My all-time favourite video game is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night! 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 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! 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 Master-Blaster, was truly fantastic! Especially when you consider that half of this overworld was an upside mirror image of the castle from the first half of the game! Many players often thought the completed the game, only discover that there was a way to re-play it that opens up a second castle of equal size and more difficult enemies!