Game Stooge

REVIEW: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Xbox 360)

• Scribbled on March 22nd, 2007 by Jonah Falcon
• Filed in Action, Microsoft Xbox 360, Platformer, Retro, Reviews, Xbox Live Arcade

When Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was announced, a lot of retro gamers went into a tizzy, having fond memories of it as being the best of the long-running Castlevania series on console systems, the PlayStation One and Sega Saturn in particular. So great was the demand for it, that when developers hit the “50 MB Limit” snag while porting it over to the Xbox 360’s Live Arcade service, Microsoft was forced to expand the limit to 150MB. (Castlevania: SOTN comes in at just under 100MB anyway, though.)

The story actually begins at the conclusion of the previous game, Dracula X, in which the player controls Richter Belmont, and has to defeat Dracula. This sets up the rest of the story, in which Dracula’s son Alucard (har, har) is awoken from his slumber to combat evil on behalf of Mankind.

The game is interesting in the opening levels in that as Richter and as Alucard for a portion of the first level are already maxed out as characters. This allows the gamer to play around with the controls to reacquaint them with their full abilities. It also gives the player a sense of weakness when Death comes along and robs Alucard of all his equipment, and he must regain them as he wanders through the castle completing objectives.

Castlevania: SOTN is essentially an action 2D platformer with action elements, but what sets it apart from most is the sheer size of the castle. Much of the castle feature side-missions – in fact, more than half the castle can remain unexplored while still finishing the main story – one of the Achievements is exploring all 200.9% of the castle. The RPG-lite elements involve arbitrary level increasing and a simple inventory system. Alucard also has special attack moves a la fighting games in which various control and button combos allow him to cast spells or perform special fighting moves, which is almost mandatory toward beating the bosses of the game.

One of the pleasures of Castlevania: SOTN is the lush soundtrack by Michiru Yamane, which alternates from bombastic Gothic orchestral sweeps to fuzz guitar techno-rock arias. The ballyhooed “enhanced graphics” aren’t much improved from the original, which is basically consistent with “supernatural anime” usually found in cartoons like Vampire Hunter D, with all the required staples from the long-haired, lithe hero to the feisty femme fatale (Maria Renard).

Castlevania: SOTN does have its problems, however. It is very much a console game, with all the trappings and unintuitive limitations that were present even ten years ago. The documentation is poor – if a gamer never played Castlevania: SOTN, they wouldn’t know what the save points were, or even if they guessed that the red, glowing ball was a save point, what to do – going to the “system” menu doesn’t help, since saving the game requires the player to move the D-pad/analog stick up. The game requires the player to redo the opening over. And over. And over, and there’s no way to skip the long, badly written dialogue with equally bad voice acting. Furthermore, the game is hard, and plays like a coin-op game in that if you’re killed, “GAME OVER”, and welcome back to the title screen – God help you if you accidentally skipped one of the save points, which are not on the “main path” – they are in rooms just off the main path.

Castlevania: SOTN is one of the few single-player-only games for Xbox Live Arcade, though it does boast a leaderboard, and is not a one-sitting experience. Newcomers will be baffled at first, but after a few starts and re-starts will get the hang of it. Nostalgists will enjoy revisiting the game, even if they have already experienced it with some emulator. However, it will also make many people realize how good console gamers have it nowadays, and how much more sophisticated games have gotten because of (chiefly) the hard drive. Castlevania is well-worth the $10 (800 Microsoft points), but not much more.