Castlevania General

Symphony of the Night is actually a good game to look at, since while the Netflix series is adapting Castlevania III, the backstory involving Lisa, and Alucard's appearance+fighting style is taken directly from Symphony of the Night.

Symphony onward is also where the series eventually veered off to in terms of gameplay and tone. Prior to it the plot was virtually nonexistent as anything but an excuse except in Rondo of Blood.

Yeah, starting with Rondo and Symphony they began paying a bit more attention to the plot, and at some point after that they established an official timeline. Although that might've been around the time where the DS Castlevanias were new?

I remember in an interview IGA saying that he regretted making an official timeline because they ran out of space to put new games in or something

Well then, maybe he shouldn't have been cutting games out for dumb reasons.

I still wish to this day Legends was the game that would've gotten the Rebirth treatment. There's actually some pretty great ideas in the combat such as the burning mode which gave Sonia more of a magic knight feel which was quite different from what other Belmonts got. Plus while there's elements of Lament of Innocence I like and the origin of the Vampire Killer, I kind of like the simplicity of Sonia's backstory, either as an origin story for the clan or as an addendum to Leon's tale.

But yeah, Rondo is where plot and a consistent atmosphere for the series really started to get going, a lot of people give SOTN the credit for starting that trend on its own, but as Iga himself acknowledged without Rondo the seeds for that exploration wouldn't have begun.

If you want to play the definitive versions of Rondo and Symphony, I'd recommend the Dracula X Chronicles, either getting a PSP or emulating it if you must, it provides a lot of small but noticeable improvements and features, though the voice acting is a bit less campy than what anyone outside the fanbase is used to. Still good soap opera fun.

That Netflix series was cool. I hope they make a second season.

Now I'm gonna try a No Damage Run.

Right. I don't have a way to play the games myself (don't have any of the right systems) and I'm pretty sure I'd just get my ass whooped anyway, hence the LP's.

Speaking of which, I just decided to go to the LP Archive of SOTN, and I'm already liking this guy better than the other dude I was watching (talks a lot less for one thing).

So I'll be using the Archive from now on to look at things...who knows, maybe I'll just binge every game in the series via the LP Archive (or at least every game they have there).

Symphony's really, really easy, which makes it an even better starting point. Most of the metroidvania games are, which is half of why they're so much more popular than the classic side scrollers.

Plus SOTN is so ludicrously easy to break into fucking pieces I mean wow.

Sot N is as hard as you want.

If you think it's too easy, limit yourself in some way.

When you need to limit yourself to make a game challenging it's an easy game.

edited 12th Jul '17 6:29:50 PM by Hashil

But what do you call a game that you can't beat without putting any limits on yourself?

edited 13th Jul '17 12:16:13 AM by dragonfire5000

Hard.

The Fairie familiar is damn essential. She's great support, informs a first-time player wherebreakable walls are, and if you have the bat and mist familiar, you can get her early pretty easily with an exploit so easy even I could do it.

Also her song is lovely, especially in English.

For what it's worth, SotN comes with Richter Mode as a feature which is pretty hard without the need for any self-imposed challenges.

Turns out being a Glass Cannon who only heals via save points makes it so you have to actually learn and avoid boss attack patterns, much less be wary of enemies on the way between said save points.

Hydro Storm would disagree there.

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I mean, uh... at least you don't have to actively hop through as many hoops for the challenge to be there, I guess?
does maria mode have any busted stuff in the later ports or

Maria is about as broken as she was in Rondo as she is in Saturn So TN, she's got a fucking triple jump, can glide, has very good kick attacks, yeah its kind of weird she uses kung fu instead of her animal buddies, has fireballs, yeah she's not much like Maria in playstyle. PSP Maria has her old moves back, but the item crashes are different and the Guardian Fist is now her default crash instead of her Street Fighter-esque spammable. She also has lots o unnecessary movement, she can do a hover jump, can do rapid air dashing, rolls, and does divekicks.

I'd say she's the closest to a hard mode, her attacks are the weakest in the game even if she's got some really cool crashes and has more useful subweapons.

There's a guy on Youtube, Arek The Absolute, who has a bunch of CV videos on a guy called Shadowserg's channel.

He makes it a point of mastering just about every CV boss, doing No Damage - No Subweapons runs on them all.

So making a game harder on yourself with artificial limitations is very much reasonable. Yes, Sot N is easy, but every CV is easy as well if you use items.

Ans here's a secret: I don't use Items on bosses. Ever. I play CV like I play Devil May Cry: Like a man.

Or a woman.

I suppose there's no real difference, when you think about it.

I think PSP Maria only has Guardian Fist as a subweapon now instead of a special move. She has a hilariously good airdash that can zoom across the area in record time but it also means you're likely to crash into an enemy. She's great fun but nowhere near as batshit insane as Saturn Maria who apparently was kung fu fighting. That cat was fast as lightning, even a little bit frightening and she fights with expert timing.

If you don't know what you're doing, SOTN isn't easy. It's just easy to make easy.

If you don't know about what drops what, what breaks the game, where to go, how to activate x, why you should do y, it's pretty hard. The problem is, in the information age, it's almost harder NOT to know these things.

I'd say going in blind, SOTN is the hardest Metroidvania-Castlevania to complete after OOE. However, it's also the easiest to break after Harmony Of Dissonance, AKA the easiest game ever.

I was gonna say, Order of Eclesia's no pushover, but you mentioned it. It still has a lot of exploits, but enemies can't be spammed with most attacks like the other games and rare drops are almost nonexistent.

Yeah, Saturn Maria is hilariously OP. She can still do a lot of cool stuff though, especially her Bullet Hell crash.

You seem to be taking easy like it's some kind of bad thing.

A game doesn't have to be hard to be good, and even though SOTN was an absolute cakewalk without any extra effort to break it on my part, I still had a great time with it. I like difficult games, but there's nothing wrong with having something low stress to run through either - a lot of people just can't handle really challenging games, and the fact that games are trending towards being easier is half of why they've got a bigger audience than ever before nowadays.

I'm not saying its bad. SOTN is piss easy to break into pieces but if you put that aside its still a surprisingly masterfully put together game. They took a graphics style used badly by Earnest Evans and made it work perfectly and Alucard has smooth as silk sprite animations that I've yet to see imitated properly to this day (save Street Fighter 3 or Garou Mark of the Wolves)

SOTN is easily one of the easiest games in the franchise, if not THE easiest, but it's atmosphere, visual design and creativity have been unmatched in the franchise to this very day.