CASTLEVANIA SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT: WHAT WORKS, WHAT DOESN'T

foreword:

so! initially, i had planned to only write a single post about symphony of the night. the problem is that... well, i had a lot to say about it? more importantly, just about everything i had to say could fit into two categories: things strictly about the game itself, and things about the game's legacy and impact on video games as a whole. so! i decided to break it up-- not just so that i could get something written before i lost motivation, but also to avoid the multiple thousands of words the original draft reached before i decided to split things up. so! this is the first part of my analysis of symphony of the night. i'll be examining the game more or less in a vacuum (or, at the very least, from a contemporary perspective), picking apart what works and what doesn't, then separating those broad categories into subcategories because by god i've gotta make good use of markdown somehow. but first, an introduction!

introduction

castlevania: symphony of the night is a 1997 action platformer/RPG for the sega saturn and sony playstation. the central premise of the game is that you play as alucard, a mysterious half-vampire found in previous castlevania games whose sole goal in life is to take down his father, dracula. the entirety of the game takes place in dracula's castle, which alucard must explore (and pillage) in order to find dracula, who has seemingly been revived after being killed several years prior. there's various pieces of gear, mobility upgrades, health upgrades, and various other goodies and treats to be gathered from the castle, because it's a metroidvania game, and that's what those games are like. (i understand that, chronologically, much of that isn't a given, but again! i have to save that for the other part! to the best of my ability, at least.)

anyway! that's the game, in extremely broad strokes. so. is it good? is it bad? is it kind of good, and overall an enjoyable experience, but flawed in enough ways that make it somewhat difficult to recommend to anyone who isn't already an avid fan of the genre? probably the last one, given my specificity, but let's find out anyway!!

somewhat quick disclaimer: i played the PSX version, not the saturn version. what this means is that i played a game that had less overall content, but a much cleaner visual experience, as well as faster loading times. i don't really get into the version differences in this review, but i thought it important to point this out! also important to point out is that i emulated this on my 3DS. it didn't cause any major issues, save for making some dialogue illegible, but again, i value, uh, journalistic integrity? if you could call me a journalist.

what works

the audiovisual experience

let me start off by saying this game is a treat to look at and listen to-- even when it's not exactly good by modern standards. to be blunt: it's an original playstation game. the sounds are compressed, the sprites are kind of blurry, and the voice acting is delightfully cheesy. despite this, the backgrounds are often attractive, and the enemy designs are always a lot of fun, even if they're not always original.

all of the screencaps in this essay are taken from this video. i couldn't figure out how to mess with youtube's CSS to disable the video progress bar, so, uh, there's a line through them. sorry

the music is also great! i don't have much in particular to say about it, given my lack of musical knowledge, but there's a reason these tracks get remastered and recycled into youtube videos and future castlevania games alike. they set the mood extremely well, and they're well made for the system. i usually listen to my own music while playing games (the crane wives won't listen on repeat to themselves, after all) but i ended up having my earphones plugged into my DS the whole time. great listening!

the controls: combat

fighting monsters and bosses (which are usually also monsters) makes up about half of the game, give or take. alucard has a number of weapons and spells at his disposal, and you can mix and match these to your heart's content. while there is quite a bit of variety in weapon design/effect, and while which weapon you use most certainly impacts your overall experience, i am mostly going to gloss over the specifics of the weapons, if only because it would take too long and be uninteresting to read. what is marginally more interesting to read, however, is a breakdown of alucard's movement, and how it makes combat interesting and dynamic! so let's, uh, let's do that.
another reminder that i used a 3DS! the controls more or less evenly map out, but i'm gonna be describing buttons based off of their locations rather than their names. sorry

alucard's basic movement is typical to the castlevania series; that is, the controls are very stiff, and you are stuck in place for a bit when you perform a standard attack with most weapons, unless you attack from the air! already, this is a fun system that rewards being cautious and deliberate with your actions; it's taken wholesale from earlier castlevania games for a reason. in tandem with the subweapon system (also more or less identical to previous castlevania games), and the different kinds of weapons available, you've got a lot of options! new to symphony of the night, however, is the extremely satisfying backwards dash: a quick slide opposite from the direction you're facing, accomplished by pressing the top button. it doesn't provide any invulnerability frames, but it does enable the player to move swiftly when that otherwise would not be an option, giving them the opportunity to dodge attacks and counter-attack with style. it's difficult to master, but still very fun to utilize! figuring out how to combine aerial attacks with a grounded dash is a fun challenge, and one that unintrusively presents itself throughout the game. it's great!

map design

so, as mentioned earlier, the entirety of the game takes place in or around dracula's castle. during the early segments, around the first thirty to forty minutes or so, the player is forced to proceed linearly, but the game very quickly opens up. off the top of my head, i can think of three different routes the player can take immediately after beating the first boss; there are probably more if you're already familiar with the game. it's very exciting! most metroidvania games are not quite that liberal with their worlds, often gating off most whole areas behind movement upgrades and the like. being able to just go to half the map damn near right off the bat was incredibly refreshing, and very exciting too.

welp. that's all the nice stuff i had to say. time to get into...

what doesn't work

the controls: platforming + exploration

i'll be blunt: there's a reason every castlevania game up to this point was linear. a few paragraphs ago, i mentioned the stiff controls. while these work great for combat and boss fights, they're abysmal when it comes to navigating the labyrinthine castle. often you will find yourself backtracking through long corridors filled with enemies, and it will take forever. alucard simply does not want to move quickly, and the limited fast travel points around the map only slightly alleviate the issue. there are upgrades that give you a transformation to increase your movement speed, but this form (a wolf, if you're curious) controls very poorly, and the upgrades that make it even worth using appear pretty late in the game, making it mostly useless. don't even get me started on the bat form, which is an even slower transformation that gives alucard (nearly) unlimited flight. it's necessary repeatedly throughout the game, and it just takes fucking forever to use. not fun in a game with plenty of backtracking.

i'm going to take a second to talk to you about the other defining game of the metroidvania genre: super metroid. (it's a miracle that this is the only time in the entire review that i do this. talk about restraint, right? anyway.) super metroid, too, does not have the smoothest of controls, but it also has, like, a run button? and a wall jump? and a myriad of other movement upgrades directly required to beat the game that all grant the player additional speed and mobility when they engage with the environment? the slower controls play into the game's favor in super metroid, whereas in castlevania it just feels like you get more and more stunted options. each time you turn into a bat, you have to wait for an animation before slowly flying around. the same goes for the wolf and mist, the other two transformations; they're slow, and they make you sit still to use them. it's annoying. i hate it. i don't have much more to say on the matter.

the inventory

alright. here we go. we're really about to get into it now. you ready? no? well then. what're you reading this review for?? like it or not, it's time to really get negative.

allow me to present to you a scenario: you're fighting a boss towards the end of the game, and you are suddenly at low health. a common occurrence in a difficult boss fight! luckily for you, you have some food in your inventory you could use to heal. great! this is how you have to use items in this game:

• first, press start to pause the game. (the music will pause as soon as you do.)
• second, go to the EQUIP menu.
• in the equip menu, select either alucard's left or right hand slot, then sort through a menu of every weapon, shield, and item you've obtained in order to pick out the healing item you want.
• exit the menu entirely. (music's back!) press the button to attack with alucard's left or right hand slot.
• if you are using a potion, alucard will drink it, and the potion healing timer will start up, ending in a few seconds where you'll be healed a significant amount. if you are using a food item, use it and it will be dropped to the ground so that you may consume it, healing you instantly.
• if you are still not healed, re-enter the menu (music pauses again.) and repeat this process; if you are as healed as you would like, enter the menu once more via the above instructions and scroll through the menu to find your weapon again.

it might seem like i'm being dramatic. and, alright, i am, at least a little. however, you end up with several pages of items by the end of the game, and without a tool to sort them, you'll inevitably find yourself digging through countless armor pieces and low-level healing items in an attempt to find the one thing you actually need; especially once you get to the part of the game in which different sets of armor are useful for different fights. it's a pain in the ass, and it entirely disrupts the flow of the game.

the RPG mechanics

alright, before i say anything else, let's just take a look at the menu again. so there's a lot going on here! i'm not going to dissect the exact particulars of what numbers mean what, because ultimately they all boil down to how often you get hit and how hard you hit others. it's basic RPG stuff-- but it's in a metroidvania! ain't that curious. this was one of the few things i knew about this game going in, and i was curious! after all, metroidvanias are a (typically) non-linear genre, and a levelling system might be difficult to implement in such a game. so how'd it go?

bad! it went bad. they did it bad. they did not do it good they did it bad. the opposite of good. bad.

although initially the mechanics seem to work well, once the map branches out (as i mentioned earlier) it quickly becomes apparent that there was no sort of scaling enemies with levels whatsoever. every enemy you encounter will either be a damage sponge, absorbing a ridiculous number of hits, or will be made of glass and do almost no damage. this applies to some bosses as well-- a few fights were extremely trivial thanks to my gear + level being greater than had seemingly been expected. most of these fights were towards the end of the game, too, resulting in a difficulty curve that made the early-game harder and the later-game easier. it took a lot of fun out of the experience.

however... despite the boring late game, i still had hope. after all, in my searching through gameFAQs, (i got lost a couple times, ok) i saw mention of a whole post-game/true ending part of the story. the "inverted castle", which i discovered was just... the entire castle, upside-down. which is pretty cool! i was excited-- i assumed rooms and enemies would be reworked to make more sense in this redesigned environment. how'd it go?

the entire bonus half of the game (feat: map design again)

yeah, this shouldn't be a surprise, huh? i mean, you knew the structure of the review going in, right? what works, and what doesn't. not, like, what works, what doesn't, and what also works as a little trick for optimists everywhere. no. the inverted castle fucking blows. the game's flaws become exaggerated to extremes:

• because the castle is upside-down, you have to use alucard's (incredibly slow!) bat transformation to progress.
• furthermore, the fast travel gates do not carry over, so you must re-unlock them, thus requiring a whole bunch of walking and flying through areas that are, for the most part, entirely unchanged, save for stronger versions of previous enemies.
• all of the enemies pretty much explode into dust upon you looking at them, EXCEPT for the enemies that STILL deal ridiculous amounts of damage (and spam projectiles.).
• because there are no more progression gates, all of the bosses in the area are laughably easy, given that, if you've been thorough, you'll have more than enough EXP and gear to tear through them. this all SUCKS. like, genuinely, there's an area of the game pretty close to where you enter the inverted castle, and it's already pretty bullshit visually, and it's just filled to the fucking brim with bullshit enemies. there are these fucking infinitely spawning enemies that freeze you in stone every time they hit you, and there are ALWAYS at least two on the screen, and every hit in the game has ridiculous knockback so even if you have the armor that makes you immune to stone it's still a fucking nightmare, and it just genuinely doesn't stop, and oh my god why in the fucking world did they do this. i know the answer, and it's "padding the game's length out by re-using assets and artificially inflating difficulty," but oh my god is it so fucking frustrating!!! god!!! sigh. ok. deep breath.

intermission

... alright, i may have gotten a little bit intense there. to be honest with you, "bonus half" might be overstating the size of the inverted castle. i pushed through it in about a couple hours, and while it definitely felt long and draining, it was bonus content... sort of. the true final boss, dracula himself (spoilers sorry) lies at the center of the inverted castle, and to play the game without actually beating dracula just feels kind of... hollow? all of this is to say that i think my grumpiness towards the castle is justified. but also maybe i could calm down a little bit.

conclusion

so. what did i think overall? to be honest with you, symphony of the night feels like three different gaming genres smashed into one another, resulting in a disjointed and uneven game. on one hand, you've got the classic castlevania movement and combat, which have been developed further with new weapons and mobility to become even more enjoyable. on the other hand, you've got the RPG mechanics, which don't fit anywhere, and on the third hand, you've got the whole exploration aspect that defines most of the game!

it feels like symphony of the night is constantly stepping on its own toes. the movement and controls work great for combat, but the engaging battles are often made tedious by the uneven levelling. the exploration is interesting in theory, but the backtracking that is endemic to the metroidvania genre is made far more frustrating by the limited movement options. the music is paused every time you have to go into the menu mid-fight. it feels like each component of symphony of the night is held back by the other mechanics. it's the video game equivalent of three dogs trying to shove themselves through a doggie door and none of them getting through, and it's disappointing to see.

as i said towards the beginning of the review, i genuinely cannot in good faith suggest this game to the average gamer. it's slow, clunky, and honestly not worth the annoyance if you're not already a fan of the genre; however, i think the number of people who are big fans of the genre but haven't played one of the two games that define it has got to be pretty low. i mean, sure, i myself had not played it until recently, but... y'know. you get it.

playing this game (and becoming disatisfied with it) got me thinking, though. with the lack of popularity as an individual game, and the lack of contribution to the overall concept of a "metroidvania" game, it becomes hard not to start asking questions: how did this game earn its way into defining the very name of the metroidvania genre? how does it shape the genre beyond just the name? just where is the -vania in metroidvania? all this and more (epic segue) in the next and presumably final part of my pseudo-essay: "sotn review part 2: untitled."

...i don't have a name for it yet. naming essays is hard.