I have tried, in the past, to put some little thought down somewhere on every game I finish. It doesn't usually last long, quite honestly! But new year, new attempt. (This'll get interesting when my backlog-clearing this year turns to some edutainment and hidden-object games sitting in my Steam library from various bundles, but we are going to TRY.)
So of course, the first thing I run through is just a randomizer seed in a game that frankly needs no introduction. We're coming up on 26 years of SotN, and I'm still of the opinion it stands up quite well these days. So instead, what of the randomizer?
If you've not played this one, most of the settings are focused around shuffling items: enemy drops, regular item locations, relic spawn locations, what the Librarian is holding. There's item stat options and a few settings to influence the logic more specifically, but we're not looking at an entrance randomizer or enemy randomizers (not yet, at least, I'd love to see 'em). For the most part, the requirements are fairly light-you need the Holy Goggles to get into the inverted castle, the five Vlad relics to get into the final boss room, and whatever mobility upgrades you need to secure those six things. (I'm pretty sure you could do this with nothing more than Soul of Bat, depending on the logic, but a seed that gave you nothing else would be a huge pain.) There's a few other things logic might call for, Spike Breaker and Merman Statue and Form of Mist and so on, but those're the bare minimums.
And, of course, you need the gear to actually beat Dracula and whoever else happens to be in the way of your exploration. Luckily, this is where SotN really shines in the randomizer! Symphony of the Night has a massive, wild, and varied pool of items, and a seed where you get your mitts on stuff you might never get ahold of in a standard playthrough is usually a pretty fun seed. The Sword of Dawn and the Holbein Dagger never see use in a regular run for me, and they're genuinely neat weapons that are fun to use. Then there's the Crissaegrim and the sheer delight of running into a Crissaegrim just laying around in the first castle! You can watch the difficulty curve deflate down to nothing right in front of you when this happens.
On the flip side, though, the randomizer brings up a big issue with SotN's structure that (to its credit) basically never comes up in a regular game: it is a pain in the neck to traverse that castle sometimes. Teleporter placement keeps a few places still agonizingly out of the way, and if you're running back to check the spiked halls in the chapel or the Merman Statue door, you'll feel just how obnoxious that can be. It means runs occasionally tend to go longer then they're fun for, when you have nearly everything and you've just got one thing left, and you've gotta travel to the four corners of the earth.
Still, a bad seed is, like, three hours, which is probably way faster then most people can run SotN, even if they're fairly familiar with the game. This brings up something: As a kid, I had those multi-page third-party memory cards that would wipe themselves if you so much as coughed in the same room. This always used to horrifically upset me when it happened and I lost saves. These days, I grumble about a SotN seed where I have to rethink the entire castle with each new item taking three entire hours! I could probably bang out a 200.6% save from scratch pretty casually in an afternoon, and I'm no speedrunner. Child Lavender really didn't need to get so upset about having to restart anything short of a big RPG, looking back (that kid had way more spare time then I do these days), but ah well.
Anyway! It's a fun randomizer to pull out once every couple months, I think, but unlike Aria of Sorrow or a few others, the chance of pulling out a timesink-y seed makes me not want to run multiple seeds of it back-to-back. Still, it's a rando I'm better at then I am at most of them, and it's a very good game as a base. Hard to mess up SotN too badly.