I went to a small game store in Denver — it’s probably gone now — to look for a copy of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. When I got back to my house and booted it up, I was greeted by the opening sequence. Wow! You’re playing as some Belmont dude fighting Dracula and the voice acting is…well, it’s a real thing. “What is a man? A pitiful little pile of secrets!” delivered with all the flair I’ve come to expect from a local community theatre production of Hamlet. Initially, I thought, “this is going to be either great or terrible and I’m not sure which.”
But it turned out to be great. The cheesy factor wasn’t a weakness, it was a strength. It added to the Gothic horror atmosphere rather than detracting from it. I think the developers knew exactly what they were doing when they recorded those lines.
Once the game actually starts, you’re Alucard, a half vampire, exploring your dad’s castle. Right away I could tell this was nothing like the linear Castlevania games I’d tried to beat before. This was more like…I don’t know, like you’re let loose in a museum where you could interact with everything and every room was connected to three other rooms you hadn’t visited yet. Also, the movement was silky smooth, a lot smoother than most 2D games.
And when I stumbled upon the back dash move during a fight, it was like discovering a twenty dollar bill in an old jacket.
The exploration aspect of the game was the first thing that captured my attention. I’m used to working in construction and following blueprints, and every piece of equipment has a specific place and order of use. The castle was a blueprint that continued to evolve as you progressed through the game, and finding a new ability would allow you to access sections of the castle that you couldn’t get to for hours prior. For example, using the double jump power-up for about an hour allowed me to go back through the entire castle, find new paths to areas that I thought I’d already explored, and find ledges I had stared at before I had the double jump.
That’s good game design.
What finally won me over to the game was the equipment system. I’m not usually a big fan of RPG elements — I don’t enjoy number crunching as much as I enjoy action — but Symphony presented the RPG elements visually and immediately. Depending on the weapon you were equipped with, Alucard would move and fight differently. Eventually, I found a ridiculous-looking sword called the Crissaegrim, and if I held the attack button and mashed it, Alucard would transform into a blender. It took me around 20 minutes of trial-and-error to figure out the timing of this silly attack, but when I did? I felt like I was cheating, but the game was designed for you to find combinations like this.
But the music. Good lord. I’ve worked at a few construction jobs where guys debate what to listen to on the radio — classic rock, country, etc. — but this soundtrack would have ended that debate. Each section of the castle had its own theme that fit the mood of that area perfectly. The library sounded scholarly and mysterious. The clock tower sounded urgent and mechanical. And I won’t even start describing how “Tragic Prince” sounds during boss battles — it gets my heart beating in a way that few horror films can.
A year or two after I purchased Symphony, I bought the soundtrack from an import website. I paid a ton more than I should have, but I still listen to it when I’m working on projects at home. There’s something about that Gothic orchestral sound that makes me able to concentrate. My neighbour asked me why I was listening to “vampire music,” and I told him I was building some deck furniture. He asked if I was going through a midlife crisis. I didn’t know, and I don’t care.
About 15 hours into the game, I thought I had beaten it. I defeated the final boss, saw what I assumed was the end credits, and was pretty happy with my purchase. But the game told me to equip some rings to “see beyond evil’s illusions”, and suddenly the whole castle turned upside down, and I realised I had only seen half the game. I literally said “are you kidding me?” out loud to an empty room. The upside-down castle wasn’t just a gimmick — the level designers had somehow designed the castle architecture to work both vertically and horizontally, and turned familiar rooms into entirely new challenges. The areas that had previously been easy to navigate were now deadly traps when the gravity was inverted, and forced me to adjust my combat style and think about vertical space in ways the right-side-up castle did not require.
The upside-down castle added another layer of complexity to the existing areas of the castle, and forced me to rethink my strategies and find new routes to previously inaccessible areas. My first run-through took roughly a month of playing a few hours each night, and I completed the game with around 185% map completion — yes, the developers let you exceed 100%, thanks to the upside-down castle. Of course, I knew I had left out a bunch of stuff. Hidden rooms, secret items, random optional bosses that I had heard about but never found. So, naturally, I started another playthrough.
By 2012, I had both GameFAQs and YouTube to reference if I needed help finding stuff, but I didn’t use either. Part of the fun was finding things and secrets on my own, like someone who lived in ’97. I found breakable walls by accident, and various transformation powers by accident, and I spent way too long farming rare drops from enemies just to find out what they dropped. Each time I found something new, I felt like I had accomplished something, and looking up the answer in GameFAQs wouldn’t have given me that same feeling.
Symphony of the Night has a huge number of secrets. I am mainly referring to hidden items, but the game also includes some genuine wackiness that gives you no tangible reward other than to give you joy. There is a pair of boots that raise Alucard’s height for no reason. You can sit in a confessional booth for exactly one minute, and a couple of little demons show up. I think the developers just liked designing this game and included the extra details simply because they wanted to, and not to appease a focus group.
I’ve replayed Symphony of the Night maybe 8-9 times in the past 12 years. With each playthrough, I continue to find something I missed in previous runs, or set myself some arbitrary goal like “I want to finish the game using the worst possible weapons” or “I want to see how fast I can get to the upside-down castle.” Thanks to the high quality of the base gameplay, the game never feels boring.
What’s funny is that this game spoiled me for other action RPGs. I’d try to play a new game and think, “the movement doesn’t flow as smoothly as Symphony” or “the equipment system isn’t as intuitive.” It set a bar for many other games, and one that few games can hit, even today — 25 years later. I’ve played a ton of Metroidvania games since then, and while many are excellent, none have replicated the magic of Symphony of the Night.
Modern versions of the game are generally faithful to the original, although they cleaned up some of the voice acting for better and worse. The new voice acting is way better than the old voice acting, but it loses the goofy, cheesy charm that made the original so quotable. Sometimes imperfections add to a product’s personality, much like a historic building has character that a new building lacks.
I currently own Symphony of the Night on four platforms — the original PlayStation disc, the PSP version, the PlayStation 4 bundle, and the recently-released Switch version. My wife thinks I’m crazy for buying the same game on four different platforms, but each platform has its own advantages. The Switch version is great for playing in bed before sleeping — there’s something soothing about wandering through the castle at night with your headphones on, just exploring at your own pace.
When I played Symphony of the Night as an adult, I was able to appreciate the game on its merits without any of the nostalgia of my childhood clouding my judgement. And the merits are numerous. The pacing is perfect — you start off weak and eventually build to becoming incredibly powerful, but the difficulty curve matches your improvement so you’ll rarely feel overwhelmed, unless you’re close to the end of the game and being overwhelmed is the point. The world design is layered without being overly complex. The combat has depth, but doesn’t require precise timing to be enjoyable.
Most importantly, the game respects your time and intelligence. The game gives you no assistance, no step-by-step explanations of every mechanic, and no quest markers to guide you to your next destination. Instead, the game trusts you to learn, to experiment, and to explore. I’m starting to think that type of design philosophy is getting less and less common in modern games — almost all games offer some type of assistance, whether it’s a tutorial, quest markers, or some other type of guidance.
The impact of Symphony of the Night on the gaming industry is amazing. You can draw a straight line from Symphony of the Night to games such as Hollow Knight, Axiom Verge, and Bloodstained — all of which are great games that understand what made the original so great. However, none of them capture the exact atmosphere of Symphony, nor the exact balance of Gothic horror and Baroque excess that defines Symphony.
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