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Backlog: Castlevania Symphony of the Night

Time for another Backlog! Yay!

And quite the backlog it is!
This is Symphony of the Night! And if you've never heard of this game, you've never played it! For more intelligent insights and obviosities (it's a word!) read on, my dear reader, read on.

Symphony of the Night then, sometimes also lovingly called SotN, or FUCKITIWASJUMPING! was the first game in the so called Metroidvania games, named after the Metroid style of gameplay that was introduced into the Castlevania series, as a breath of fresh, albeit stolen, air. But hey, stolen air rules! You know what they say: Better stolen air, than your own vacuum!

Well, I said that once. In fact, I did just now.

The first time was also very much the best time, like with sex, only completely the opposite. Which is to say, none of the sequels so far have been as good as this one. It is quite easily the biggest of the lot, it has the best soundtrack, and it also has the most appalingly atrocious Theme Song in the history of Video Games EVER.
And that includes the little known Theme Song: My Penis is Large by Elton John for Final Fistfuck VI. Great game though!

The great thing is that, even though the game might only appear moderately sized from the start, there is a HUGE twist for those skilled enough to find it, which makes the game easily twice as long. Other Castlevania's have tried variations on this theme, but none of them are as interesting or well done as this one, so basically: you don't really need to play any of the other Castlevania's after this one, cos they're not nearly as good anyway.

Graphically the game is kinda lacklustre, simple 2D graphics, with some moderate 3D backgrounds here and there, and a couple of polygonal enemies, nothing special. It could probably have run off a SuperNES, sans the 3D bits. What the SNES could not have handled though, is the MARVELLOUS soundtrack. WOW!
This is widely acknowledged as one of the best PSX soundtracks around, and rightly so. There's a great variation of music, and all of it fits the many environments of this game, be it gothic rock, romantic waltzes or complete silence, it ALL rules.
Voice acting is kinda crappy though, as are the dialogues in the first place, also, naming your character, who is the son of Dracula, Alucard? GREAT IDEA, Bitches! (Note: it took me five years to figure out what this meant, and I was not happy in the end). I mean, geez, the geezer is thousands of years old, you'd think he could come up with a more original name than that, right? Stupid Undead Git.

So, uh, SotN, it's basically a platform game/RPG with lots of platform hopping and RPGing elements, with the experience and the equipment and the double jumps and the what-have-you-not. Oh, speaking of which, the item management in this game royally SUCKS. Shit, you find DOZENS and DOZENS of items throughout the whole game, and your weapons and items are all thrown together on one big pile, with NO possibility of ordering or arrangeing them, which sucks. Sometimes you have to plow through your equipment very carefully to see where that newly picked up sword went, and you'll also be stuck with it for the rest of the game.
There is a shop, where you can buy cool stuff and sell valuable gems, but you canNOT sell your equipment, which really makes your item windows a great mess.

Also, like ALL Castlevania games, Symphony of the Night, or Nocturne in the Moonlight as it is also called in Japan (Those crazy little bastards!), can get EXTREMELY frustrating at times, with some very cheap bosses, and most annoyingly (and this is a typical Castlevania trait) being nocked back when you're hurt, causing you to fall of platforms and the like. Oh, how I like that.

And another thing, although I already mentioned this for one of the other games, the nature of this Metroidvania, and getting the Castle to form a nice, fitting whole, means you sometimes get really really LONG hallways, with NOTHING to do, but defeating the same kind of enemies over and over again. This is especially fun when you have to backtrack to get other goodies. There are warppoints, fortunately, but never enough, and there's just a couple of key hallways that you'll get to see a LOT, more than is comfortable anyway. That's the Konami Motto: Repetition is Good!
And no, I'm not going to repeat that.

SO, the final verdict then. GREAT game, absolute classic, but just too many tiny things that detract from the experience. A nice round 9.0 seems in place, with a "Must Play" seal attached anyway, but I can't promise you'll like it all the way through.

posted by Ingen! @ 8:53 PM