TBT Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

It took me a little while to settle on a title this week, but I ended up going with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (SotN). I've always been a pretty big fan of the Castlevania series in general, due in large part to Symphony of the Night. The series itself is massive, with over 30 games released on pretty much every console you can think of. SotN deviated quite a bit from previous installments in the series. Having been released in 1997 for the Ps1, Castlevania had already seen over 10 games released in the series. Previous iterations centered exclusively on a vampire hunting family called the Belmonts, with every game placing the player in the shoes of one of the descendants. However, SotN featured Dracula's half vampire son Alucard (his mother was human; and yes, “Alucard” is Dracula just spelled backwards).

For the most part, Castlevania games were all stage based: you beat a linear level, and then move onto the next one. SotN on the other hand had a large map you could explore at anytime... provided you had the ability to traverse it of course. See, there is a reason 2D action-adventure games are called Metroid-Vania games, and along with the Metroid series, it's due to this game. It is essentially a 2D sandbox game and because of that, unless you had a crazy good memory, you could get lost trying to find your way (I know I did). The overall flow of the game had you going though different rooms and areas of the castle to gain new abilities, which you would use to explore further. For example, you could turn into mist to pass through some grates, or turn into a bat to fly to previously unreachable ledges.

As you went about, there would be all manners of beasts and monsters ready to attack you. One of the reasons why I love this game so much is because you can pick up and use any weapon you want. You can easily find weapons off dead enemies or buy them at the shop (yes, there is a shop keeper who happens to be the librarian of the castle), but you'll almost always find the more powerful ones by exploring around! The cool thing about changing the weapons was that they handled differently. You even get to equip all different kinds of armour, and when you changed your cape, it would change in game as well (just the colour though).

If you haven't guessed it by now, the main point of games like this is to explore the entire thing. It even goes so far that if you don't explore enough, you might actually miss out on half the game! Yes that is correct, there are 2 endings. One is half way through the game, but I'm sure some people didn't even realize, since 50% of the game is the entire castle. If you do it right, the second half is a double of the first castle but upside-down! The entire map was designed to work like that, every stair case, every passage way. It's a little disorienting at first, but you get used to it.

Having the word “symphony” in the title, you would expect the music to be good and SotN does not disappoint. Mixing all different types of music genres, each area of the castle has different background music. That being said, the voice acting is mostly horrible haha. It was a Ps1 game though, so I was pretty surprised it had voices at all.

One of my favorite for sure

All of the above said, there are some frustrating bits to the game. Most notably, like I had mentioned before, getting lost is a pain in the ass. If you get the ability to double jump or turn into mist, you have to remember where you have to return in order to benefit from these abilities. Not all areas are even beneficial to progressing either. I enjoy finding health power ups as much as the next guy, but if I'm walking around for half an hour trying to figure out where to go it gets frustrating. 

The controls are solid and the combat is fun, if not simple. The only other thing that really annoyed me was certain areas where enemies spawned indefinitely. They weren`t big enemies and I can see that they were designed to be a nuisance. But the frequency of their arrival on top of the enemies that are already in the area can get over whelming though. While I never died during sequences like this, man was I pissed! If only because every time you get hit, you`re knocked away. 

All in all, I will always love this game, even when it doesn`t always point you in the right direction; I love exploring the world, the main character is sick and the overall progression he takes over the course of the game with new abilities and brute strength is awesome. It has become available on both the PSN and Xbox live, so I suggest playing it if you haven`t already (they apparently redid the voices).