Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Metachronos overall score = 8.9 / 10

Positive
- A terrific version of a classic game
- Good reasons to go back and play through a second or third time
- Intelligent achievement design

Negative
- Updated graphics are more of a filler than an actual update

Konami's classic 2D adventure game, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, will be 10 years old this year. Unlike a lot of older games, SOTN hasn't seen a multitude of updates and rereleases. The first of two releases planned for 2007 is an emulated version of the original PlayStation game for Xbox Live Arcade. It marks a couple of firsts, such as the first emulated console game to appear on Microsoft's download service. It's also the first game to go over the now-outdated 50MB limit for downloadable Xbox 360 games. Considering the size, scope, and sound contained in Symphony of the Night, that larger size makes sense. It all adds up to a faithful version of a classic game that's just about as fantastic today as it was when it was first released. The bulk of Symphony of the Night puts you in the shoes of a man called Alucard. He's Dracula's son, but he's turned his back on his vampiric legacy, instead choosing to slumber for an eternity. But Alucard wakes to find that Dracula's castle has risen, and someone is trying to resurrect the vampire leader. You take control of Alucard in Dracula's castle and attempt to figure out what's going on. While you'll enter the castle fully armed and armored, you'll quickly lose all of your items and abilities. From here, you'll start with nothing and have to collect items and explore the castle.



SOTN came out right around the time when developers were realizing that their CD-based games could be filled with fully orchestrated music, as opposed to the synthesized stuff that was so prevalent during the cartridge days. As a result, the game is filled with plenty of great music. There is also a fair amount of speech in the game, but just because you can fit real speech into a game doesn't automatically mean you should. Most of the speech in the game is terrible, though it's at least terrible in a relatively funny way most of the time. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is an epic adventure that set the tone for all of the 2D Castlevania adventures that we've been seeing on the GBA and DS over the past several years. It's a healthy-size adventure that expands nicely to make multiple play-throughs desirable, and it's probably the beefiest Xbox Live Arcade release yet. Even at its 800-point ($10) price tag, SOTN feels like an absolute steal.

i had this game...lost it...was pretty good and long

took me a good month to finish it

on the ps1 i guess, am i right?

yeah

i knew it