Castlevania Advance Collection includes 4 games: 2 of them are disappointing to say the least, 1 is alright, and 1 is great. The collection has substantial quality of life features. I will not review the collection as a whole; each individual game will be reviewed and scored. I only used the save/load feature in the first two games. Chronological release order:

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Playtime: 2 hours, 35 min

• For a reimagination of a 1993 game, the pixel art is still highly appealing. I don't have anything bad to say about the aesthetics.

• The controls SUCK. It's really bad, and I know that this is a mark of an era, but Super Castlevania IV had much better controls, and it came out 4 YEARS before Dracula X!
  
  
• The instant kill abysses are terrible. Again, I understand that this was a thing back then, but it still sucks.
  
  
• As a result of the controls being awful, the combat is also awful. It's highly imprecise, highly difficult, and unfun.
  
  
• I was going to only save once per stage at first, but I quickly changed my mind.

Dracula X stinks. It's bad from the beginning to the end; aside from the nice Castlevania aesthetics, there isn't anything good about this game. It's not fun at all, and the only thing that makes it "bearable" is the fact that it is kind of part of the Castlevania series.

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Playtime: 17 hours, 36 min

• The aesthetics are fine. The sprites aren't as pretty as Symphony of the Night, but it's good enough.
  
  
• The DSS is pretty nice. It has many variations of cards that you can combine and evoke. The only bad thing is that... it's kinda rough to make cards drop.
  
  
• The QOL features help a lot. Being able to see which monsters drop cards or the overall encyclopedia. Although these features are not part of the original game, and without them, the game would be EVEN worse than it is.

• The movement is super stiff. It's the major drawback in this game; it really stinks. Even after you get more abilities that improve your movement, it still feels bad to play.
  
  
• Combat feels pretty bad because you can't move the way you wish to; it's a huge disservice and gets even worse because of the difficulty spikes.
  
  
• The game is rather difficult; it gets more difficult with time, and I love challenging games, but when the movement itself feels so sluggish, then the difficulty drifts from being fun to being a painful torment.

Castlevania: Circle of the Moon is a bad Metroidvania, not just a bad MV but a BAD GAME; the DSS is a nice feature, but the movement gets in the way of everything else; it's utterly the worst. If it weren't for the save/load, I wouldn't have finished this; I do not recommend.

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Playtime: 14 hours, 26 min
Misc: 200% Map

• The movement is remarkably better than CotM—although that doesn't take much. You freely move as you wish, and it doesn't feel sluggish, but it's not perfect; attacking while jumping forward, your movement gets locked in action until you hit the floor.
  
  
• The fusion spells are a lot of fun: each spellbook, when combined with a sub-weapon, performs a special attack; the variety of attacks is really appealing; however, some attacks are so drastically strong that they make nearly all enemies utterly trivial.
  
  
• The aesthetics are nice, perhaps a bit too colorful for me, but the sprite work is significantly better than CotM but not as great as SotN.
  
  
• The QOL gadget shows how many secret items there are in the area by showing a "?" in the right side of the screen. It's unfortunate that players didn't have those back in the day.

• Bosses are disappointing: almost all of them have simple attacks; they are incredibly easy to defeat.
  
  
  • This ties with other problematic oversight: you quickly gain money, buying potions is effortless, and with no limit, it's rather impossible to die.
  
  
• The fast travel is highly inadequate. You can't fast-travel decently until 80% of the whole game. Yeah... amazing idea.

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance is a generally fun Metroidvania; it doesn't quite exceed in everything it does or has, but it doesn't suck all the way through like CotM. It has substantial problems, but it's a nice game... that could've been better.

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Playtime: 14 hours, 52 min
Misc: 100% Map

• The pixel art is amazing. I can say that it's much, much better than HoD; it's so good that I would even dare say it's pretty much on par with SotN.
  
  
• The movement is impeccable. It has no downsides like the other titles, and it's perfect in all that it offers. Aria of Sorrow has the best movement in the whole collection.
  
  
• The concept of Tactical Souls is magnificent. There are three kinds of souls: Guardian Souls, Bullet Souls, and Enchanted Souls. You get these souls by defeating enemies. This concept is the refined idea of everything that came before, and it's amazing.
  
  
• Lots of variety of good equipment, very RPG, but in this game you have a grand variety of weapons, done meaningfully, just like was done in SotN.
  
  
• A small but significant thing that improves the gameplay is limiting the amount of potions you can carry to 9; it balances the difficulty and doesn't let the game feel too easy.

• It's a shame that the soundtrack isn't great because the GBA's sound hardware wasn't great. That leaves a great game without a great soundtrack.
  
  
• Minor spoilers ahead: There are 8 bosses in the game—besides the ones attached to the story—and 4 of them become regular enemies after being defeated. It's a little thing, but I don't like it.

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow is excellent; the refined idea of monsters souls is amazing. The souls have huge variety of attributes, and the game has more than 100 monsters to collect. The movement is precise. The story has a good alignment with the Castlevania lore, and the difficulty is good overall. It's not a perfect game; there're little bits that I didn't like, and the greatest downside is the soundtrack—but not because of a lack of care. All in all, AoS is great; it's fun, and it's the best game in the collection.

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Castlevania Advance Collection has many good features: The Encyclopedia for each game. The Gadgets help you a lot. The Save/Load feature is a must for the worst games. It also has nice Wallpapers for your sidescreen if you're playing in the original aspect ratio. And each game has a black crown silhouette in the right corner; once you beat the game, the crown is lit and shown. It's a small, pleasing detail. Now, the games... Dracula X is garbage ablaze, Circle of the Moon is really bad, Harmony of Dissonance is nice at best, and Aria of Sorrow is great, not perfect but GREAT. I would say the collection is worth it just for AoS alone, but I would wait for a sale before purchasing it.

Amazing. A must have for any Castlevania or Metroidvania genre lovers

A classic pack of Game Boy Advance games that pits the leather and whip-loving building inspectors against a homeowner that just wants the right to build a home with sealed fire escapes, flooded passageways, and spikes everywhere. Freedom vs. bondage, indeed.

The games are classic, and emulated faithfully, which means a few things: great gameplay, low pixel counts (they were meant for a Game Boy , after all) and the emergence of the true villain of the series, the dreaded RNG (which is only a frustration if you want to 100% it or get the achievements, in which case prepare the grind for cards in Circle of the Moon and souls in Aria of Sorrow - the furniture collecting weirdo, Juste, in Harmony of Dissonance has no such issue).

It seems some lessons were learned from the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, as there is now a rewind function, multiple save states, an encyclopedia of gameplay information, upgraded higher bitrate music, although no in-game bonus content (which is fine to me), so this collection passes the "as good as piracy test" and then exceeds it with the usual little niceties like a gallery and music player. More importantly, the games play great.

Now Konami, the Playstation game collection, please!