A Castlevania Thread

King of Posters
#1

Y’all I played through Symphony of The Night this year. It was alright. It is real haphazard and has strange item placement and story progression. It barely holds on but it does. It spawned dozens of search action games that annoy me within 15 minutes when I see a ledge I can’t reach. I fly into melodramatics How Will I Ever Reach This Ledge? Double Jumps Don’t Exist.

Anyways I picked up Aria of Sorrow for the first time since release maybe. I also 50 minutes in got a double jump. I like all the SotN callbacks. I am also going hmm this has a lot less personality than SotN. I like when I use my memories of SotN in this new castle. The plot is dope. I…wish I was playing the Japanese version. But this 8 dollar chinese multicart doesn’t have it.

Is SotN still the king? Why is it the king? Can no Search Action take the title?

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#2

it’s the maximalism and the 2D-3D sumptuousness, same reason FFT is so good even though there are finally some objectively tighter designs

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#3

Hollow Knight did for me at least.

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#4

La Mulana is better at least up to when it becomes punishingly obscure and if you’re old enough to hold SotN on high you can handle the rest of it too imo

and I do have genuinely high hopes for Ori 2

#5

La Mulana is excellent and realizes that the counterintuitive combination of adventure game environment puzzles and a Souls-esque difficulty, leveling, and open design that requires the player to nibble at level sections before committing is actually amazing

it also has good Japanese bedroom coder humor and vibes, very wholesome nerdiness

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#6

La Mulana is a GoAT but the first time you look at an FAQ you are sunk and it is very tempting to that fate. I never even gave 2 a hard try. Played like 15 minutes and never returned.

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#7

for me, personally, SotN is really the peak of what that kind of Castlevania is doing. i know people will say that other titles are as good/objectively better because of this or that, but i think it was just the right game at the right time. i played and enjoyed all the others, but nothing feels like SotN to me.

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#8

all of those castlevanias are ultimately pretty sloppy imo (aria and harmony least so, but still) and once you recognize that sotn is just the most belligerently maximalist and beautiful

yeah la-mulana is so much better but that’s like saying marienbad is better than fast 4

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#9

Yeah, once Castlevania becomes that entirely different game, its virtue is no longer in tight action but in lush oddness, and maximalism is the only way to go.

Bloodstained is so curious in that the budget should have broken it just like it threatened Shenmue 3, but the commitment to abilities from every single monster really saved them.

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#10

I should still play bloodstained I guess

scarlet grace is helping me get over my aversion to PSP graphics

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#11

“Lush maxamilist oddness” is why I like vampires and ultimately SOTN.
Something about that particular convergence of great graphic designs, campy dialog, excellent music, fun movement and the lack of organization give me the the cluttered evil castle adventure I crave.

SOTN: Its a magical living castle full of death obsessed echos of evils’ past that has been basting in its own juices, hidden far from God’s light for 1000 years. There is no order here! Its Madness! MAdness!

Other Search Actionvanias:
Oh fun its a spooky castle that gets harder as I get in deeper.

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#12

SotN is so rewarding and fun to play because there’s a billion secrets and weird interactions nobody tells you about and the game doesn’t require you engage with them so there’s entire huge portions of the experience that you might miss out on by just playing through it normally

It has this joy of exploration-for-exploration’s-sake that games which emulate it usually falter on.

I do love the DS Castlevanias - Dawn through Order - for similar reasons, and Bloodstained also strikes similar chords. Besides that, nobody has come close to capturing the magic, probably because they aren’t spending development time on sequencse almost nobody will see, like a nest of birds growing to adulthood each time you enter the room

As mentioned by others, La-Mulana is the most similar to that feeling, I guess, but emphasizes puzzle-solving over RPG monster murder, so I like it for related but distinct reasons

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#13

this thread reminds me that I really wish we had a different name for post-Symphony games, or that each one had taken on “Symphony” as a title that grew to become its title, because pre-Symphony Castlevania is such a different game with such different goals that we don’t deserve this sort of language confusion

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#14

Conversely I find symphony of the night a confused mess where every cute little micro interaction barely makes a difference my actual play of the game and the traversal of the castle is just a little too much a pain in the ass, and nothing has a sense of place, and the action is constantly falling short of Rondo of Blood.

The designs of it’s successors improve upon it a lot just by tightening everything a little bit. Even then, the Igavania’s sense of…place are all kinda bad. All of them feel like pretty tubes of gothic imagery without much cohesion in a way Metroid and like, Hollow Night don’t to me?

Like this isn’t to say it’s a bad game. It’s just a game that constantly feels like less than the sum of it’s parts, in the same way most other igavanias do, but moreso?

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#15

I think I would agree with you if the Inverted Castle didn’t exist. Recontextualizing the entire game, and revealing all these little environmental details that seemed confusing before (like spikes on a ceiling), really cemented Dracula’s Castle in terms of being a purposeful “space”.

I played Hollow Knight, and aesthetically it’s more coherent, but there’s much less variety of aesthetic compared to SotN. The patchwork, set-piece driven nature of igavanias are part the allure to me.

Plus, Portrait of Ruin explicitly lampshades this.

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#16

I quit part way through inverted castle. Nothing about the inverted castle made me care. It was the castle. But upside down. With annoying enemies. I wasn’t exploring new places or getting new abilities, it was a remixed boss rush.

Like a lot of SotN it’s a cool trick but really under-baked to me. I got to the inverted castle going ‘yes, this is where I will understand why people love this game so much’ and then…nothing. It was just SotN but all the cool exploration and pickups were gone because I’d been everywhere before.

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#17

I played SotN for the first time a year or two ago on my vita. My feelings align with Automatic Tiger’s. I just found the whole game really boring, especially the inverted castle. There are a lot of interesting touches that collectively amount to nothing. Less than the sum of its parts is a great way to phrase it. Granted, I’m sure it had much more impact when the game was new and not so imitated.

I felt the boss fights in particular were poorly designed. They mostly amount to battles of attrition where neither skill nor cleverness is necessary.

After finishing SotN, I played Aria of Sorrow for a little bit because I remembered liking that game quite a bit. I had a better time with Aria, so I think it does hold up better.

#18

I also played SotN for the first time this year, also on my vita! I’d assumed that I’d dislike it because I didn’t like the one I tried on my DS, and get bored by most current metroidvanias like Axiom Verge, Hollow Knight, The Iconclasts, etc. But I enjoyed Bloodstained enough that I was curious to try SotN after all this time.

I was surprised, I totally adored it for the reasons people have mentioned here. Just how quirky and eccentric and clashing it can be. The atmosphere is so different that even though it has a similar structure to Super Metroid and its followers, I never thought of any of them while playing.

It also helped that Rondo of Blood is my favorite game, and SotN feels like an ardent loveletter to Rondo that somehow maintains its own distinct identity.

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#19

2016 had a pretty good case between Momodora IV and Ori and the Blind Forest Definitive Edition imo.

#20

Maybe Iga was bad for the direction of the series? Pre-Iga games were doing just fine