“It’s is very funny to me that your castlevania journey stalled hard on Symphony of the Night, one of the most beloved and influential games of all time.” These words by a close friend of mine have haunted me for months bro.

Classic Ina Followers may recall that last year I spent the month of November playing every Castlevania game in release order, a project that started when I bought that collection of most of the classic games on a whim and sort of just went to town once I realized how entirely my shit every single thing about the series is. Castlevania’s been something of a blindspot for me – as a kid I played AND QUITE LOVED Castlevania 64 and later Order of Ecclesia, and then specifically Lords of Shadow 2, and maybe a couple years ago I had a really great time with Aria of Sorrow but other than futzing around with the first couple of NES games in a false start at this project that was the full extent of my scattered Castlevania experience.

How much I love Aria really set me up for a surprise then because the reason I haven’t posted about Castlevania in a year is that I actually got through like 60 or 70% of this game right after I finished Bloodlines and I was so entirely turned off that I put it down and just didn’t come back for eleven months. I think if I wasn’t so committed to making this a “play every game in the series” kind of thing I may never have.

BUT I DID THIS WEEK and I ZOOMED THROUGH THIS MOTHER FUCKER and I’m SO TORN BRO. Well, not really, I think actually I mostly just don’t like it, but I hope I can adequately explain why.

Because obviously there is so much to love in Symphony, and so much stuff that’s specific to my personal taste too. Aesthetically, the game is a dream, holy SHIT. Everybody knows how good looking it is, experienced sprite artists taking advantage of the fancy new hardware to push what they’re capable of. You see it everywhere, from obvious stuff like Alucard’s butter-smooth animations to the absolutely METICULOUS details in nearly every background in the game, used to dial up a sense of place and atmosphere in as maximal a way as possible but with a slightly different flavor than we got even from powerhouse games like Bloodlines and Super IV. But I don’t just like how GOOD the game looks, I also like how a lot of the time the game looks kind of messy and bad? There are a TON of reused sprites from Bloodlines in this game and listen man I LOVE Bloodlines but it is a stiffer and more early 90s arcadey looking game. It’s that in a way that suits it but compared to the way original sprites look and move in Symphony things just kind of stand out when they’re contrasted. It’s not just that either – the most realistic visual fidelity the series has seen yet along with a much less strong sense of theming than any of its three mainline predecessors (necessitated, I’m sure, by how much exponentially bigger and more open Symphony is) means they really mash ALLLLL the inspirational shit for this series together in a big soup in a way that feels a lot more overt than ever before. You have grotesque horror imagery, fairy tale mystique, hollywood horror guys, and overt cartoon monsters all chilling in this same castle, and often on the same screens as each other, with no sense of visual cohesion tying them together in a way that just didn't come through as hard on, say the NES.

And I think that fucking rips ass dude. I’m sure I’ve spoken about this in these Castlevania writeups before but I think the fact that Symphony of the Night exists so permanently in the cultural memory as this titanic Important Game that people are still playing, especially with its legendary status in the ever-more-popular speedrun world, that it’s easy to forget that it was at one point a game that like, came out, in 1997, in a moment in history. One where 2D games were spoken of by pretty much everyone as if they were relics on their way out the door. That was surely on the minds of the Symphony of the Night team too, who had this game’s obnoxious 3D cutscenes foisted on them by their corporate managers, who were making a game for the Playstation, a console that’s so powerful but also famously kind of bad at running 2D games, who were surely working on this with the understanding that they may not get many more chances to make a game like this, if they got to make any more Castlevanias like this at all.

You can FEEL this energy vibrating through all of Symphony of the Night; it feels like a swan song, a chance to pay homage to everything everyone loved about every single previous iteration of the series and ALSO to cram in every idea they thought might have been cool in this format before the boss came in and started making people learn how to model skeletons riding motorcycles in 3D. SO there’s just all kinds of weird bullshit in here – yeah sure there’s an input based spell system, uhh puzzles will be tied to the game clock, hide a third of the game behind some really oblique bullshit I promise it will be worth it when they figure it out, oh hey what if the game was an RPG and it had the worst menus of all time. Feels like my man Hagihara simply did not say no to anything anyone asked him if they could put in the game and honestly god bless him.

The addition of Ayami Kojima as the key character artist coupled with a returning Michiru Yamane using the strengths of the Playstation's sound doohickeys (idk shit about that stuff man) to deliver something altogether moodier and synthier than we got from previous Castlevanias create the outrageously intense arch-goth style that people identify with this series for the first REAL time I think. There have always been shades of this, it’s a bit hard to avoid when you’re dealing with the subject matter Castlevania does, and the soundtracks have dipped into this vibe from time to time when they’re not fully rocking out but this is a very distinct artistic shift away from both the original 80s hollywood vibes and the more modern anime stylings the series had leaned on up til this point, and I think these aesthetics suit it really well. It looks and sounds like you made a Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream get drunk at the kind of nightclub where people still do ecstasy.

It’s so fucking boring though. This is the hardest part for me because ON PAPER Symphony is still theoretically doing the kinds of things that I like to see in exploration based games. The castle is huge but the game leads you directly through very little of it, and there are massive chunks of it that have nothing to do or see in them. So often you’ll work your way through some challenging puzzle room or gauntlet of enemies, maybe even fight a boss, and be rewarded with a swords that’s like fifty times shittier than the knife you’ve been rocking for two hours. That’s fine by me, I do like to get a little treat if it’s gonna be something cool or interesting, but I hate feeling like the only reason to explore in a game is to get to the treasure chest or Lore Nugget or whatever at the end of whatever I’m doing. I rarely feel like Symphony of the Night is doing that though, both because the rewards are genuinely terrible almost every single time (including the important ones! There are SO many upgrades and abilities in this game that are just like complete garbage lmao we are truly filling a list we made the castle so big oh piss oh fuck) but also because almost all of the areas in the game are so distinctly designed and full of personality; I WANT to poke around in them, even if I’m always only doing it to soak up the atmosphere and maybe see what kind of big freak I get to stab at the end.

The big problem for me then is that I think the actual act of moving around the castle feels like complete shit almost all of the time. Not the act of moving Alucard – that feels incredible – but the act of moving inside of the space of the castle. I think something was fumbled pretty badly in the transition from tightly designed levels to a big open world that’s intended to be crossed back and forth over many times. There are certainly a lot of cool rooms that offer neat layouts and challenges to overcome, but SO much of this castle is just big hallways with a few guys copy-pasted in them. It’s not like this didn’t ever happen in Castlevania before, but it was way less common, generally speaking, to see enemies just plopped somewhere without a feeling of intent to where and how they were placed, and I think that almost feels like the MAJORITY of enemies in Symphony of the Night. Space fillers. Overwhelming the player with numbers and leaving it up to me to figure out how to deal with it using his robust arsenal and moveset rather than filling the game with more considered encounters. And I understand how that sounds, for sure; by the sounds of things the game had a rushed development as it is, and I think the piece that we got is pretty astounding considering that, but it doesn’t change tedious it is to just get around. And when there IS a challenge that’s satisfying and tough or even just like difficult and a relief to clear, damn I am usually a lot less enamored with them the third or fourth time I have to truck through that area. The Clock Tower is my arch enemy in this game (I was bad at the switch puzzle).

My other big sticking point is that Castlevania is an RPG now but I think this sucks? I think this sucks dude. I so rarely feel like a proper balance is struck in how this plays out. There’s equipment everywhere and it’s all useless. I like finding the secret abilities, that’s cool, but I am not as crazy about filling my inventory up with fifty shirts that all suck ass. The main issue for me though is the way this affects interacting with enemies, where encounters often boil down to getting turbo stomped and dealing scratch damage based on my level or being able to kill guys by stepping on them – rarely does it feel like I’m properly tuned to stretch my resources from one save point to another.

All of this coalesced on my first playthrough when I got to the upside down castle and found that every enemy suddenly killed me in just a few hits and the nature of the designs of every room meant that while things were somewhat cleverly crafted insofar as the upside down layout accounts for all of your abilities, what that actually means is you have to spend a LOT of time as that awful bat or doing your super jump thing and I really just don’t like how any of the extra traversal stuff in this game feels at all! And that was enough for me to take a break that became a couple weeks that became a couple months that became me restarting the game almost exactly one year later. I did finish it this time, but I find that my feelings haven’t changed very much. I just don’t get along with the part of the game where you’re playing it. Which is, unfortunately, basically all of it.

And yet.

And yet there’s that room with the confessional where you can get the good nice guy who gives you the grape juice or the shitty twisted guy who stabs you, but also you can sit in his chair and a lady will show up and SHE might try to stab you and that is also really cool. You can sit in basically every chair in the game except the one you kill at the end and none of them even do anything, except make you look fucking cool. You can look in that telescope and see the guy in his little boat! If you get some peanuts you throw them into the air and you have to catch them in your mouth to get the health boost because I guess Alucard will only interact with peanuts via fun party tricks. If you have your bat buddy equipped and you turn into your bat form he gets really psyched and then when you turn back into a vampire he’s like damn that sucks. There are seemingly infinite little hidden details and skills and secrets tied to equipment and combinations of equipment and certain inputs and shit. Is that the fucking guy from Kid Dracula? I think it is the fucking guy from Kid Dracula. There are so many greebly little details stuffed into this game for seemingly no reason at all other than that it would be cool to have them in there, and it’s truly impossible not to be charmed by them.

I’m similarly charmed by the story, as scant as it is. I think the character sketches here are strong, and while Maria is pretty swagless here these are the coolest takes on Death and Dracula so far easily. I even think the localization is good, like sincerely I think this is a very fun script with a strong sense of character that matches the tone of the rest of the game. Some of the voice actors are certainly weak links but you’re not gonna catch me saying SHIT about the guy doing Dracula here he is fucking EATING. I think the only time I actually laughed because the game caught me on something silly was when Alucard hit us with that fake Edmund Burke quote in the ending; I guess whatever else he was up to in his exile, Alucard was making sure to keep up with 1700s British politics.

I hope that when I get some more distance from Symphony of the Night that’s the stuff that stands out to me. The verve and playfulness on display here; the expansive lineup of Guys, the beautiful background art. I worry that it will be the bad vibes, which I tried my best to resist. I wanted to like this game more than I did but at some point I had to give up the goat and admit to myself that this was the first time I had ever just really wished I wasn’t playing the game while I was in the middle of it. I know a lot of the big players on this team will go on the be involved in like fifty more games iterating on the foundation laid here, and I know for a fact that I really love at least one of them, so I do hope this one’s a fluke. But even if Symphony is a personal low point for me, that’s like, that’s pretty good right? I guess if this is how I’m feeling about one of the most beloved and influential games of all time then we’re in a pretty good spot, right? Only up from here I’m sure.

NEXT TIME: CASTLEVANIA LEGENDS

LAST TIME: BLOODLINES