Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or (The Unexpected Virtue of IGAnorance)
I'm sure you've heard of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The series as a whole is one of Konami's most imporant, and Symphony is probably the most popular (though certainly not unequivocally). It's one of those games, like FF7 or Ocarina of Time, that is well-known and liked even to self-described "non-gamers." And indeed it shares a lot of similarities with both of those games. It came out around the same time, where (largely thanks to Sony) videogames were experiencing previously unheard-of cultural relevance and popularity, particularly among young adults, and like both FF7 and Ocarina it represented a significant stylistic shift for the series in a direction that made it more appealing to the masses. Ocarina and FF7 both had stunning 3D graphics, and FF7 shifted to a more anime-inspired, over-the-top-dramatic science fiction plot, and was all-around much "cooler" than its nerdy fantasy predecessors.
Symphony marks an even more dramatic shift for its series. The previous games were all pure action games, featuring a mostly linear progression of mostly straightforward levels which required players to master a small arsenal of nuanced, intentionally-rigid character actions, and while the avatar's available moveset evolved only in tiny increments over the course of ten-ish games, the level design grew exponentially more elaborate and weird. The series reached its apetheosis in the one-two punch of Rondo of Blood and Bloodlines, the moral of which (especially Rondo) is that when all you have is a hammer, buddy you better get REALLY good at hammerin' because those aren't nails: they're definitely still keyholes.
Symphony is different. Most noticeably, it ditches the level-based structure in favor of a Metroid-style single big world consisting of multiple interconnected areas. After Symphony, you no longer made a game "like Super Metroid;" rather, you made a game in the "Metroidvania" "genre". And as the first Metroidvania, Symphony sets the example which all future Metroidvanias would follow by fundamentally fucking up the entire concept of a Metroid game.
It's necessary to discuss briefly the circumstances in which I played Catlevania: Symphony of the Night. There are a few ways to play it, but I ended up playing the PSP game "Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles" on my Playstation Vita. The Dracula X Chronicles is primarily a weird 2.5d remake of Rondo of Blood, but by playing finding secret items you can unlock the original Rondo and Symphony. Therefore, my journey into Symphony of the Night, and the Castlevania series proper, started with 4 and a half levels of a weird 2.5 remake or Rondo, which really helped me see Symphony in its historical context.
And boy howdy, let me tell you: I really liked 4 and a half levels of a weird 2.5d remake of Rondo. It is spectacular. As I mentioned earlier, its limited mechanics are tuned to perfection, and the level design starts out thoughtful and quickly becomes dastardly. You have to figure out how to overcome a gauntlet of bone-arcing skeletons, spear-lunging skeletons, sine-waving bats, and Mother Fucking Staircases using only your wits and the ability to move forward, backward, jump, backstep (Rondo's one merciful allowance), and whip horizontally.
In contrast, the first area of Symphony of the Night (after the admittedly cool as hell intro) is this:
Special Thanks To "World Of Longplays."
Watch until around 7:30 or so. The first few rooms in this game are a) completely flat, and b) populated almost entirely by large, cool as hell-looking wolves that c) pose no threat and die in one hit. One thing I find particularly terrible/hilarious is the part of the video starting around 7:20, in which the player intentionally jumps over the monsters instead of killing them, which I assume is so that the viewer actually gets to see their animations for attacking and turning around. Watching it was the first time I had seen either of those. Also note that (again in contrast to Rondo), Alucard is VERY agile and has a pretty elaborate moveset that only becomes moreso as the game progresses. So you have like 20 interesting tools to work with, but your task is just to carry a medium-sized box to the other end of the room.
Now, an argument could be made that these early areas are not supposed to be difficult, but rather to establish mood/tone/plot/etc. Plus, immediately after this sequence there is a cutscene in which you meet Death, and Death takes all of your fun equipment away! Thus, this brief sequence is sort of like the beginning of some Metroid games, in which Samus is briefly cool and powerful, only to have her powers removed, thus requiring the player to get the cool stuff back which is The Whole Game. HOWEVER: I don't buy it. First of all, no amount of narrative groundwork-laying is an excuse for dull design, but more importantly, this is not an isolated incident. If the intent is to make the player briefly see Alucard (and themself by extension) as a badass before deempowering them for the game proper, then the game still fails because for the rest of the Bad Part Of The Game (I'm trying to avoid spoilers, I'll clarify later) there continue to be similar situations: flat rooms with cool/scary/powerful-looking enemies that are pitifully weak, which you fight in succession with no variation.
In fact, MOST of the game's rooms are either completely flat or have minor, gentle slopes up and down. The other rooms are often narrow, vertically-scrolling rooms with a simple pattern of blocks used to ascend or descend (as seen in Metroid), also generally uninteresting. Some of the rooms are actually good, though! The Library is large, scrolls in all directions, is kinda confusing to navigate (this is a positive), and only half the enemies are boring as hell! The clock tower wastes most of its potential on a Big Important Plot Set Piece (a dramatic outdoor area with a broken bridge which serves as a gating mechanism) that is cool looking and boring to play, but a few of the vertical rooms nearby are actually really interesting, with intuitive (or intentionally unintuitive) combinations of platforms and enemies. Furthermore, the clock tower does the best job in the game of actually utilizing its theme as more than just pretty graphics (there are gears and other moving stuff you can interact with, sometimes in puzzly ways)!
Symphony actually deviates from its predecessors in two big ways, not just one. In addition to the shift to a Metroidvania-style level structure, the game also introduces RPG elements in the form of equipment, stats, and magic spells. I'd imagine Igarashi and co. thought this would "spice up" the series, but what they and any game designer must understand is that every design decision is a tradeoff. When making a big stylistic or formal shift in a game, you have to be able to recognize both the strengths and weaknesses of the new direction; that way, you can try and maximize the strengths while eliminating or mitigating the weaknesses as much as possible. If you can achieve a net positive, then congratulations! The shift was A Good Idea.
Given my tone thus far it should come as no surprise to learn that Symphony does not do this. The Metroidvania shift is a failure, but I certainly see how it could have been a success. The Castlevania series has always been known for its gorgeous graphics, music, locales, and sense of gravitas, so making a game about exploring one amazing place could potentially make all of those qualities even better! However, the developers do a terrible job of dealing with the challenges that come with this type of design.
I count approximately two big challenges in a Metroidvania game: macro-level pacing/gating and micro-level room design. Someone could write much more about Symphony's room design, but I will limit myself to my broad assessment above: it's average at best. However, in a way, comparing Symphony's room design to that of Rondo is a bit unfair; the drop in quality didn't come from nowhere. Though Symphony was Igarashi's first Castlevania, I'm sure that many members of the team had prior experience with there series, perhaps even the really great ones (aside: does anyone know of a reliable source for this sort of thing? It's so hard to find personnel information for older games aside from the top-level ppl). Therefore, I'm sure that the necessities of a less-controlled player progression, including backtracking, tackling goals in a nonspecific order, and having multiple routes leading to the same goal, made room design automatically more difficult; the player can enter from different directions, and with different ability sets at different times! However, that's not a good excuse. If Iga and co. wanted to pull off a paradigm shift, then they should have adapted their design chops to fit, or else not done it at all. Even an exquisitely-designed Symphony probably wouldn't have the same degree of tightness of a game like Rondo, but it could still have been a lot better than what's there. As for gating, let's look at an example:
In this game, Alucard can transform! He can transform into a wolf! And a bat! And a cloud of mist! How is that not the coolest thing ever? It'd be nearly impossible to fuck that up!
Guess what: it's not the coolest thing ever. Because they fuck it up. The first transformation is the wolf. Fuckup Number One: it is given to the player in the lamest possible way. It's just sitting in a totally normal-looking place, guarded by a teeny tiny environmental gimmick (you have to hit a lever) that serves a different purpose anyway (the elevator you use to get the Wolf Soul is also a convenient transportation device). Why isn't it behind a super hard puzzle or a boss or a gauntlet or at least in a cool-looking place? For a game so concerned with being cool and badass they sure did an awful job of making the wolf transformation seem cool and badass!
Fuckup Number Two: the wolf is almost entirely useless. Seriously. It can do like two things, neither of which are really worth doing aside just for kicks, and neither of which allow access to any new areas. Or at least, that's the case right when you get the wolf, which leads us to...
Fuckup Number Three: the wolf becomes non-useless AFTER YOU GET THE SECOND TRANSFORMATION. That's somehow even worse than being totally useless. And still, the new Wolfy Moves granted by an item are pretty piddly.
So then a very long period of time passes in-between getting the wolf and getting the next transformation, which might be cool if it meant you had a long time to learn and master the cool wolf power (lol). The next transformation is Mist. Mist is non-solid, which means you can pass through things like grates and steel bars! Or, y'know, JUST grates and steel bars. You immediately recall having seen some of those, so you Do The Metroid Thing and backtrack to their locations. If I'm not mistaken, SPOILER: there are just two. One is a trivial treasure, and the other is
FUCKUP NUMBER FOUR: THE ONLY SIGNIFICANT USE OF THE SECOND TRANSFORMATION IS TO GET THE THIRD TRANSFORMATION. The steel-barred door in the library leads down a chasm to a room where you get the power to turn into a bat. Then, if you have at this point already seen the Big, Dramatic, Obviously Important Broken Staircase at the top of the map, you now know you can fly over it with the bat and beat the damn game.
Time between Transformations 1 and 2: probably hours
Time between Transformations 2 and 3: about 2 minutes
This is not how you gating!
And as for the bat... the bat is pretty cool.
While I think the "Metroidvania Decision" is a sensible one, and that the game could potentially have reaped the benefits of its new direction, I see no such potential in the RPG elements. Adding in RPG shit to this game was absolutely the wrong move; the negatives are numerous and varied, while the positives are basically nonexistant. And the combination of the two concepts introduces even more, entirely new problems!
The wrongness of the idea is pretty basic; it's not hard to figure out! Iga and co. took a series known for its meticulous precision, for putting players in very carefully designed situations and requiring very specific things of them, and then stuck in hundreds of variables that will affect the way a player experiences any given challenge. Pulling that off successfully would take a miracle; the only games I can think of that do so is the Demon's/Dark Souls.
The game is terrible at rewarding the player. I can't count the number of times I accomplished some moderately-tricky task (significantly more difficult than the surrounding game, but that's not saying too much) like a puzzle or boss battle, only to be rewarded with a weapon significantly less powerful than the one I was already using. Such situations were the vast majority, in fact! If the game was still linear, the problem wouldn't be hard to fix--just make sure the new weapon has better numbers than whatever weapon the player probably has!--but combined with the nonlinear world it's a much more difficult challenge. This is just one example of the numerous problems the RPG stuff causes, and at this time I seriously can't think of a single concrete GAIN, aside from I suppose a vague feeling of "progression" and a bit more worldbuilding (though whatever worldbuilding is gained by all the weapons' flavor text is cancelled out by the existence of a consumable offensive item called "neutron bomb, so there).
The spells are cool, if sorta gamebreaking. The fighting game inputs are cute.
So everything you just read pretty much sums up my thoughts on the game 40% of the way through playing it. At that point, I fucking hated this game. I hated it perhaps as much as Bernard hates Xenogears. The only reason I didn't stop playing it is that, unlike Xenogears, Symphony of the Night is pretty short, so I hadn't been playing it very long. If I had stopped, the above content would have been a lot meaner, I assure you.
But y'know what? It got better.
OKAY SO: SPOILERS COMING SOON. Symphony of the Night has a REALLY NEAT TWIST a certain part of the way through. It's not a plot twist (well I guess it is but the plot isn't interesting enough to worry about spoilers), but rather a formal/design surprise that is REALLY REALLY CLEVER. It's cool even if you already know about it, but if you don't I DEFINITELY recommend skipping to the END SPOILERS tag farther down because I bet it's way cooler if you don't. Okay? Okay.
What I called "The Bad Part Of The Game" earlier is obviously the Upright Castle. The Inverted Castle is cool as FUCK. I already knew it was gonna happen like "oh the castle turns upside down neat" but it works SO WELL. It's the one point in the game where an element of the game is exactly as awesome as the developers intended it to be. Because, as I'll address a bit later, one thing this game does have going for it is a GREAT sense of place! And after spending hours in this place and becoming comfortable with it, to have it suddenly FLIP-TURN UPSIDE DOWN is really, really effective. It just feels immediately wrong. This familiar place has become suddenly unwelcome again. Having to remember that the library is on the left instead of the right, and that the "catacombs" are now at the top of the map, and climbing up rooms that you used to fall down and vice versa, and especially the fact that all the things in the background (lamps, tables, desks etc.) are all hanging from the top of rooms, does wonders for the game's mood and sense of danger. On top of that, the game actually gets REALLY HARD around this point, as well as totally non-linear! It's still kinda boneheaded at times (it still has long rooms featuring the exact same encounter over and over), and the bosses are still mostly pitiful, but just the basic act of Cranking Up The Numbers (enemies give and receive way more damage) improves the game quite a bit. And the fact that you can pretty much just make a beeline to the boss or explore like 90% of the castle for optional treasure is really cute and well-conceived, even if a lot of the treasure suffers from the aforementioned problem of being shitty. Okay that's it. Inverted Castle totally works.
Welcome back! Here I will mention some little things about this game, mostly good. Some are well-discussed in many other pieces elsewhere, or perhaps just not as interesting to talk about, so I'll just list them:
• Some of the weapons are really fun! Most of the time the smartest decision is just to use a normal sword and perhaps shield, but there are also nunchucks and a slower two-handed sword, which totally rock, and some others I can't remember which don't!
• You can use shields in this game, which is dumb for two reasons. First, it totally goes against the Castlevania aesthetic philosophy of power and forward motion. Secondly, the devs apparently had the stupidity to add such an incongruous ingredient to the Castlevania recipe, but not the balls to commit to it! It doesn't take long before the enemies start shooting projectiles that are unblockable, and shields quickly become 90% useless. So shields don't even totally destroy the game (which could have been interesting), they just sorta muddy the waters in the same way every other new idea in this game does. BLUH.
• The music and visuals are astounding. It's pretty difficult to overstate how gorgeous this game is. The backgrounds are rich and detailed, the enemies are cool as hell, the bosses (though mostly dull to fight) are imaginative and fully-realized, and the use of 3d special effects is impressive yet tasteful
• Related to the graphics and music, the mood and sense of place is very strong. Okay there is one pretty bad thing: not infrequently the enemies bear little relation to the environment. But besides that, the Library, Clock Tower, Church, Colosseum , etc. actually bear a decent amount of structural resemblance to those things!
• The game is full of loving details. Many rooms have graphical elements that aren't re-used, enemies often have more attacks than you'd expect, and there's even a totally useless room at one point (to my knowledge)! In the church, just next to the bottom of one of the big towers, is a tiny little confessional room. As far as I know it has no treasure in it, and it doesn't lead anywhere. It's just a really cool, beautifully-drawn confessional in the church area with its own music!
• One of the bosses is basically just a giant ball of corpses. When you hit it corpses fall off of it.
• Also shields look stupid when you use them, they just hover in front of you in a sissy-ass way.
• They did a good job with the sub-weapons! Granted, they're mostly the same as previous games, but the new ones are cool, and the relative expenses of the different weapons and the availability of ammo are tuned quite well! Also, I just use the axe 99% of the time, so I appreciate that the axe is not too weak or too expensive.
• OH MY GOD forget what I said about the confessional. My buddy Sam, who is a total Castlevania dork, showed me that you CAN do something in it and it's SUPER COOL. Hint: sit in the chair.
• Apparently you can sit in the chairs in this game! You press up in front of them, which makes sense, and Alucard has a cool as hell sitting pose.
The best word I can use to describe Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is "boneheaded." Its heart is in the right place, and the game was clearly made with a lot of love, but it is just full of boneheaded decisions big and small. I'm glad I kept playing, even though I hated it. It's unfortunate that it got popular and turned an incredible series into a mostly-okay one. It's also unfortunate that it invented "Metroidvania" because I feel most modern attempts at the genre make the same mistakes I've listed here, blindly adopting a particular form without fully understanding the tradeoffs. Despite the score, I definitely recommend you play it. First play Rondo of Blood (or Bloodlines), and then play Symphony of the Night.
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