Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Konami, 1997
Symphony of the Night plays a sweet song of woe
I fully admit that I’m a little late for the Halloween party that is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I really stopped paying attention to the series after Super Castlevania IV, mostly because it’s a hard series and I have a lot of love for that game and the original. I didn’t need anymore Castlevania. But after coaxing from friends, making the MetroidVania connections and knowing its legendary status, here we are, and it’s taken a bite out of me.
Symphony of the Night, in all its gothic horror, appeals to me on several levels. The story is familiar in that Alucard — son of Dracula and a supporting character in the third game — is attempting to stop his father once again. That familiarity is enough to get me going because it’s all I need to know about what’s going on. Sure, I’m kind of used to a Belmont leading the way, but Symphony of the Night doesn’t need to rely on that kind of tradition.
The tradition that it does lean on is gameplay. The combat and movement are excellent, and it feels second nature to move around. Keeping it simple but adding the RPG elements was a fantastic design choice. Most of the new weapons are cool, and fighting enemies is a beautifully built song and dance. Best of all, there is an in-game map included. For a sprawling game requiring massive platforming, a map is required, and Symphony hits the mark by automatically including this.
Graphically, the game is gorgeous. Konami did something beautiful here and Castlevania looks better than ever. The gothic details are something to behold and are eye-catching as well as pleasing to someone with a goth sensibility and yearning for video games. The soundtrack is just as beautiful, necessitating finding the soundtrack to add to the collection. There are familiar riffs (Vampire Killer makes a cameo) and new chords to strike that are masterpieces, which is expected of the legendary Konami sound.
Alas, while trying to think of anything wrong with it, I’ve concluded that Symphony of the Night is a well-executed masterpiece. It hits all the marks and pulls no punches in elegance, craftsmanship. It’s telling that most Castlevania games later in the series use Symphony as the template on which they build. Symphony is a building crescendo of greatness, culminating in solid storytelling, gameplay and world-building.
So, you can imagine the delight that is a generous mix of all three. To that end, it should be obvious by now that we love Rival Schools and its overall series Project Justice. Despite the fact that it comes from the brain trust known as Capcom, we’re still entranced by the concept of Japanese high school students fighting to save themselves.
of the board game mode and the character creation mode that plays out like an eroge simulation are some of the goodies that we’re missing out on in the U.S. There’s also the addition of three new characters: Ran, a photojournalist who uses her camera to attack; Nagare, a swimmer; and, Chairperson/Iinciyo, who leads the charge for Taiyo High School students to defend themselves. Other than these gifts, there’s not much different here than the first game. You’re still fighting to defend your chosen school, and there’s still fun to be had in a slightly deep fighting game system. There’s not too much different aesthetics-wise, in that there are a few new stages and new stage themes. The older stages are still here and it’s fun to play against the newcomers with older characters or a created character.
I have two caveats with recommending the game to others. The first is the fact that it’s in Japanese mostly and reading is a must to get through the character creation and board game modes. That’s a bit much if you’re not into the language or know enough to navigate through menus. The other issue is the fact that, as usual, Capcom has seen fit to deny American gamers the best of a series, 
shortchanging loyal money-spending fans who would pay a high price for the goodies of the character creation mode and the board game mode. The dirty truth of it all is Capcom has never thought highly of its American audience. We’re not going to see something awesome like either mode because “we just wouldn’t get it anyway.” A fun fact is that both modes were to be included in the first game but were left out in America because it would have been too much trouble to include them for Americans, according to Capcom of Japan. But we’re smart enough to make cash grabs off of for multiple version of Street Fighter, though, right?