Game Review: Castlevania; Symphony of the Night. · 2:23pm Aug 16th, 2018
My first attempt at professional-style critique. Tell me if you enjoy.
"What is a man?! A miserable little pile of secrets!"
Hey! It looks like Konami may start trying to get back into my good graces! It's going to take more candy and flowers and a promise never to see the Pachinko whore again, but it's at least a start!
Castlvania's been on my brain, lately. With Simon and Richter Belmont being added to Smash Brothers and Koji Igarashis "Bloodstained" on the horizon I've just been seeing more and more pretty vampires around. Perhaps I'm being seduced by rippling man-chest, and impossibly perfect hair, but the urge to play soon overtook me. I wanted to play a Castlevania game, and the only option available to me was Symphony of the Night, which is kind of like your only option for music is Queen. Sure, you've heard it a million times, but it's still what you would have chosen regardless.
Quick disclaimer before I start the review proper, I own two versions of this game. The PlayStation Portable version, which I played for this review, and the XBL/PSN straight port of the PlayStation 1 original, which is the one you should buy, if you're interested.
The PSP port plays a lot better and has a few extra features, but there are two major stumbling blocks.
1) It is very hard to get, in more ways than one. Chances are you do not own a PSP, as the system sold incredibly poorly. Even if you DO however, you cannot get this version of this game on it's own. You get it bundled with Castlevania: The Dracula X chronicles. And even then, it isn't available from the start. You have to do something rather obtuse to unlock it. For most people reading this, just getting to play this version will take patience, time, and money.
2) They fixed the acting and dialogue, which is a travesty.
The dialogue in the original game is legendarily awful. That line I quoted at the beginning? That is the most famous line in the game, and it is read by a man who learned everything he knew about acting by watching insane clowns do Hamlet through a slit in a piece of graph paper. It adds to the B-Movie quality to the story, and fixing it just feels wrong.
What are these people failing to act their way through? A... Fairly decent story, actually.
In the year 1792, at the end of the previous game (Castlevania: Rondo of Blood), Vampire Hunter Richter Belmont defeated the evil Count Dracula, and rescued his fiancee. He watched the castle crumble to dust knowing that Dracula's curse was sealed away for another century. Unfortuntely, no one told the Castle yet, because it rises from the ground a mere four years later.
Annoyed at having his well earned retirement interrupted, Richter goes to the castle to find out what's up, but soon disappears, causing his protege, Maria Renard to investigate the tower herself.
In the midst of all of this, Alucard, Dracula's son with a human woman, is awoken from a 400 year slumber by the castle's premature rise. He goes to the castle to tear the damn thing down. As Alucard, you have to find out what happened to Richter, and why the castle resurrected itself prematurely.
Like I said, perfectly fine story. Alucard is the cool loner, haunted by his past, with a face so pretty you just what to break his nose so there will be one blemish on his disgustingly perfect face. Normally, that archetype drives me up the wall and down the opposite one, but Alucard wears it well. Unlike a lot of the other brooding bad boys in fiction, he's not self-centered. His goal at the beginning of the game seems to be "shut down that racket while I'm trying to sleep." He's goal oriented, but he won't screw anyone over to accomplish said goals. You genuinely feel that he's a man forged by his pain, as opposed to a man who merely wallows in it.
He plays well too. Alucard is one of my favorite characters to control in any video game. There are no traditional "Stages" in this game. The castle is a massive open labyrinth with progression only blocked off by certain obstacles you can't pass until you obtain certain ubgrades. A fully upgraded Alucard can turn into a bat, wolf, or fog. He can double jump, cast magic spells, summon familiars, see through illusions, breathe fire, poison enemies, and even travel at super-speed.
He is a vampire after all, and vampire's have superpowers. Unlike pure-blooded vampires, though, Dhamphirs have to earn that stuff, and that's where the RPG elements roll in.
Alucard's main means of attack is swords, of which you can find several throughout the castle. You can equip them at your leisure, along with shields, armor, hats, and my personal favorite, capes. Not only are these all varied in terms of stats, the swords, shields, and capes all look very different on Alucard's character sprite. This gives me a better sense of progression, because I look very different from when I started, along with feeling much more powerful.
Not that I really need to. This game is rather easy. Enemies come in three major subsets. There's the small ankle-biter kind, that are very fast and hard to predict, but they do practically no damage and an errant breeze will take them down. Then there are human-sized ones, who have nothing special about them. And finally the ones the size of a fridge that take and dish out damage like a Sherman tank, but who telegraph more than Western Union on amphetamines. Once you have even the vaguest idea what you're doing the worst any of them can be is irritating.
Not that they aren't fun. The aesthetic of this game is based on old Universal horror movies, so anything you've seen in a monster flick will show up in this castle. Zombies, skeletons, evil puppets, giant wolves, demons, Medusa heads, sentient suits of armor, witches... Basically if you can make a Halloween costume out of it, it is an enemy in this game. The bosses range from the traditional, like the wolfman, Frankenstein's Monster, and the mummy, to the truly insane. Like the gigantic rotting zombie that attacks you with giant flies, the dinosaur-man is Aztec armor that shoots lightning, or the ball of writhing, screaming corpses.
Oh, forgot to mention, parents strongly cautioned.
My favorite boss fight has to be the Succubus. Not because of the fight itself, but because this demon of sensuality and lust tries to tempt Alucard... By turning into his mother. And remember that his father is the final boss of the game. Somewhere in the great beyond, Freud just punched the air.
Oh, and the game looks and sounds fantastic. Gorgeous 32-bit pixel art, mixed with some of the best music in video game history. "Dracula's Castle," "Bloody Tears," and "The Tragic Prince," are my favorites, but that's only the tip of the iceberg.
I'm struggling to find negatives here and it's... A little difficult. The only one I can come up with is that once you find a certain item in the late game, the credits may as well roll. Because an already fairly easy game just became a complete joke. But that item is a rare random drop from an enemy that spawns in only one area. So you'd have to be looking for it. And even if you do get it, you've come that far. You've earned playing the rest of the game on God Mode.
Final Recommendation: Highly Recommended.
Summary: Absolutely pick this game up if you like old monster movies, or are just looking for some silly fun. Symphony of the Night will certainly provide it.
That’s okay, though: Simon Belmont is in Smash 5.