davidn

Even though I was a child of the Playstation era due to coming to the console world about five years later than most people my age, I had had a notable gap in the games that I'd played for a long time. It wasn't exactly difficult to get hold of, being one of the four or five Playstation classics that were actually released in Europe, but somehow it had completely passed me by and I'd never even seen it at all, let alone played it. When looking through the Playstation Store one night, we saw Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was available, and decided that it was time to give it a try.

Hideo Kojima's invasion of the Castlevania series was going to happen much later on, but you're treated to a dose of exactly his kind of madness right from the beginning as it starts you confidently off in the wrong game. You're presented with the title "Final Stage Bloodlines", and are then led through what I was later to find out was an enhanced remake of the finale of one of the previous titles in the series. It confused me hugely when it came up, and even after going back to it after finishing the game, this time understanding what was going on, it still felt uncomfortably like something out of a dream where you turn on the television and things aren't acting as they're supposed to, and the ten o'clock news is being presented by the Clangers and they've asked them to make sure to tie every story in with the name of a kind of cheese because they've got a new sponsor but they refuse to do it because they can only speak in that slide-whistle voice and... but still, getting back to the topic at hand, you're introduced to the backstory through this positively ham-tastic demonstration of how to create an instant classic of a cutscene, then invited to take a few whacks at Dracula, being awarded invincibility if you can't do it, before you get to start the actual game.

Here, you're instead put in control of Alucard, a complete ponce with hair to rival a power metal drummer and a collar with its own postcode, who has decided that the best way to distance himself from the name of his cursed bloodline is just to spell it backwards rather than changing it to Rodge and going to live in the country. Your task is to venture into a castle full of creatures of the night who can't act, chopping them up with a selection of gradually more effective equipment while they respond by making a set of unearthly squealing noises unmatched by anything but most episodes of Sex and the City, and gather up the cash that they keep in their bat/crow/skeleton pockets. But the introduction to the main game is quite wonderful - after stalking through a darkened corridor, the lights suddenly come up, the Dracula's Castle theme starts playing, and you just know from that point on that you're in for something very special.

My first thought on getting into the proper game was much like my first thought towards many classics that I didn't grow up with - namely, "Cripes, this is bloody hard". And you're not granted any forgiveness with continue points like in today's games - if you die, it's right back to the last save point for you. So it took me a while to get reaccustomed to taking every opportunity to save, even if I didn't think that I'd really done an awful lot since starting the game. The difficulty was made clear to me when after finding the first real "level", the Alchemy Laboratory, I was completely flattened against the first boss, a deadly combination of a flying fire-spitting blue gargoyle and a sort of flamingo with a spear. I actually retraced my steps at that point, wondering if I'd wandered into a place where I wasn't meant to be yet, but the backtracking let me level up a couple of times, and once I mastered Alucard's sort of Michael Jackson sliding backwards dodge, I got past them after a mighty struggle. This pattern was to be repeated many times throughout the game.

It gets easier as you go on, though, because there are so many different paths to take and upgrades to find at any one point - eventually you even break free of your confinement to the ground, with the abilities to transform into a bat, a nondescript cloud of mist, or the world's most effeminate-looking canine*. What most impressed me about the game was just how much of it there was - it's all rendered in beautiful sprite work, and the castle is so large that it's very easy to get completely lost. This problem was alleviated somewhat when I realized that there was a map (after only about five hours), which helped a rather extraordinary amount, but it still takes a while for locations to become familiar. One other thing hampering navigation is that a couple of areas also seem to be fond of repeating rooms and enemy patterns more often than you'd think was necessary - for example, there's a bit where you have to run along a flat area with some pillars in the background and hit a scorpion-lady-for-a-tail a bit until it catches fire, then you run past it and exactly the same thing happens again, twice. Then you encounter Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, uproot it, and then exactly the same thing happens again a screen further along. Obviously, Dracula owns one of those castles from Scooby Doo where every single corridor has a grandfather clock, bookcase and doorway that just whizz past in endless rotation as you run along them.

The only way in which I felt the game showed its age was in the interface, which has a rather messy mid-90s look to it (not helped by being able to see all of its naked pixels on a modern television) and was extremely clumsy at times. I finished the game with an absolute banquet stuffed into Alucard's overcoat because the food healing items and potions are so awkward to use - you have to go into the menu, unequip your weapons, equip what you want to use, go back to the game, use the items (making him toss them disgustedly a bit in front of him), pick them up to actually get the health benefit, then go back into the menu and find the weapons that you had equipped again. It really doesn't feel worth it when you lose the amount of health you gained back so quickly anyway. And of course, there's always the atrocious acting, common to so many games of the time - but this one does it so badly that it somehow becomes part of its charm. There's a beardy man in the castle's library who you can buy things from, but "Vocal coaching" is not among them, sadly for both him and you.

It took much longer than I ever expected at the outset, but after going around gathering up abilities for ages, we finally flew over to the tower at the top of the map, battered the final boss in the same place as we had begun in the fake introduction, and finished the game. No, in fact we didn't - just as you think you're at the end, you're transported into the sky and invited to go through an entire inverted copy of the castle with an entire new repertoire of enemies and bosses. I had thought that the game was big before that happened, and that the extra section really would be just a little bit extra, but you really can go anywhere - including up to the lowest level of the catacombs, which features the scariest music I have ever heard - knocking the crown away from previous record-holder Ecco the Dolphin - and which allows you to get to an absolutely ludicrous boss which is over a screen high and takes about ten minutes of hacking to defeat even when you're using a rather cheaty item that causes most of his attacks to heal you.

I'm not sure how I managed to avoid hearing about this twist for the last fourteen years - perhaps the black hole of popular culture that I occupy works to my advantage sometimes. (I had the same reaction at the start of Terminator 2, and I first saw that in 2001.) It's amazing that this amount of care went into content that was so... optional, even if it was intended to be the true route through the game - it takes a lot to get there. In fact, I only discovered it by mistake because my problem was that I assumed that I needed to get everything before completing the game, and thought after one disastrous fight with the apparent end boss that I was meant to do that much, much later. So I put off going back there until I had got everything in the castle, whereupon the game moved its goalposts.

But I'm glad that I got the full experience. It's very rare to be able to play a game without any idea what's going to happen in it at all like that - now you can just go on the Internet and be fed absolutely everything about releases before you've even played them.

* Apart from

kjorteo

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

ravenworks.livejournal.com

I don't know which surprises me more -- that you managed not to hear about the inverted castle (http://www.invertedcastle.com/), or that you actually managed to find it without hints! Especially now that (having shepherded a friend through the game only a couple of months ago, actually!) I've noticed that, in a particularly appropriate bit of Graveyard Duckery, the "secret message" on the rings doesn't even refer to the right room..!

I dunno, I think I almost prefer it as the kind of secret that you have to have spoiled by a friend -- that was one of the things I loved about Cave Story, back in the days before it was well-known enough to have FAQs... but I agree, not knowing that it's going to happen beforehand sounds like it would have been awfully exciting. (Alas, I had been reading FAQs about it for days before I finally decided I had to try this game...) I can't decide whether I love or hate the fact that they've completely disguised 50% of the content of the game, though. You can beat the game, get the credits, and have nearly "100%" completion, and have no idea that there's more than just chasing stupid heart containers left. If you don't have a friend to spoil it for you, you can miss out on awesome exploration and boss fighting because you weren't anal enough in your completionism -- which is a valid thing to enjoy in games, but a separate interest from what it would take to enjoy the inverted castle, really... it doesn't make sense to reward only the completionists with content that could be enjoyed by anyone! If it were a grindy dungeon of palette swaps, that would be one thing...

Is that what you picture Alucard's wolf form looking like, by the way? I always thought he looked like a robot dog, or at least an "animate suit of armor" dog...

Oh shoot, which reminds me :D Did you even find out about Richter Mode?

BTW, apparently they re-recorded the dialogue (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnPhL-XyC3U) for the PSP port... Personally, I'd rather hear people totally own the hammy delivery than try to make a game like this actually seem like it could be done seriously. (And they ditch the André Malraux quote!) I feel like the voice acting was perfect - it's not like we're talking about Doctor Wawwy (http://www.audioatrocities.com/games/megaman8/), they just read their cheesy lines cheesily, and I think capped off the game's atmosphere perfectly. :)

What exactly is your subject line quote mangling, anyway?

From:

rakarr.livejournal.com

"Running After The Devil"

From:

kjorteo

Man, that new version is awful. I actually fail to see how the new version is in any way higher quality or more capable of being taken seriously than the old (I would argue that the old Dracula's voice was actually better, even!) and they changed questionable dialogue into even more questionable dialogue presumably because the former had become a meme. The end result is (to reference something I linked elsewhere) like translating Heavenly songs into English... all that really does is just remove the charm.

From:

From:

kjorteo - Date: 2011-04-14 01:27 am (UTC) - Expand

From:

davidn

Quick, let's get back to this post before any more arrive below!

I glanced at an FAQ a couple of times, when I wasn't sure where to go or what to do next to get an ability - the only times I remember was to find out when the passages in the clock room opened, and when I couldn't work out how I was meant to get through the completely dark spike-filled room (the sonar, of course!) It was my belief that I shouldn't go and fight Richter, and that I still had a lot to do before I was meant to go there, that caused me to accidentally complete the game a lot more than I had intended to - the guide just assumed that you were going for the optimal completionist route through the game, and didn't note that I was doing anything special at this point.

What did the rings say again - Wear/clock, in/tower? I had realized that "Clock Tower" was the name of an actual level, but it was nevertheless obvious to me that it meant the unsubtly significant clock room in which nothing much special had yet happened. (But while I'm on that subject, I really thought that having the clock display the time since you started the game, and having events based on that, was a nice touch.)

I did find out about Richter mode, after completing the game - I actually have a save partway though. It's strange that even though the mechanics of the game should change an extraordinary amount with him, it's still perfectly possible to do it (something that was also striking about the inverted castle, but this isn't as much of an example of design cleverness as I thought at first because it just so happens that you can fly up to any impossible areas, rather than them being designed to be passable both ways up).

I couldn't help noticing that the wolf was a violent shade of purple that not even I could mistake for anything else! I thought the slightly mechanical look was just part of... what it looked like, or as a result of it being made up of sprite-based connecting rods (I was surprised when I saw the sprite sheet, on a search for a demonstrative picture, and found that it was made up of so many individual parts, with no actual drawn walk cycle at all).

The voice acting really was perfect - as I've noted somewhere several miles below, it's a level of greatness that only a combination of really bad acting and terrible dialogue can paradoxically hope to achieve. (And of course, the subject line, apart from mentioning "Symphony" and "Night" in the same chorus, is another example of so much charm being produced from an extraordinary attempt at English.)

From:

rakarr.livejournal.com

I would like to respond to your quite excellent review with something substantial, in kind, but all I can think to say is that I knew what your footnote was going to say as soon as I saw the asterisk denoting it.

And that reverse catacombs music - I don't need to click the link, I remember it - has me hearing cries of "Hyah! Hyah! AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!"

From:

kjorteo

Oh, dear. Does my reputation precede me that much?

From:

rakarr.livejournal.com

Hey, I've got first-hand experience!

From:

davidn

I thought he had a very Cervantes-like set of grunts :) "BLEH BLEH BLEH GAAAH!" (Or "DUCK!", which might even be more appropriate for this game.)

From:

kjorteo

Don't think I didn't see that!

From:

kjorteo

Also, really? You thought cited the inverted castle as further evidence of the game being lovingly made with detail and effort poured into it at every turn? I totally agree as far as the entire first castle, but to me it felt like the developers were just as surprised to have a second castle as you were, and that portion of the development consisted of flipping the maps upside down and scoring absolutely God damned everything with Finale Toccata.

Furthermore, I'm going to have to disagree with you regarding the creepy music, though--not that the score doesn't have its creepy moments (far from it!) but that the one you selected is far from the most unnerving example to me. I always had the biggest problem with Abandoned Pit, myself. Also, in a series that's specifically built around including every gothic or monster movie type horror thing they can possibly find in any medium ever, SotN is impressive for having both of the only two occasions I've actually been legitimately creeped out by the design of a boss. (On the other hand, it also had all three of the top three occasions in which I thought a boss was cute.)

Edited Date: 2011-04-13 07:25 am (UTC)

From:

ravenworks.livejournal.com

Aw, now I wanna hear both lists!

Also: how did I never hear the evil dolphins in Abandoned Pit. :X

And (if I could take a wild guess on his behalf) I think what's lovingly made about the Inverted Castle is even the completely unnecessary second quest has a completely original set of bosses! And the bosses in this game are kind of a big deal :X

From:

davidn

Yes, that's absolutely right - I was very impressed at how much more challenge there was to it, after I thought I'd completed it. And a significant number of those bosses are screen-high sprites - the amount of artwork in this game is... staggering. I know that a modestly-sized 3D game will have more graphical assets in it, technically, but I just... notice the quality of it more, here.

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