Chardish Games

I saw a couple weeks ago that the classic Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was on sale on Xbox Live for five bucks, and I decided to take the time to revisit this old classic. It’s a game with a remarkable reputation: it frequently shows up near the top of game critics’ “best-of” lists, and deservedly so: it’s an excellent game. It’s loaded with secrets, brimming with atmosphere, host to some of the most unintentionally funny (read: poorly acted) game dialogue of all time, and practically the entire reason why we call its genre “Metroidvania” and not merely “Metroid-like.”

Let me make it clear: SotN is a fantastic game. It’s not to be missed, and if you haven’t played it, you should. But it’s not perfect, and its imperfections stood out to me upon a replay, particularly now that we now have much better examples of the genre (Shadow Complex, Metroid: Zero Mission, Batman: Arkham Asylum, etc.) Of course, the original Super Metroid is a far better game. So what’s wrong with SotN? Find out after the jump.

The inverted castle. I know that the inverted castle is often touted as the game’s greatest innovation - hordes of fanboys and fangirls scream, “you beat the game, and then you get to play the same game upside-down! It is a brilliant concept, with one small flaw: the level design is horrible in the inverted castle. This is simply due to the fact that the designers apparently designed the regular castle with no regard for how the levels would play upside-down. As a result, there are parts that stand out: for example, in the normal castle, most platforming can be done merely with the double-jump skill, excepting those circumstances where one must traverse a very great vertical distance, in which case the player must either use the gravity boots or transform into a bat. A very, very common occurrence in the inverted castle is a number of ledges that can almost be reached with the double-jump, but are just out of reach - in other words, the player must transform into a bat at the apex of the jump, which is inconvenient and time-consuming.

Furthermore, the inverted castle lacks all of the interesting features of the normal castle, particularly the system whereby different parts of the castle are locked out until certain items are acquired. As a result, Alucard’s trip through the inverted castle feels aimless and disjointed. One could argue that this was an intentional design decision, made to make the inverted castle feel more unnatural - but shouldn’t a normal demonically-possessed castle of the undead ruled by a vampire lord feel unnatural?

Lack of guidance. The game doesn’t ever tell you where to go, and has no help or hint system in case you get stuck. As a result, the player is very likely to get into a situation where the only solutions are either to consult a walkthrough or to revisit every room in the game, hoping that a formerly unaccessible area is now accessible. (The entrance to the Underground Caverns, in particular, is very hard to miss unless the player either stumbles upon it or pays close attention to the environment.) Future Metroidvania games introduced objective-based help systems that point the player in the right direction, but this was a problem that was already solved as of Super Metroid, a game which used map computer terminals to plot unexplored regions of the game world, encouraging the player in the right direction.

Terrible HUD. The life meter represents life as a number but not as a bar or percentage indicator, giving the player little indication how close he is to death. The magic meter is represented as a percentage bar without a numerical maximum, which is a useless figure when spells always cost a constant amount of magic points to use. As a result, the magic meter is totally unable to tell the player whether he can cast a given spell or not.

The growth system. The player has four ways of increasing in strength: 1) leveling up through killing of enemies, which causes stat increases, 2) discovery of items around the dungeon, 3) discovering items through killing enemies, and 4) purchasing items from the shop. The level-up system is perfectly fine, as is discovery of items in the dungeon. However, most enemies drop one of either two items: a common item or an extremely rare item that is hopelessly overpowered for the stage in the game in which it is acquired. Finding rare items amounts to pure luck, and when a rare item is found, the player has no indication that it is rare - as a result, he may be unlikely to realize that the severe drop in difficulty is a result of luck on his part, and not design.

In addition, the shop is totally worthless very quickly into the game. The traditional roles of an RPG shop are to a) allow the player to discard old items in a way that benefits the player, and b) allow the player to make growth decisions in a nonlinear fashion (causing questions such as “do I buy the normal sword, or save up for the enchanted sword?”) Symphony of the Night’s shop does neither of these. The only items that are salable are precious gems that have no purpose other than to be exchanged for money, thus depriving the player both of a suitable inventory management system and the ability to make meaningful choices about what to keep and what to save. Furthermore, after the midgame, the items the shop sells are almost totally worthless, making further trips to the shop even more unnecessary.

The Richter game. Like the inverted castle, the Richter game feels totally tacked on, as it probably was. Richter is unable to move around the castle without using a plethora of special moves to overcome his weaknesses in mobility. As a result, Richter’s game is stuffed with uncomfortable Street Fighter-esque button combinations, the usage of which on a frequent basis are mandatory to complete the game. To make things worse, the game does not tell you these moves at all: not in the manual, and not in the game itself. In other words, without consulting a FAQ, you will never, ever be able to beat the Richter game on your own. In addition, Richter’s HUD is even worse than Alucard’s - only a trained eye will notice that the life potions received for killing bosses actually do increase Richter’s max life, as no numerical representation of Richter’s life amount is ever available to the player. Lastly, the difficulty of Richter’s game is seriously marred by the use of “Item Crashes” - special abilities of special weapons that can take down bosses, including the final boss, with total ease and lack of effort.

Too many hard gates. In game design parlance, a “hard gate” is a point in a map that cannot be crossed without meeting a certain condition first. Doom’s blue doors simply will not open without the blue key. In Final Fantasy I, traversing off of the first continent is impossible until the king builds the bridge for you. In Diablo II, you cannot take the caravan to the east until you defeat Andariel. Hard gates stand in contrast to “soft gates,” which are gates that theoretically could be crossed without satisfying a certain condition, if an alternative means were possible. For example, in Super Metroid, the door into Kraid’s lair is a soft gate - the player is meant to use the high-jump boots to gain access, though a bomb jump or cleverly-timed wall jump works just as well too. Soft gates facilitate speedrunning and make the world feel more natural. SotN is littered with hard gates, though, reducing the game’s depth and complexity by a significant degree - trying to find the fastest route through the game world is a problem less worth considering than in other Metroidvania games.

Again, Symphony is far from an awful game. It’s just imperfect, and its imperfections become clearer on repeated playthroughs and in the light of age. One hopes that future designers will learn from its mistakes as they expand upon the genre.