Time has withered away much of what once made this game great
Symphony of the Night is often considered one of video game’s greats and it contributed the second half of the name for its genre, the “Metroidvania”. Unlike Super Metroid, though, this game hasn’t held up so well in the face of two decades’ worth of iterations on the formula, both within and outside of the Metroid and Castlevania franchises.
That’s not to say that I don’t think this game is worth playing. It certainly has its strong points – some of the music here will always remain as catchy and fun as it was in 1997. The art style is also as striking as it was in 1997 – actually, that part of the game has aged like fine wine. I could see someone saying “ugh, 2D” way back in 1997, but in this age of pixel art indie games, Symphony of the Night still looks better than most of the competition. Even as someone who enjoys the occasional anime, I’m not terribly fond of where Castlevania went with character designs as time went on. It is worth mentioning here that I played this game mostly on my Vita – I still think it looked good when I played it on my PS3, but that was only for an hour and the big screen may not be as kind to some portions of this game as my Vita’s OLED screen was.
The game is also pretty big for its genre. All of the other Castlevania games I have played have taken me between 5 and 7 hours to finish the first time. Symphony of the Night edged closer to 9 for me, and I know that there is a fair bit more content I could go back and attempt. Unfortunately, this is part of where the game has fallen apart over the years.
Finishing this game requires that you go out of your way to gather some very obscure items that have very little to do with the game. There's a gold and silver ring hidden on opposite sides of the map and, sure, I could see a completionist stumbling upon both rings while trying to get a hundred percent of the map, but even if you manage to get the several items needed to even get to each ring's respective hiding place, the game only gives you the vaguest of ideas on how and where to use them. For that matter, some of the items necessary to get those rings are used once and never again - lookin' at you, Echo of Bat.
That’s not the only problem with level design in this game. There are several very long passageways throughout which only seem to exist because some other portion of the map needs that much space and they didn’t know what else to do to keep things lined up correctly. Of particular note here is the long hallway connecting the tower on the far right of the map to the middle – it’s just one long jog from one end to the other. The second half of the game takes place in an “inverted” version of the castle and that just makes the level design worse. Alucard’s double jump ability now only takes him almost to every ledge he needs to reach, so you wind up using the bat or mist to make it everywhere, both of which involve transformations that bring all pacing to a crashing halt for a second. It’s not annoying occasionally, but after the tenth time in the past five minutes, it gets old. You can also obtain a special optional ability to jump really high, but that jump goes straight up, requires a button combination, and the game does not tell you how to use that ability.
Symphony of the Night doesn’t have particularly balanced combat, either. The first third of the game generally leans towards the easy side, but still feels pretty good to play and you still have to be somewhat vigilant about staying alive. After a certain point far too early in the game, however, you might as well have unlocked God Mode or something. By the end of the game at level 45, only a very tiny handful of enemies could do more than 1 damage to me, and I hadn’t been challenged in a very long time. The few times I had come across difficulty felt cheap. A handful of late game bosses can kill you easily and it seems like the only way to reasonably defeat them is to cheese them. Everything else just hits Alucard for one damage and he goes reeling backwards like he’s been kicked by a troll or something, but he’ll never actually die unless you put the controller down and wait. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if Alucard’s movements didn’t feel sluggish and slow, but Alucard’s actions just don’t feel quite as responsive as they should.
None of this is to say that I didn’t enjoy most of Symphony of the Night. Exploring the castle was fun. Finding new equipment was fun. The Inverted Castle was a cool idea, even though I knew it was coming and even though it overstays its welcome before it’s over. The voice acting is delightfully cringe-worthy and terribly under- or over-acted, and the story being delivered – while pretty basic – is actually pretty decent. Some of the bosses have some pretty cool design, and some are strikingly disgusting – Legion, er, Granfaloon and Beelzebub come to mind. But almost everything this game does has been improved upon in the two decades since release, and things that must have seemed like minor flaws then show up as major flaws now that all the shiny newness has long since worn off. Is this game still worth playing? Sure, I would recommend it to anyone who is looking to play a bit of video game history or to anyone who is looking for a decent Metroidvania and has played most other things. However, if you’re looking to get into this series or even the Metroidvania subgenre, start somewhere else.
