Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

2025-01-18
"Wow that Richter boss was pretty easy, huh? Wait what's this? Oɥ sɥᴉʇ˙"

I've spent most of my life being told that Castlevania Symphony of the Night is one of the greatest games of all time. And believe it or not in 2024 when I finally popped a copy into my PS2 and sat down to play I wasn't really hooked. Sure, the music is phenomenal and the sprite-work is jaw-droppingly beautiful. But the actual gameplay had me scratching my head. This is what people have been losing their minds over? It just kind of felt hard and grindy. I beat the first couple of bosses with the short sword and it just felt...basic. So I put it down. I dreaded going back but it was an albatross around my neck. How could I not get Symphony of the Night?

Then I got a random drop of a new weapon. And I got a power up to my health. And I tried out some different sub weapons. I'm leveling up and I'm becoming more powerful. Fights that gave me trouble were becoming easier and then a breeze. Ahhh the blessed power curve. I was bored? I'm having a blast. Looking back I think those "boring" initial hours are actually perfect. The perfect foil to how absurdly powerful you get by the end. You pass enemies that required careful dodging and numerous pokes and now you're just laying them out with one hit. It's one of my favorite things in a video game when they nail it and, by jove, Castlevania Symphony of the Night nailed it and set the blueprint for a whole genre in the process.

Looking back, you know what game I kept comparing SOTN to? Elden Ring. The reverse chronology of it all is weird but, hey, I was six years old when SOTN came out so I missed it till now, but I swear I can now see a clear line from so many things SOTN does that FromSoft would later make their bread and butter in 3D. Sure there's the obvious like the level design with backtracking and shortcuts and the relationship between different spaces. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about things like how utterly unbalanced SOTN is. It predates game designers incessant desire to beat every game to within an inch of its life with the Balance Stick. Here we have absurdly spammable attacks like the Holy Water, we have utterly broken combinations like the Shield Rod and Alucard Shield, and everything in between. Is it "fair" or "balanced"? Who gives a shit? It's fun! And if you don't like it you can use something else. And that's another similarity between FromSoft/SOTN: the wealth of options. There are so, so many weapons and items and spells. Half of them serve no purpose and half of them are weird as hell. Some weapons have secret moves or combinations just waiting to be experimented with. And I love it. You can just feel it was a game made by a team that was allowed to throw in whatever they wanted. Someone said "What if we had a sword familiar that once it levels up enough it turns into an equippable item," and the team was like "Sure why not?" "How about an armor that gets stronger based on how much of the map you've explored?" "Sure why not?" "What if when you finish the game we flip the castle and they do the whole game again except harder and with more stuff?" "Sure why not?" I guess what I'm saying is it's dense in the same way a FromSoft game is dense. Dense with enemies, dense with bosses, dense with options to play the game. Dense with fun. I can't think of a better way to describe a game than that.

In short, it is a masterpiece. But even so it is not without its flaws. That power curve I mentioned does kind of fall away in the latter part of both halves of the castle. The room with the gears you have to hit a precise number of times or they reset the count while nonstop being petrified by medusa heads absolutely took years off my life. And what the hell is up with the music in the inverted castle? Almost every section in the regular castle has ludicrously good music from jazz to metal to classical and everything in between and the inverted castle is like "Uhh let's just make all the songs kinda eerie and boring." But even that list of complaints is paltry in comparison to everything that this game did right and does right.

It's a testament to Symphony of the Night's quality that I can come in blind almost 30 years later and have as good of a time as I did. Hell, I might be one of those weirdos that plays it every year or two from now on. I can't wait to see what dumb bullshit combo I come up with next time. Fuck balance, long live Symphony of the Night.