Retro Review – Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997)

There are moments in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night where, simultaneously, you’ll feel vulnerable and all powerful. It’s a rare balance in video games that is struck multiple times over the course of Castlevania’s most well-regarded title. There’s a tangible desire to tip that in favor of feeling omnipotent on the part of the player, creating a willingness to explore an excellently designed map that infamously flips itself in the second half. It’s through this complex design that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night found a way to stay relevant twenty years after its release.

Minutes into the game, Alucard, our vampire-slaying protagonist, is stripped of his equipment by Dracula’s servant, Death. There’s enough absurdity in the first moments of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night that you’ll either find yourself pulled in or pushed out. With some hilariously dramatic voice acting to match, I definitely found myself on the side of the former. After Alucard is ripped of his possessions, the game sets you out on its primary objective: find anything you can use to your advantage to destroy Dracula for good.

Your first experiences with the game’s mainframe depends a lot on which direction you choose to go from the starting area. Because Castlevania: Symphony of the Night functions as one of the first games of its kind (even getting a genre named after it, in “Metroidvania”), it’s easy to imagine a circumstance where a stubborn player opts to go the “hard” way, leading to a cycle of death that seems almost unavoidable. Smarter players, or those more acquainted with the genre, will recognize areas that are above Alucard’s paygrade. Because the game branches off in so many ways, every player will eventually encounter a moment where the game will, very apparently, tell the player to come back later.

Where Castlevania: Symphony of the Night excels is in its unrelenting tease for better items and gear. With so many of these items locked behind difficult areas or hard-to-reach spots, it sets up the kind of risk and reward that has become so prevalent in games like Dark Souls and Hollow Knight. Relatively frequent checkpoints keep exploration from ever feeling punishing, but if you push Alucard too far into the unknown, getting out is often just as difficult as getting in.

Proportionately, an item is almost always as valuable as its capture was difficult. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night strategically locates many of its most valuable weapons and gear – which all have various stats, special abilities and visual design – far apart from one another. This certainly creates a sense of ludonarrative dissonance – something that the game struggles with through most of its playtime – but it’s the most logical approach from the perspective of balancing the difficulty.

Even considering its substantial source material to work with, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night succeeds in crafting an intricately designed castle, abound with mysteries and prominent visual design. The game meticulously blends long, crawling hallways with vertical clock towers that can take upwards of an hour to climb. It’s rare that you’ll reach a dead end without it proving an essential item, valuable tool or fun mystery — like a Catholic confessional that prompts a violent ghost when you sit in it.

Unfortunately, the game has several locations that are an absolute headache to get through. For instance, there’s an entire column that requires vertical movement and timed jumps on Alucard’s part. In this column, flying Medusa heads soar horizontally across the screen. Not just one every minute or so but dozens. These Medusas can stun Alucard in place, allowing enemies to violently cut away at his health. For a game twenty years old, it often has too much going on at once, providing a difficult, frustrating path.   

There are only a handful of mandatory items to beat the game, so much of the exploration will be voluntary. Thankfully, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night provides an extremely low floor and very high ceiling for its difficulty, based entirely upon how much (successful) exploration Alucard partakes in. There were moments where I’d prioritize advancement in the game’s plot, and it regularly punished me for exhibiting low-tier gear. It wasn’t until the game’s second act that I made a concerted effort to track down some valuable gear, and it wasn’t long after that Alucard was slaying the same enemies, which had once given me trouble, with ease.

The game never feels too easy despite Alucard’s collected power. Many of the foes, particularly the various bosses, own a certain visual divinity. Some of them are large and towering, others are grotesque and menacing (one boss, in particular, spews out dead humans as you swing away at its body assembled by corpses), while others are more human, like Alucard – reminding us that he’s not the only character in a phantasmic universe. Most of the fights benefit from specific weaponry or sub-weapons (which can be picked up along the way and exist in a non-permanent form), making exploration the best way to ameliorate Alucard’s experience.

There are a couple of bosses that are either frustratingly easy or difficult, including a late one that is almost impossible without a couple of specific weapons. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night never really makes up its mind on how it wants to scale the difficulty of its boss fights, which is a shame, because it does that so well outside of them.

Much like Super Metroid before it, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night confines its progression through various skills. There aren’t many that Alucard will need, but the game makes sure that the ones you have to use are plenty fun. In this subset of required skills are a handful of transformations that allow Alucard to take a new form – most namely, a bat. This allows Alucard to easily handle the same vertical climbs that used to take so much time with ease and cross a few purposefully designed crevices that prevent progress. These transformations take a while to find, but once Alucard has them at his disposal, there’s a leap in the way the player can traverse Dracula’s castle.

There are several endings in the game, most of which double as some sort of failure on Alucard’s part, but the game does have a significant twist that doubles the size of the game if you make it that far. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night treats this to the age-old problem of games running on limited memory. Instead of creating new assets, it just repurposes old ones. After Alucard breaks Richter’s (another vampire hunter) spell, the game stonewalls the player’s completion by sending them on a quest to find Dracula. The twist? He’s somewhere inside of a new castle – an inverted version of the one we just fully explored.

This was frustrating, and would likely be frustrating to anyone playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the first time in a modern space. The reason being twofold: it delays the gratification of completion and, essentially, tells the player they’ll be doubling down on everything they just did. Not to mention, the inverted castle is very immediately jarring, especially considering the carefully designed aesthetic.

Once I got through that initial frustration, it became clear why there was a decision by Konami to duplicate the earlier space: everything we just earned for Alucard needed room for use. It felt almost like the, now popular, new game plus mechanic that so many games use. Alucard is able to carry over his weaponry, gear and skills, with the promise of more rewarding exploration on the way.

Because Castlevania: Symphony of the Night isn’t exactly flush with space, it takes many of the games already used assets and flips them on their back — making them new. The inverted castle also adds many of the game’s best weapons and tools, including all of Alucard’s original gear that was taken from us by Death. By the time you find Dracula in the inverted castle, presuming a healthy dose of exploration, Alucard is a near-unstoppable machine. It’s toward this late game experience where everything just falls into place, making all of the extra effort the player puts forward worth it. Conversely, anyone who might forego any unnecessary inspection may be throttled by the dense inverted castle — which dozens of new enemies, all more difficult than in the original castle.

It’s worthy of note that the game owns one of the best, and most diverse, soundtracks in the Playstation era. Each level dedicates itself to a single score, with the only complaint being that not all of them seem entirely fitting. Nevertheless, there are several moments in the game that will serve to be more memorable than they may have been sans the score.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has an interesting combat system that borrows from several different genres, including fighters and RPGs. The variation in which the weapons work is the most fascinating aspect of its many gameplay systems, as each has a different swing speed, with many owning a unique specialty – like a powerful flurry of fire. The biggest disappointment, in regards to the combat, is Alucard’s inability to swing upward and downward. Because the game relies so heavily upon its verticality, you’re constantly placed in a position to jump around enemies — not the easiest thing to do given Alucard’s inflexible jumps.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night neatly ties together its many mechanics, even if it takes its time in getting there. There are several instances, spread across the game, that produce a perfect balance of power and exposure. Alucard’s experience, and the difficulty of the many trials he faces, serves as a vessel for the player’s adherence to their own curiosity toward Dracula’s castle. While Castlevania: Symphony of the Night never finds an even stride to pace itself with, the game’s fastidious level design, impressive aesthetic and meaningful exploration provide it a spot alongside the all-time greats.

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