Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is a platform-adventure action role-playing game developed and published by Konami in 1997 for the PlayStation. It is the direct sequel to Castlevania: Rondo of Blood and one of the most successful games in the enormous Castlevania series, seriously, it’s huge. The game features Dracula’s son Alucard (Dracula backward) as the protagonist and was a bit of a break from the older games in the series. Its initial commercial success was limited because it was not strongly publicized. It was critically praised, gained sales through word-of-mouth and eventually became a hit. It has since been re-released on several gaming consoles and is now considered a sleeper hit, a cult classic, and by many one of the best video games ever made.

Pros:

This is such a great game, the gameplay is quick and fluid, the equipment is varied and awesome, the music is solid and changes quite drastically throughout, just such a good game. The graphics are a meticulously detailed, gothic-style and so damn beautiful take on the classic side-scrolling pixel art of the Super Nintendo era, but vamped up for the PlayStation. Seriously its looks great and still manages to hold up, really well too. You can build your character, and this game, like nobodies business. There is so much replay value in this game and when this came out, before finding out information on google, you could have easily missed out on a ton of content. Alucard can level up, gain lots of various equipment, which is actually shown and utilized differently in gameplay. You unlock various abilities like changing into various animals or a smoke cloud. You can find and utilize four different familiars, who level up and can be upgraded as well. There is even a hand full of hidden button combos for special moves that you can discover. The castle is huge, dynamic, littered with multiple puzzles, mini-bosses and a ton of drastically different areas and bad guys. This game is a perfect balance of simple enough on the surface for any newcomer and in-depth enough to keep even the most veteran of players still entertained. The most amazing part of this whole game is the fact that there are multiple endings that are achieved drastically differently. If you play this game at face value you would miss on the true ending in which the whole castle turns upside down and you have to roll through the whole game again in a completely different and way more challenging way, since enemies and stages have been changed to meet your skills. You can even play the game as a more classic Castlevania protagonist, Richter Belmont, if create a save file named “RICHTER” (I would not recommend it, he’s more or less stuck with what he has the whole time). Just an amazingly solid and in-depth game.

Below are some awesome tricks you can do in this game, enjoy!

 

Cons:

The voice acting and dialog can be a bit rough, as I am sure you can tell. The biggest initial hurdle for me is the start of this game is a bit brutal. You come in as this heavy hitting bad ass, just destroying everything in your path and within a few minutes Death steals all of your awesome equipment and you have to punch your enemies repeatedly in the face to kill them (which is still pretty fun). This turned me off from the game and the first few times I played it I would only get a bit past this point, and after getting my ass royally handed to me, I would just say “fuck it!” and give up. There is very little hand holding in this game, which is a good thing, but you can easily go the wrong way and get destroyed by a mini-boss you are not ready for. There is a ton of backtracking in this game and it’s just something you have to accept here, but really can get a bit annoying. You can also find yourself getting a bit lost, from to time to time, even with the “blue squares” map. Finally, once you get some great equipment most of your items become just icons in your inventory and when you are exploring new areas, and beat an awesome boss you get rewarded with a now useless item… yay! You can also absolutely break this game with a few good pieces of equipment.