It seems like 2023 has turned into the year of 32-bit nostalgia for me. At least the first quarter has. I recently spent twenty-something hours addicted to Final Fantasy VII after years of straining to see why fans loved that game so much. I came around on it. And now I find myself diving back into Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night - a game that I've loved from a series that I've loved for a very long time. But I haven't actually played Symphony Of The Night in like a decade, so there's always that fear that my memories of the game are better than the game. And yet, it turns out that, no. Symphony Of The Night still rules.
God bless, Konami by the way. Not Konami now. But Konami way back then. They really knew what they were doing at the time when this game was released. When every publisher was pushing 3D, Konami looked at the landscape and said, "y'know what? We should just continue making Castlevania 2D." And it worked. Symphony Of The Night was released on Playstation and Saturn (the latter only in Japan) and it served as a mind-blowing sequel to Dracula X. It's a staggering follow-up and honestly, it blows away the 16-bit Castlevania entries handily. Of course, a couple of years later Konami would mess things up with their Nintendo 64 Castlevania games, but the less said about those, the better. But let's backtrack here... There's two flavors of Castlevania. There's the Classicvanias (basically everything 8-bit and 16-bit, except maybe Castlevania II) and then there's the Metroidvanias, which start with Symphony Of The Night. If I'm being honest, I'm not a huge Metroidvania fan. I mean the genre in general. I like the concept of Metroid more than I like the games themselves. And I play every Castlevania game I can get my hands on because I love the series, but I prefer linear stage-based games over these sort of puzzle/exploration labyrinths. And yet, Symphony Of The Night is just it's own perfect thing. It's the ideal game within the genre. It's ineffably amazing. Case in point, I fired this up on a Saturday night with the intention of seeing if it was even what I felt like playing. Now, it's three hours later. I've always remembered loving this game, but I guess I forgot just how much I love it. As big a fan as I was of Castlevania as a series for all these years, I didn't actually play Symphony Of The Night on Playstation. I really can't remember specifically why I managed to miss out on it for so many years, but my first experience with it was when I bought my Xbox 360. It's cool to say that I'm still playing that Xbox Live Arcade release of the game all these years later thanks to Microsoft's wonderful work on backwards compatibility. Perhaps one of the things that makes this such a successful Metroidvania to me is the amount of player agency. You can truly approach this game as you wish, and as a result get as much out of it as you put in. It's possible to clumsily rush through to a final battle against Richter in like four hours. Of course you'll get the "bad ending." You can put much more work in and delve deeper, collecting enough items to reveal a whole different version of that Richter fight and get the "good ending." And then you can get completely absorbed and realize that all of this was really only half of the game as the castle inverts and sets you off on what is effectively a new game plus as you march toward Dracula himself. In an effort to simply rekindle nostalgia, I opted for that first short option. I just really wanted to spend time back in the castle, revisiting and taking in the awesomeness of it all. As highly as I've praised this game for years, I cannot understate just how riveting it is. And just how well it all still holds up. For the sake of nostalgia, here's my brief rundown of this quick playthrough to jog my memory... After revisiting the end of Dracula X and finding out that I'm nothing more than a miserable pile of secrets, I entered the castle and grinded the front hallway for a couple of quick, easy levels. It wasn't long before I made my way to the first (easy) boss battle against Slogra and Gaibon. Then it was off to the Marble Gallery and a fight against myself. Then a bit more grinding before making my way to the library to spend some cash. In true RPG fashion, I found myself constantly seeking out new and better gear. I spent a lot of time in menus, but it was good stuff. Lots of stat reading. Then there was time spent in the Outer Wall, the Clock Tower, and the Royal Chapel. I conversed with Maria a bit. I killed that big Hippogryph (a joke of a battle) and then on to the Castle Keep. After that, I played with clocks and made my way to Olrox's Quarters. This is where the difficulty spike happens in my mind. And more grinding doesn't hurt, really. By the time I found the Alucard gear, my own gear far surpassed it. The fight against the Minotaur and Werewolf is the first truly difficult one in my mind. It took me a few tries, but I finally got it down as I remembered I had stockpiled potions and never bothered using them. Also magic spells. Yeah, that's right, I knew some spells but didn't remember to use them. The ability to turn into a wolf or myst are cool for traversal, but the crazy thing is that once you can turn into a bat you can effectively just end the game if you feel ready to take on Richter. Again, this is the "bad ending." You're missing out on tons of story (like Richter's not even the bad guy), huge portions of the castle, and more importantly some great sections of the game. Wrapping it up here prematurely means I didn't even get to refight the Succubus, which is an awesome battle. But my goal here was completed. I wanted to go back and confirm that yes, this game is just as amazing as I remember. And it is. All these years later, it probably remains my favorite Castlevania, which is kind of cliche, but whatever. And now I've got a new save four hours in that I can come back to next time I want to remind myself how much it rules so I can dig deeper into the castle once more without starting from scratch.
0 Comments
I definitely consider myself a fan of puzzle games. Especially "stuff dropping from the ceiling" puzzle games. And the Magical Drop series provides just that. I actually discovered the series kind of by mistake. It must have been back around 2010 that my wife and I went up to New Hampshire one weekend to meet my family for a short vacation. I knew I wanted to bring some games with me to play in the hotel at night and at the time I had a PSP and just downloaded some random time killing games on it. One of them was the original Magical Drop, and I ended up playing that all weekend.
In the years since, I've read up on the series more thanks to Hardcore Gaming 101's book on Data East. And that reading up is what has brought me to playing Magical Drop III this week all these years later in 2023. If you don't know Magical Drop, the concept is simple-ish. You've got a bunch of bubbles or spheres or whatever dropping from the ceiling. You've got two buttons. One button grabs the spheres down to you. You can grab as many of the same color as you want. The other button shoots them back up. The goal is to throw the biggest pile of three or more. Which is pretty simple. But the deeper aspect is making big chains. What makes Magical Drop special is that it's a puzzle game rooted in the arcades. As such, there's a competitive side to it not unlock my beloved Super Puzzle Fighter II. With that in mind, you've got an enemy playing against you so you're racing to make the biggest chains as quickly as possible to outlast them. Also, chains cause your enemy's spheres to come down faster. In short, it's good stuff. Magical Drop III is no exception. There's not a lot different about the third game than the previous two, outside of a new third button that will manually drop the next row of spheres. There's some strategy here with that added button, but in all candor, I don't use it too often myself. That said, it seems like most fans consider Magical Drop III to be the pinnacle of the series. I can't say for sure, but it's certainly solid. The original was just fine, but this one does have more characters with different attack patterns. Plus you can play as World as this one, and I like her. The fifth game didn't really seem to make much waves, but I remember enjoying it. And I don't think I played the second and fourth games. This week I've mostly been playing the Xbox version of the game which is one of those ACA Neo Geo releases by Hamster. Which means it's an arcade perfect port to consoles. There's some good selection of modes here. I made it a priority to beat the standard arcade mode on one credit, and felt pretty good about it when I was able to do so in just a few attempts. There's an endless mode which feels like exactly what I'd hit up when I just want to zone out. Then there's a third adventure mode which is some kind of weird board game thing that has you doing different challenges and stuff. It's not really the kind of thing that attracts me to such an arcade puzzler. I've also played the game a bit on Anstream Arcade which is a streaming service on Android that gives you access to a plethora of awesome retro games. Though I'm not a big fan of playing games like this with touch controls, there is something kind of awesome about knowing that a game like Magical Drop III is always in my pocket waiting to go. It's exactly the kind of thing I might want to play if I'm killing time for an oil change or whatever. |
Games
All
Archives
February 2024
|