Retro Game of the Month March 2018: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Playstation)

Started the inverted castle today. Feels good.

a_skeleton_00 said:

I remember when I thought I beat the game then that shit flipped and my 11 year old penis got hard for the first time.

Replaying this should be a must on everyone's list.

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It's a great setup, too, that doesn't explicitly tell you there's more game to be had, let alone how to access it. If you don't feel inclined to seek out every hallway you eventually get access to, you end up beating the game with what seems to be kind of a downer ending. But by indulging in the gamer explorer spirit, your curiosity is rewarded with a couple of message-bearing rings that, although not difficult to decipher, do require initiative and problem-solving on the player's part, making the discovery of the second half of the game all the more fulfilling. Stuff like that is what video games are made for.

A few more fun details:
- When you get hit by a Golden Medusa Head (or a few other specific enemy attacks), you temporarily turn to stone. Usually you just look like a statue version of Alucard, but once in a while you"ll turn into a statue of a giant hunched gargoyle.
- The inverted library features enemies named "Lion", "Scarecrow", and "Tin Man", a cute homage to the Wizard of Oz.
- Some weapons have features you can access through specific button inputs. The Shield Rod, for instance, can fire projectiles that look like the Gradius shield with a back-front-attack input. The Sword of Dawn can summon warriors who attack for you if you execute a standard fireball input. There's surprising depth and flexibility in what you can do with your equipment, and while much of it doesn't change the game significantly, it's really entertaining to discover abilities you didn't realize you had.
- Your bat familiar "loves" you when you transform into a bat and get confused when you revert to human form. It also acts as a kind of "option" that fires fireballs along with your bat form. As the bat gains levels, it is joined by a second (and eventually a third) bat, offering even more firepower when you're in bat form.







I'm making great progress and the game continues to seem easier than I remember it (I beat both of Death's forms without getting hit, which seems weird to me). The Nova Skeletons seem to give a ton of experience, as I gained several levels in a short time just by killing several of them on the left side of the inverted castle (I didn't stick around to grind, though, since, as mentioned, the game's not too hard). The wolf transformation seems useless for the most part. There was one squat passageway I needed it to fit through, but other than that the only use for it I found was uncovering sections of the map in the inverted castle where the water on the ceiling prevents you from using your bat form and you have to spam your wolf form again and again to gain height, a process that feels odd and unintuitive. Still, despite being a mirror-image of places I've already explored, the inverted castle still manages to feel fresh, with tons of power-ups and unique creatures.

One of the harder bosses, Galamoth (the very big gold guy) was giving me trouble until I remembered to get the Beryl Circlet first. It makes electric attacks heal you, changing the battle from an exercise in futility to a joke (still took about a billion hits, though).

I love the "reunion" battle where you fight fake versions of Sypha, Grant, and Trevor Belmont from Castlevania 3. That was a great touch. I also like how your save game icon on the memory card changes frequently. The most recent one I saw seemed to resemble Konami Man, which was an odd but fun reference.

So far all I've been doing here is lavishing praise, so I might as well give some attention to the things I'm not crazy about in SOTN:
- I wish there was a way to organize your inventory. The fact that your weapons, shields, and consumable items are all jumbled together in one huge list seems counterintuitive to me.
- There are some cheap deaths, such as in the dark room you have to navigate in bat form with your echo power. If you mess up and touch a spike, there's a decent chance you'll end up in a damage stun loop you can't recover from and end up dying.
- As well-designed as the inverted castle reveal is, this game is packed with so much content and so many secrets that a player would likely never figure out without outside help. One of my favorite swords, the Jewel Sword, is hidden in a room you can access by going through that tunnel near the beginning of the game you have to smash open both ends of, but you have to go through it in bat, wolf, and human form. There is absolutely no way to guess this and I wish the designers would have found a clever way to give you a hint. In the Colosseum, for instance, there's an area where you see small engravings of stick figures on a wall. Why not use these background details to give you hints about secret stuff you can do? The shield rod has a unique special move for every shield you can equip it with, executed by pressing square and circle at the same time. This is a great feature that adds visual splendor, gameplay variety and practical effects, but as far as I know the game does nothing to let you know this is even a feature.
- The duplicator is WAY too expensive. I understand that it's kind of game-breaking and it shouldn't be easily obtained, but unless you cheat and exploit a glitch you're going to have to spend at least a good couple of hours grinding until you can buy it, and that's if you farm the $1000 candle in the Colosseum while using your Shield Rod/Alucard Shield special ability.
- Once you find the Alucard sword, you're still going to discover a ton of new weapons but there will be very little reason to ever equip them. Seems like a shame.

k^M said:

... you can sort the inventory, or at least you could in the PS1 version. Not sure if there is still a way to do it on the ps4 controller but pretty sure you could use select/triangle to get a sort list?

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You're right. You can sort your items by pressing square on the left or right hand, but NOT from the item list itself. Definitely not intuitive.

While I'm griping, it would be nice if there were a visual cue to let you know when a status effect wears off. I'm equipping Alucart gear and the Ring of Arcana and using luck potions to increase my chances of getting rare drops, but I keep having to pause the game to see if the luck potion boost is still active. Even with all that, though, I haven't had much luck with rare drops. I think I might beat the game, then start over in Luck Mode (which I've never done before) just to get all the rare drops possible.

I did start over in Luck Mode and just finished clearing the regular castle. While the early game is pretty tough (I died at the guy who drops my first sword), eventually it kind of balances out and starts to feel pretty similar to regular mode. While I found more rare drops than usual (including the very useful Ring of Varda), from what I've read you don't really get to enjoy the benefits of common rare drops until you equip the Alucart set, 2 Lapis Lazuli and use luck potions. If you're curious about Luck Mode you can access it by entering X-X!V''Q (X, dash, X, exclamation point, V, apostrophe, apostrophe, Q) as your file name. Also note that the aforementioned Varda Ring (which greatly boosts many stats and makes playing with the Alucart set feasible) won't drop unless you've already got a game clear save file on your memory card.

It's a testament to this game's excellence that after beating it I immediately started over again and still can't get enough.

Had an infuriating moment yesterday. I was farming Oruborous in order to get a second Lapis Lazuli for what felt like an eternity. I was relieved when it finally dropped, then died on my way to a save point. I would have survived if I hadn't been too lazy to change my equipment and/or use some healing items, but my cockiness got the better of me. Ah well...

Ultimately, maxing my luck stat (and it apparently maxes out at 199) still does not produce dependable rare drops. I'm still grinding, if I'm lucky it doesn't take very long for any given enemy (Venus Weed was giving me a hard time, but I also spent a bit of time unaware that I hadn't switched my duplicator back to a Lapis Lazuli so that was on me).

But man, what I wouldn't give to swap out the backwards dash button for a slot for consumables. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the convenience of being able to move at a higher speed through areas I've been in hundreds of times, but I would rather have an instant way to use a luck potion or a turkey or any of the many, many throwable weapons (whose only true potential is met once you can use them indefinitely) without having to go through the cumbersome and awkward process of equipping and then unequipping them from one of my already occupied hands.

Another thing I love is the food items. There's a ton of them and they range from NY Style pizzas to dim sum to ham & eggs to nattō . When you get the duplicator using a meal card becomes Christmas, tossing out an infinite supply of collectible random food items. It does includes spoilers, though (I got the banana from a meal card before I got one from Skeleton Ape).

Trying to collect everything has allowed me to enjoy some of the more unique weapons, too. There are a ton that are super gimmicky but are also fun to play. The Heaven Sword is a throwable weapon that comes back to you, damaging enemies on its return path. The Jewel Sword lets you randomly turn defeated enemies into jewels (allowing you an alternative way to grind for money). The Nunchaku has a really fun double-hit that makes you feel super-powered for a while. It's a crying shame that I force myself to play in Alucart mode for the most part (I will switch out my equipment for bosses who don't drop items anyway) as it doesn't afford me much opportunity to enjoy the many ways to play this game.

Also, have I mentioned the morphing effects yet? Your transformation into vapor is seamless. Olrox transforms from a vampire to a large green monster via a stunningly smooth morphing sequence. I couldn't find an animated gif of the Olrox transformation, but I did find one of consuming a peanut, which you have to manually line yourself up with to catch in your mouth:



This game is packed.

Here's a fun article about several of SOTN's quirks.