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Before going any further, I'd like to digress for a moment to comment upon the-supposedly- cheesy dialogue. It should be noted that Sparkles and I recently engaged in an eerily homologous discussion.
Kmart: The Mars Volta steals men's souls and makes them into slaves!
Sparkles: (sitting atop a throne of bootlegged VHS pornography, sipping spritzer from a crystal chalice) Perhaps the same could be said of all noodling...
Kmart: Their music is as empty as your soul. Mankind ill needs a band such as Mars Volta!
Sparkles: (throwing chalice down with delicate flick of wrist) What is a man? A miserable little pile of desire for melodious excellence. But enough talk... Have at you!
(That's not cheese. It's Velveeta.)
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The preceding video may not have been terribly impressive (visually), especially if one uses modern standards of video game graphics to judge its merit, but it's important to note that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was released a decade ago and, moreover, it signified a tremendous leap beyond the imagery depicted in the 8- and 16-bit generations of gaming. Sprites were big, colors were vibrant, and the attention to detail was far beyond what people had expected, and it was all in 2-D, which was something coming out of left field considering that the motif of the period was to take classic games and fuck them up in 3-D (Contra being the cruelest example possible).
That yearning to take advantage of the 'next-gen' systems' super-hyper-awesome-geometric-number-crunching CPU to construct polygonal paradise was inevitable, and perhaps even understandable, but more often than not, the initial 3-D entry of a popular series was gut-wrenching at best. (Seriously. Look up Contra: Legacy of War and tell me that doesn't look like your father's dick wrapped in a flour tortilla and topped with salsa verde.) In that sense, it was both refreshing and reassuring to see Konami hadn't abandoned that which had given it the adulation of the gaming community.*
But the gameplay was different! Waaaaah!
I stand corrected, somewhat. Konami had tinkered with the traditional formula for Symphony of the Night, and the game played unlike the majority of its predecessors. With the exception of the convoluted Simon's Quest (to which SotN owes, unquestionably, a debt of gratitude), the Castlevania series was, basically, a linear, level-by-level platformer with obligatory boss encounters, but you already knew that. How did the game actually play? A video is worth fourteen words of yours, and ten thousand of mine.
Those fourteen words of yours would, most likely, be something like "I can't believe I just watched that stupid, boring, asinine, pointless bullshit you posted" and, honestly, I can see how the video would give you such an unfortunate impression of the game, but you'll just have to trust me (unless you'd like to trudge through another thousand words) when I say that actually playing the game is quite engaging. You take on the role of Dracula's bastard son, Alucard, as he travels around the big, bad vampire lord's castle, searching for a way to destroy his own father. Along the way, you'll collect hundreds of items (weapons, armor, heroin, etc.) to assist in the mission, explore several decadent locales, and tackle numerous beastly entities.
The music, composed by Michiru Yamane,** enhanced the gaming experience considerably. Sure, you were treated to orthodox concepts (and I'd like to stress that I'm not adverse to sticking to what works), but there were also tunes that strayed far from what was expected of an entry to the series. To this day, I'll stand behind the SotN soundtrack, and it contains the best rendition the Dance of Illusions (aka battle with Dracula theme) available.
Is Symphony of the Night the best Castlevania game to date? I'm not saying that, but it tells you something when every subsequent 2-D game in the series has followed a similar path.
Eric Lecarde
* We love the Power Glove.
** Or Yamane Michiru (山根 ミチル), if you want to be dumb about it.
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