The GBA Castlevania trilogy, complete in box: Japan vs US boxes

Between 2001 and 2003 Konami released three Castlevania games for the Game Boy Advance: Circle of the Moon at the system's launch window, Harmony of Dissonance in 2002 and Aria of Sorrow in 2003. Together they carried the Symphony formula into handheld form, and together they make one of the most satisfying complete sets in the series: three boxes, three cartridges, three manuals, all in the compact GBA format where the box is a small cardboard sleeve of art rather than a display poster.

The American boxes lean on dramatic character art and heavy logos for a young handheld market, while the Japanese boxes, under the Akumajo Dracula name in its various forms, tend toward cleaner compositions and the series' established Japanese typography. Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow carry Ayami Kojima's character art into the handheld era, which links these little boxes to the Symphony shelf visually. Circle of the Moon, made by a different Konami team, has its own look, and a side by side photograph of the trilogy makes that internal difference in the series easy to see.

Completeness on GBA is a paper hunt. The boxes are thin cardboard and were crushed, opened from the wrong end and discarded at high rates, so a true complete set with box, cartridge, manual and the health and precaution paperwork is scarcer than loose cartridge counts suggest. Japanese GBA boxes survive in better average condition in the import market, partly because Japanese owners kept packaging at higher rates, but that is a tendency to verify copy by copy, not a rule to pay by.

Watch for the quiet substitutions. A US cartridge in a Japanese box, a manual for the wrong game in a trilogy set photographed as a group, and reproduction boxes made for display all circulate. The trilogy invites group listings, and group listings invite blurred photographs. Ask for each box's back and each cartridge's label individually. It takes a seller two minutes and saves a buyer from owning a handsome photograph and a mixed set.

The collector read: this is the Castlevania CIB set that rewards patience over money. None of the three boxes is a stand alone trophy on the level of a Symphony first pressing, but a matched, honest trilogy in either region displays beautifully and documents the exact years the series proved its future was portable. Buy matched region sets where you can. The trilogy reads as a set because Konami published it as one, three years running.