See that right there?  That’s me at the top of the leaderboard for the new Castlevania: Harmony of Despair (Chapter 1) game for XBOX Live Arcade.  You might ask yourself, how can I be so incredible to get to the tippity-top of an XBOX Live leaderboard?  Well, you can’t get to the tippity-top because there will always be someone better than you to steal away first place.  Second place, however, is easily attainable.  Just follow these three easy steps:

1. Choose the game you want to almost dominate.
2. Convince the marketing people for that game to send you an early copy (or download code), so there’s no competition.
3. Don’t totally suck.

If you follow my advice, you too can continue to lead the life of disappointment and self-loathing that is second place.

So, how about that Castlevania: Harmony of Despair game?

It’s actually pretty good.  If you’ve played any of the Symphony of the Night style Castlevania games, which is pretty much anything to come out of Castlevania this millennium, you won’t be too surprised.  However, they’ve done some cool stuff with this version.  First of all, it’s multiplayer with both competitive and collaborative ways to play.  What sucks is that those options aren’t available yet.  At least, they weren’t when I tried.  When there’s only about 100 people who have a game, it’s hard to find someone looking for a match.

It’s clear, though, that the game is designed with multiplayer in mind.  With the click of a button, you can zoom out to see the entire level.  No more map screen to figure out where to go.  You zoom out to see the whole thing, and you’re actually still playing.  In single player, this might just seem gimmicky, but when you think about playing simultaneous multiplayer, the utility of this option becomes more apparent.  According to the “How to Play” info in the game, there is also a collaborative ass-kicking move you can do with a partner.  I think it’s called Dual Crush.  A quick Google search shows that Dual Crush skills were also part of Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, but I don’t think those moves were performed with a partner.  To be perfectly honest, I never played most of the more recent Castlevania titles, so if there was a multiplayer one I didn’t know about, you can just lay your wrath upon me in the comments.

There are a bunch of other character building elements that make the game interesting as well, but that sort of thing has been around in Castlevania for a while – you know, magic, weapons, experience leveling…  it’s classic stuff, but done well.  You also get to choose from multiple player characters a la Castlevania 3 for the NES.  Like I said earlier, I haven’t played a lot of the recent games, so maybe you could do that more recently than in Castlevania 3, but it always lends street cred to call back to the old school anyway.  My player of choice is Shanoa, but it’s clear from the leaderboards that Alucard is the popular one.  I didn’t like him so much because his sword attacks (before getting any new weapons) were really slow.  Luckily for his fans, watching the number one replay video proves you wouldn’t get stuck with his crotchety old sword forever.  There’s this one that XBOX Live player, Das Alucard, uses which is pretty much instantly drawn and kills anything it touches.  Kinda looks like cheating to me, but I’m sure he’s played through the entire game like fifty times already.

Me…  I haven’t moved past chapter one because I became too obsessed with perfecting my score in that level.  If you get the chance to see my replay video, I’m sure you’ll see I’m far from perfect.  Even without playing through the whole game, I can safely say the thing has some serious potential.  I really wanted to give the multiplayer some time this weekend, but it just wasn’t an option.  Even so, I’m pretty comfortable saying that playing with a group of three, four, or five people would be pretty awesome.  Unless you’re playing with friends who don’t really like you and keep you stuck in skeleton form forever.  That might suck.

Overall Rating Because Cory Will Yell at Me If I Don’t Give a Review Score: 8/10
It’s well produced, classic Castlevania, with the added appeal of multiplayer and the ability to wear UV-protecting sunglasses with a +1 modifier.  The soundtrack is also pretty killer.  With that said, as much as I like the series, the Castlevania formula has never been worth more than an 8.  To do better than that, I need to see something new and full of both the shock and the awe.