VinnyVania: Symphony of the Night - Part 07

Been waiting for this!

In the inverted castle, Dracula is Alucard backwards!

Almost three hours of VinnyVania!!!!!!!!!!

Yo!

I can't wait* for the dozens of comments whining about Vinny using the shield to beat the bosses.

*Actually, I can wait.

It was fun to watch Vinny play through this one. I was a little bummed he leaned so heavily on the Alucard Shield at the end - I was looking forward to a couple of those fights. Overall a good time tho. Can't wait for the next game.

Pump it into my Vania

@blipp18: People hate pro strats.

All paths to the end game of SotN lead to breaking the game wide open.

Shield Rod + Alucard Shield seems incredibly overpowered. Full description of what its effects are:

[The shield] deal[s] 255 damage multiple times per second when in contact with the enemy. The shield also recovers 8 HP, 1 Heart, and grants 3 seconds of invincibility, although MP is drained continuously when in use.

For something that's relatively easy to find, that's insane.

Also, not a huge fan of the inverted castle in general. I've been playing the game (for the first time) over the last couple of days, and the inverted geometry feels way more tedious to traverse than the standard castle (it doesn't help that the difficulty ramp in a lot of places seems to be just throwing more guys at the player - getting hit for 1dmg constantly from, for instance, medusa heads isn't challenging, just tedious). I also feel like the enemy design wasn't particularly coherent, but a constant stream of weirdness and stuff that doesn't really fit (e.g. The Wizard of Oz stuff).

Still, it was great fun to see Vinny get to the end of it :)

That's pretty much a reflection of most people's playthrough of this game. Couple difficulty spikes or trouble spots, but once you find one of the many overpowered combinations or items you roll through large parts of the game, including most of the end. Either you luck into the Crissaegrim, or you find out the Shield Rod murders everything, or you figure out you can endlessly cast spells that blow up the screen.

Still a great game, redefining what Castlevania could be and breaking a lot of genre conventions. But it could really do for a re-release that rebalances everything - both damage you take and the items/spells. Especially the Inverted Castle where there are tons of enemies that deal insane damage and can easily hit-stun you to death.

Shit, I was home all day today and I somehow missed that this was happening? :(

From what I saw of the stream ( the ending :P ) this was a good time.

Grats on beating it Vinny, even if you did use an OP shield and I was wondering if you were even having any fun at the end there :P.

Yeah the shield is OP as fuck, I didnt bother with any of that OP shit on my first playthrough and that gave me a better sense of beating the game, I'm sure you were missing that at the end ( like you mentioned ).. which is a bit sad as this is imo a classic.

So yea..the shield is dumb and I was kinda sad Vinny trivialised his playthrough in the end :( Still one of the greatest series on the site!

Now play Douglas Adams : Starship Titanic 'the ship that cannot possibly..go wrong'

I still think this series should have been called VinnyVania: SymVinny of The Night

I find it just a little bit of a bummer. He hit a point where he didn't want hints from chat anymore, but then uses a tactic he'd have never found himself to rush through the rest of the game. I'm only half way through the video so I'm not sure but, if this is actually the end of the series it's not a great note to go out on.

Don't hurt the flower girls! They so purty...

Edit; I am actually going to buy Titanfall 2 for the campaign. Maybe dip my toes into multiplayer, if possible.

Edit; That shield is overpowered, just saying the obvious-obvious.

So despite my having owned this game since it came out in 1997, and despite always hearing about how overpowered shield rod + Alucard shield is, I somehow never actually used them together. Wow, now I see why people say it's OP.

I missed live Vinny Vania today but man, with a sub-title like that I can tell what happened.

Strong Enemy Ahead Therefore Shield

Well Vinnyvania has been a good time, despite the kind of mellow, meandering mood of these last few videos. I'm still sorta sad that it's over, but at the same time it was probably a good place to stop, since the games following this one will continue the trend of slow-paced, exploration games in a similar formula for a pretty long time. To be frank I don't think that those games would be very enjoyable to watch, even if the 'podcasts' that would come out of them would still be fun. I'd prefer that they play a game that was more immediately engaging to them.

I would have liked to see them play Lament of Innocence, because it has some Lore in it, but there are so many games between this and that one that it's probably not worth the journey.

I also wouldn't want Vinny to feel obligated to continue this feature if he'd rather mix it up by playing other games during premium time, which I think would be reasonable and probably healthy.

And hey, so long as they don't ever actually commit to putting a stake in it one way or another, they could always bring it back whenever they're in the mood for some tried and true "comfort food"" premium streaming.

Wait, the XBLA version doesn't have that crazy ass credits song?! Man, I was really looking forward to their bewilderment upon hearing that sweet sweet sax start up.

Well, it was an enjoyable feature. There's more decent Castlevania games you guys could play, but nobody is going to force you to head there (or at least not just yet).

I am glad my own experience with the game didn't include that much messing around with the shield back in the day (I eventually went for the Crissaegrim instead, which takes a while to pick up and allowed me to fight most of the bosses without it), but the fact is Symphony of the Night was far more of an interesting game than a particularly difficult one.

Which is still good enough in my book. I definitely got to feel a lot of nostalgia by watching these videos and the commentary from Vinny and Alex was also entertaining.

The Shmoo is real!

Fun feature, really glad I finally got to see what all the fuss was about with this game. Turns out it looks pretty great! I'm also glad we're (maybe, probably?) done with Castlevania. Two-ish years is a long time for a feature to run, and going through the series most iconic entry seems a fitting place to leave it and get on to the business of Something Different, whatever that may be.

I'm not complaining really, it's whatever, but the shield did make it boring to watch for sure.

Ready for Vinny to hang up the whip and move on to a new game or series.

People blaming Alex on the tone of the series

Blaming Alex for this isn't fair at all, it wasn't on him. Whenever he'd mention chat stuff, Vinny would get a tad disgruntled. Even during most of this episode, his position was a nicer take on "I'll support whatever thing you decide to do, even if it's sort of lame".

Alex can be morose at times but he seems like he might be the guy who has lost the least amount of passion at doing this stuff.

Galamoth was so god damn hard.

Vinny just shut down any mention of the chat in the past couple parts, wouldn't say it's Alex's fault. It's understandable, seems like he started losing interest and just wanted to finish the series and move on without getting sidetracked. Shit happens, and I think the forced aspect of playing a certain amount of time in one sitting on camera made it less fun for him. Either way, I'm ready for them to move on to other games.

Yep, this game is imbalanced. Maybe its only flaw! But it's kinda fun to exploit your way through the second castle anyway.

The later SotN-like games in the series fix that for sure, but IMO never quite hit the same atmosphere successfully. The Nintendo DS 'vanias are excellent, but different.

Rondo will probably always be my favorite <3 So fun and perfect. Just played through it again on Halloween.

Also nice haircut alex :)

My schedule hasn't been lining up with seeing the last few of these live, so I'd just like to say here that this is probably my all-time favorite GB Premium series, and when you look at the full breadth of the series since it started and how much has happened as the backdrop to all the vampire slaying it's really pretty incredible. In the time this feature's been going, it's moved from being played in the background of TG16 Bomberman, to the creation of GBeast, Dan being hired, Austin plus all kinds of short-run video series coming and going, and through all that there's still always some good old-fashioned Caravella-vs-Dracula gameplay to come back to. That can mean a lot sometimes.

In terms of the shield thing, as well as I suppose SotN design being perhaps a bit less conducive to streaming relative to previous games (in that there's a lot more backtracking, and the viewer can see things the player can't as easily), this episode did feel a little bit anticlimactic, even though it's not really in the control of the player. That said, I've never really understood why people use "cheese" tactics to the expense of their own enjoyment. Vinny specifically says he found the inverted castle less enjoyable after finding the shield, so then, is the only reason he continues to use it after that to speed through the game as fast as possible, at the expense of a more enjoyable experience? I'm not saying it's "wrong" or some terrible tragedy or whatever (it's always fun to see games you've 100%ed and watched speedrun over and over played in an interesting and unique way), it's just that in general I don't understand when people say what seems to amount to "I do not enjoy this item/playstyle as much as another" and then they continue to use that item/playstyle just do to it being more powerful or for some other reason, but then not actually having any more fun because of it. Again, not trying to be a whiner or overly-critical, but it did seem like a little bit of a bummer.

Anyway, I hope this series continues in some form, and if they're committed to playing every 2D consolevania they should play The Adventure ReBirth, since it is technically, in chronological order, the next console game with all-unique 2D levels. I've only played the GB version of The Adventure, but apparently the WiiWare "ReBirth" version changes the level design and mechanics a lot so it certainly seems like it would be interesting to see.

P.S. As regards above criticisms, I wouldn't say taking a meandering route or shooting the shit about random garbage is inherently bad or anything, it's more that spending a lot of time reading the chat makes it harder to pay attention to what's happening on stream. If you're in your own bubble staring at a laptop and talking to chat, you could be the most enthusiastic person ever and it wouldn't shine through. Personally, I follow the philosophy of zero spoilers or 100% spoilers; either look up a guide or just play blind, but maybe don't make chat do all the work for you unless it's absolutely necessary.

@holyxion: I second the Adventure ReBirth recommendation, it's basically an AM2R made by Konami for the Wii. I imagine you can still get it thru the Wii channel on the Wii U (as well as the other ReBirth games which were pretty damn cool).

Ooh, a new Mario Party Party episode. Sweet!

Man, the XBLA version sucks. First no CG cutscenes, and now they cut out the "amazing" ending theme. They should have played the PSN version.

@holyxion:I'm the opposite when it comes to "cheese", though I get that this makes more sense in the context of multiplayer than it does single player games. If I'm playing SotN, then I'm playing SotN and not some mod or other game with other rules. The game continuously presents me with ways to do more damage, move faster or protect myself better, so where should I draw the line? I'm sure a playthrough with just the starting equipment can be fun and challenging, but when I play a game, especially one of these older ones, it's my "job" as the player to beat it just as it's the developers job to stop me without making it unfair.

If the game is so unbalanced that I can't enjoy it then that just means that it's a bad game. There are other, better games out there, why am I wasting my time with this one?

@alucitary: Yeah, I wonder why they didn't. When I was looking into picking this up, that seemed like the best version. It's not like you can't get HDMI out of a PS3, but maybe the software PS1 emulator still spits out the resolution funny? I remember PS1 games running at a weird internal resolution (240p?) and that causing problems using component on my first flat screen.

This game is so close to being great but it's kind of a mess. The inverted castle was fun thing to find out but it's not too much fun to actually play. I am not sure if it would have fixed anything but they should have gated it a bit. Like lets say you need the acid cloud to go through here etc. Now it's just remembering where the boss areas are and run to them. Of course you can explore the whole castle again but it's still the same map. I think the GBA and DS Castlevania's have better games than this. Rondo is still the best Castlevania experience for me.

I am glad Vinny shot down most of the chats help and went to explore the castle himself. Personally I don't like to play anything with a friend, who knows everything about the game you play and is constantly guiding you to the secrets and bosses.

Finally! SoTN might be a swell game, but I'd rather watch them play through a linear Castlevania game any day.

Something else entirely next instead, though!

No damage numbers is killing me :(

Discovering a new Vinnyvania episode while being sick in bed is the best thing. :D

As always, VinnyVania is awesome. That being said, having watched these, I now realize I straight up dislike SOTN. I much prefer the linear games. This just seems overlong and dull.

Vinny: "ah, I didn't use the before..."

Too funny.

Geez, you guys really are downers, aren't you? They're damned if they do and damned if they don't. People complain that they stop engaging with the chat, but complain when they rely on it too heavily because they're just guiding Vinny to all the OP shit. What do y'all actually want from these playthroughs?? I don't get it.

I'd much sooner just watch Vinny play the game the way he wants, finding the shit he wants. This exact same thing happened with Metal Gear Scanlon. Everyone complained that Dan was leading Drew around too much, so then Dan tried to stop and people said he was playing wrong. There ain't no pleasing anyone.

Good job duders, looking forward to whatever comes next.

I for one enjoy listening to Alex as much as I enjoy listening to mr. Vania IF THAT IS HIS NAME.

As far as other Castlevania games go: I've said it before, but there are at least two other 2D Castlevanias that they haven't touched:

Castlevania The Adventure ReBirth on WiiWare (a remake of the first Game Boy game)

And the X68000 Castlevania, released in the US years later on PS1 as Castlevania Chronicles. It's basically another remake of the original Castlevania, but has a lot of differences, just like Castlevania IV was different.

I think seeing him play one of the Castlevania 64s would be fun too.

The Vinnys of the night, what beautiful music they make.

I don't understand the complaints about Alucard's Shield. Is it broken? Absolutely. But, consider the fact that Vinny is already taking 1 damage from everything that hits him thanks to both getting lost, and walk armor, and the only thing using a "normal" weapon would do is prolong the game for absolutely no reason due to them killing slower. Besides, Vinny found the shield by himself, no one led him there. If he feels like using it, thas his right.

Really wish there was an achievement for beating Shaft called Ball Buster