon card i walked away from CotM completely unsatisfied, annoyed, and just overall pissed off that i spent another 15 hours on this waste of time.
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