I try to work through my backlog in chronological order, but there's a few games that technically have a more recent release date, while actually being re-releases of games that came out much earlier. I've applied this exception for the Yakuza games, and now for the Castlevania Advance Collection, which is a collection of Castlevania games that came out on the Gameboy Advance - four of them, to be exact, although i only played three

Circle of the Moon was the hardest of the three, and took the longest for me to complete, but was surprisingly good. It follows the metroidvania design (or the design follows it ?) with a sprawling castle that incrementally unlocks as you obtain different traversal abilities. What surprised me the most was how much the game felt like Dark Souls (the first one). There's the obvious comparisons - overall difficulty; animation commitment; save rooms like bonfires - but the strongest resonance for me was the cautious feeling of exploring a new area; venturing out into an unknown, hostile world, not knowing what's around the corner, and how far you can push before having to turn back and save your progress. Good stuff

Harmony of Dissonance was my least favourite. The art style was a bit weird to me, some of the abilities felt a bit off - even exploring the castle ended up being mildly irritating. While the castle layout is perfectly fine, for some reason there's two castles that you can swap between at teleport rooms, each entirely separate in terms of exploration, although identical in structure. There's very few points where this mechanic is used interestingly; for the most part i just found it annoying to traipse across the map to a remote corner to search for upgrades, and then immediately have to return to do it again. Enemies and palette will change, but that's it. Otherwise, it's classic metroidvania, but easier than Circle of the Moon

Aria of Sorrow is (arguably) the best one, and judging by the achievement stats, the one that people are buying the collection to play. It's similar in a lot of ways to Circle of the Moon, but where that game had the classic Castlevania secondary weapons powered by hearts, as well as a magic system powered by MP with spells dropped by enemies, Aria folds those into each other for a smoother system: hearts are just MP now, and spells are cast by the same "up + B" as using support weapons. Spells (or souls) are also dropped by enemies, and are the primary system on show, supplying you with everything from combat moves to traversal abilities. The weapons catalogue has also been opened up - now you can equip more than just a whip (however iconic it may be). Armour and accessories are also expanded, making it feel even more like Dark Souls - not with the same difficulty though; that's still toned down from Circle

It feels weird to call these games "metroidvanias", as they're partially responsible for the genre even existing. They're still following on after Symphony of the Night's design (and success), and then there's the whole Metroid part of the equation, but whatever they are, they're very good - especially for playing on a handheld