Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is the eleventh installment in the Castlevania series, released originally on the PlayStation. It featured Dracula’s son Alucard, a half-vampire on his quest to destroy his father.
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According to Assistant Director Koji Igarashi, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was to be a new direction in the series. It eschewed the stage-based progression for an open-ended one, taking inspiration from the The Legend of Zelda series and Super Metroid as they offered a greater degree of replayability. The RPG elements, on the other hand, were decided on to counteract the series’ overall high difficulty level to allow players to out-level the bosses and beat the game at some point.
I came to play Symphony of the Night on a friend’s recommendation, and on another friend’s PlayStation. What first struck me was the highly-stylized art design, Ayami Kojima’s work, which was completely different from what I’d experienced with previous titles in the series. Since this one however, I could never think of an art style that better suited the game.
Speaking of the visual style, Dracula’s castle is presented brilliantly with the game not letting arches and gates and windows in the background go to waste. IT instead presents the player with layers of backgrounds which move along with them, so the rooms scroll in different ways on different layers when you go in any direction. Character sprites look wonderful and their portraits are downright beautiful.
While Castlevania has had its fair share of amazing tunes, Symphony of the Night marked a change – at least for me – with its gothic organ-centered pieces and orchestral arrangements. It not only matched the game’s tone but the environments, the characters and even the plot itself. The voice acting, however, is atrocious and it comes off flat and dull at best, and hammy and completely unbelievable at worst.
Backgrounds are gorgeous but the voice-acting is terrible.
On the gameplay side, this is the title that invented Metroidvania, adding the open-ended exploration to Castlevania as well as restricting access to newer areas based on character abilities and upgrades. These could sometimes be acquired out of a particular order, further increasing the exploration value and replayability, as there were always new routes to follow; even more when you consider there are two castles in Symphony of the Night, the regular one and the inverted castle, each with its own set of bosses and upgrades and progression paths.
Not only did the game add level progression to improve the character’s base stats, but there’s also an inventory system as you’d expect in an RPG with the ability to equip weapons and armor and accessories and use consumables. You can even buy and sell things, though the amount of NPCs you can sell things to is limited to the Librarian. Sub-weapons also make a comeback as do the hearts used to power them the Item Crash mechanic from Castlevnia: Rondo of Blood, with which you consume a great number of hearts for a powerful move such as turning the holy water bottle, normally a holy Molotov cocktail, into a screen-wide holy water rain.
Buying items and equipment? All in the Librarian’s job description.
In a similar way to how Super Metroid had moves and power-ups for the player to discover, Alucard has a vast array of vampiric powers from fireballs to swarming bats. These are all available right from the start, using typical Street-Fighter-esque button combinations. They are quite powerful but drain mana considerably, and some of the combinations are rather complicated to pull off.
The plot of Symphony of the Night picks up some time after Rondo of Blood. In fact, the opening sequence is the ending of the previous title, playing as Richter on his final confrontation with Dracula and serving as the tutorial. Four years later Alucard arrives to fight his father and destroy him. While the premise might be standard Castlevania fare, it does have some depth. This is a personal story and an origin tale, not only for Alucard but also for his family and his father, as we learn the motivations behind his hatred for humanity. The game helps to give the Castlevania Dracula a measure of humanity without taking away from what the character is.
The scene before this boss fight is one of the best in the game.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is the most influential title in the entire series, taking the game in new directions not only mechanically speaking but also on storytelling – including cutscenes to further the plot, introduce characters and even bosses. This is the title that made Castlevania what it is today.
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