Member
- Joined
- May 20, 2014
- Messages
- 68
My all-time favourite video game is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on the Sony PlayStation! It just edges out the more traditional Super Castlevania as my favourite game in the series, and I moreover thought that it was a truly refreshing take on the franchise and is vastly superior to previous attempts to mix things up with Castlevania II and Castlevania 64!
I much prefer Alacard to the usual have-whip-will-travel Belmont descendant, and Symphony of the Night did a fantastic job of incorporating gaining experience points, implementing special moves and vampiric powers, and finding hidden special items into the gameplay! And, in addition to that, the bosses had a great scale and true gravitas to them that went well beyond just being another enemy!
Even more impressively, the shift from individual stages to a giant single over-world that you can backtrack and explore at leisure, in a fashion similar to Metroid and Blaster-Master, was truly, absolutely phenomenal! Especially when you consider that half of this over-world was an upside mirror image of the castle from the first half of the game! Many players often thought the completed the game, only to discover that there was a way to re-play it that opens up a second castle of equal size and more difficult enemies!
Symphony of the Night: now that was a game!

I much prefer Alacard to the usual have-whip-will-travel Belmont descendant, and Symphony of the Night did a fantastic job of incorporating gaining experience points, implementing special moves and vampiric powers, and finding hidden special items into the gameplay! And, in addition to that, the bosses had a great scale and true gravitas to them that went well beyond just being another enemy!
Even more impressively, the shift from individual stages to a giant single over-world that you can backtrack and explore at leisure, in a fashion similar to Metroid and Blaster-Master, was truly, absolutely phenomenal! Especially when you consider that half of this over-world was an upside mirror image of the castle from the first half of the game! Many players often thought the completed the game, only to discover that there was a way to re-play it that opens up a second castle of equal size and more difficult enemies!
Symphony of the Night: now that was a game!