Actually this was always the coolest thing about this game even for us who played it on release!
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man Symphony of the Night got so stupid so quickly with the inverted castle section. it feels like trying to play Doom 1 on Nightmare mode. just all over the place… the game doesn’t feel balanced for it. it feels more like a weird sort of “challenge mode” except the challenge is inconsistent and there are a lot of monsters who just bounce you around while they take off 50 hp each hit. i’m sure there might be some useful item against that if i could navigate through the endless menu of items i have no idea what they fucking do.
the fucking mirror Link esque dark Alucard fight broke me. i had already taken a lot of damage in another room and didn’t realize there was a save room i skipped over just near there, because why would i remember that? so instead i entered the boss room and got stuck in there. i save-scummed through it because i didn’t want to replay like 20 minutes of tedious enemy slogging again and it just felt so unfair that i happened to choose the room that killed me instead of the one right near it that would have restored my health. it was a horrible experience. i yelled at my monitor and flipped it off several times. just horrible.
it’s kind of so obnoxious that i’ve ended up just trying to skip a lot of areas with the fog or bat powers because i’ve just lost patience with the game.
pictured: my experience playing the inverted castle part of Symphony of the Night
i know you can rush things with the wolf powerup if it’s on a flat surface but i keep forgetting about it because this game has 30 different things and it’s not easy to tell when something is useful or not. i didn’t even try the magic spells until recently and i just cannot do the inputs at all. i don’t know if this is being on an emulator or not. but i couldn’t get one to work a single time even after practicing for several minutes. i’ve never been good at button inputs, but i genuinely wonder if these are even going to work on emulator + with the controller i have. so i’m not going to even bother with those.
anyway my impression of the game has really dropped off in this section. i guess that’s what i get for entering a part that is deliberately kind of difficult to get to. the game went from being like an 8.5 to a 7.5 or so in my mind. i guess we’ll see how it ends, but i’m not feeling too optimistic about it.
at this point i kind of don’t care if people like this section because… there’s just way too much stupidity here that i can’t describe everything. like all the enemies that hit you and poison you or curse you and having to go into your menu every time through the billion items to find it. or all the stuff that is poorly explained and it’s not clear where and how it’s useful or not. all the bad things about the game really compound here. the idea of fighting through the upside down castle is admittedly cool, but it also feels kind of like a lazy re-use of assets at the same time that the game doesn’t really meet with something interestingly new and substantial. honestly fuck this whole part of the game.
i think i understand hyper-minimalist indie Metroidvanias a little more now, lmao. this is making me think in fondness of Knytt Underground again.
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I almost commented “be careful what you wish for” regarding your goal of getting to the inverted castle, IMO it was always more of a neat idea/secret than something that worked particularly well in execution.
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i mean i was not going to finally play the game and then completely skip over half of it, especially with hearing everyone talking about the inverted castle for at least the last two decades of my life. i didn’t expect it to be so, uh, bad though given that the game up to that point isn’t like that. not to mention that it’s bad in a way that makes the first part of the game look worse.
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All I know about the inverted castle, apart from the small cross-section of it that appears in speedruns, is the single piece of trivia that the “Frozen Half” enemies are named from the term “new half”, which is 90s Japanese slang for “transgender” (derived from “half”, which is 90s Japanese slang for “mixed-race”).
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Oh, yeah, I 100%’d the game up to the inverted castle, got there, poked around for a few minutes, thought “that’s neat,” and turned it off forever
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The inverted castle talk is super interesting, because I always felt I arrived to it significantly overpowered and it was like a bonus stage, that just like how you can negociate its geometry easily through mist and flying and jumping by that time you have tools and stats to deal with most absurd enemies it can throw at you save a couple special cases like Garamoth (which is either pretty hard or completely trivial depending on whether you have the right item). I don’t usually go to Richter until I’ve visited almost all of the normal castle though, that might make a difference (but then again I’m not sure how much of the castle you can skip to get to the inverted one).
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the inverted castle is one of the funniest game design ideas ever. it’s the same castle but it’s upside down!!! the ceilings are now floors and there are things that hyper beam you!!! it’s great lol
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i love the inverted castle because you think “oh shit they designed the whole castle to be playable upside-down??”
and then you get there and it’s like “lol no”. it is purely non-design at that point, just like “we can do this so let’s do it.” it’s dumb as hell, frustrating, annoying, and not nearly clever enough to justify its existence
but i really do love it!! like, it’s such a perfect capstone to a game that really wears its lack of design on its sleeve, right? like the game is all about maximalism already, and it’s incredibly uneven, and this just cements that completely.
all other “secret” late game areas in later igavanias pale in comparison to the audacity and stupidity of the inverted castle
i don’t blame anyone for hating it but i can’t help myself here. i find it delightful
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you say “bad,” i say…“omake”
lol no but really, you are spot on with the analysis. it is not balanced at all, and was a last-minute addition to the game. i understand that the sentiment ex post facto has been that everyone was soyfacing over the existence of the inverted castle, but i assure you that it was mostly a nice surprise that allowed my high-school-aged friends and i to spend more time with a game we were really enjoying.
another aspect to surviving the inverted castle is that SotN is also unabalanced in favor of you by this point if you know what to look for. idk if you really want any hints, but i’ll put some hidden here:
Summary
Firstly, if you want to just bend the game over your knee and never have a challenge again, get the Crissaegrim sword. an enemy called the “Schmoo” drops it in the inverted library with a decent drop rate, if i recall.
my first playthrough, i never got it, but the second playthrough, the first Schmoo i killed dropped it. imo, i don’t like using it because it takes away all challenge in the game, but some stuff in the inverted castle is indeed bullshit sometimes. it really is kind of up to you how you wanna play it - the comparison to Nightmare Mode in Doom is somewhat apt, i think.
anyway, there are a lot of fun surprises and bosses in the inverted castle that i think make playing through worth it. also more fun depending on how much of a CV fan you are, i think.
also, if you haven’t noticed, pressing down → up + Jump with the Gravity Boots equipped will let you fly around the screen super fast, essentially negating the usefulness of the Bat form.
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also the fighting game input timing is finicky, it’s not just you or the emulation
i remember some of the shield rod spells being really useful and you only need to hit sword+shield together to cast those
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honestly the over-the-topness of sotn is why I think bloodstained is such a good successor, even if it doesn’t do anything dramatically different in now-extremely-codified genre. it’s just so excessively maximalist in the exact same way sotn is. I don’t think it’s quite as good on that front but it still feels like a bona fide sequel because it still values that kind of gratuitous opulence.
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Bloodstained RotN provided exactly what I’d been craving since 2003, a castle as maximalist as SotN’s, combined with Aria of Sorrow’s monster-soul-collecting and brisk movement options.
Also you can put it on hard mode on first playthrough by inputting NIGHTMARE on the name entry screen (a must to not get bored as an experienced explor-action player).
I beat it twice on launch, and I’ve been meaning to get back to it and try the randomizer mode they added since then
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also not to be the “it’s good because it’s bad” guy, but the way the inverted castle is unbalanced is why I like it. the entire thing gives you the same kind of feeling as when you find a minus world and suddenly the level design and mechanics just don’t line up anymore. it’s exhilarating and lends an air of verite to the experience. like you could almost believe you’d glitched your way into some cut content or something.
that said on some level I think that aspect was deliberate… it punishes you if you missed or neglected using certain movement relics that might have seem superfluous at first, like power of mist. it requires that you get really good at executing the gravity jump. also, the optional street fighter input magic spells are much more useful there as well.
like I guess the idea is that now that you have this overpowered moveset and abilities, time to get creative with using them to survive this area that we probably didn’t playtest very well.
but I think the reason the inverted castle is so often-cited by devotees is simply because, playing the game naively, it’s an incredible moment to discover that there’s like, suddenly twice as much game after you thought you completed it. I just think it leaves such a strong impression, even though it ends up not really living up to that promise because of many of the criticisms you’ve raised.
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lmao i should get all those people to play my game Problem Attic if they like that sort of experience, because they might as well be playing that if they want something that feels like you’ve glitched your way into something forbidden. i guess people will do it all for More Content, esp back in those days. i like some of the new monster designs i guess. that’s about all i can say that’s positive so far.
seriously though as the person who made that game Problem Attic especially i appreciate the brazenness of just reusing stuff by turning it upside down. i literally made a game that is just about that. but the execution in SOTN’s case just makes a lot of other parts of the game feel worse to me.
tl;dr i like the brazenness, i just don’t like all the stupid incomprehensible systems and items that you’re both clearly supposed to understand and like. or the way the game nickel and dimes you and traps you in places.
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Big agree with this.
Very fond of the inverted castle personally because by then they assume you’ve done basically everything in the normal castle so they can unleash all their most devilish tricks and traps on you. You are familiar with the game, you have undertaken an obscure secret that requires basically 100%ing the standard castle, so here’s something to really challenge your skill at SOTN, using your full arsenal of abilities and items. And it’s not particularly hard either, except maybe the Uber Boss (who can be trivialized, like everything else in the game, with Alucard Shield + Shield Rod lol)
They definitely designed the architecture of the normal castle around it because there’s multiple places in the main game where environments don’t make much sense from a design perspective, like spikes on the ceiling, that click in place once you reach the inverted castle. I don’t think it was a late or ill-considered decision on their part, or lazy asset-reuse. There’s a purposeful impishness about how many of the rooms in inverted castle are designed.
That sort of player-antagonistic design, which assumes you know what you’re doing and sets out to mess with you as a result, is one of my favorite design tropes. It’s very Scholar of the First Sin, a comedy of errors as you retune your expectations in the face of a designer who is grinning at you through the proverbial screen.
All this may be undercut by me not finding the inverted castle to be too difficult, so grain of salt I suppose.
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Nobody told me at the time that I should think of using street fighter moves to navigate in the inverted castle, so I was slowly converting to and from bat form every time a jump was too high
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I’m playing a text adventure: Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing.
I’ll probably have a longer post about it in my interactive fiction thread when I decide I’ve finished, but: this is a game loosely inspired by Animal Crossing. The game is only playable online, saves your progress automatically, and you’re encouraged to dip in for a short while whenever the urge strikes you, and there will be new things to discover as time passes. When I was playing yesterday, it was raining, and things seemed a little different as a consequence.
The big joke here is that this is a fishing game without any fishing. I’m loving the exploration, researching local history, birdwatching, canoeing, badge-collecting… Like I said, I haven’t finished yet, but I’m intrigued as things have taken just the sliiiightest bend from light-and-breezy toward something a bit more sinister. Very curious whether these ominous notes will build up to something, or if they’re just occasional counterpoints to the cheery, conversational overtone.
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After much puzzling over which of the bazillion Trails games to start with, I finally zeroed in on Sora no Kiseki FC Kai, the HD remaster of the original Trails in the Sky.
The art is a bit worse than the original but the fonts are 3x sharper, which I absolutely need to make out the kanji. Also even though it’s a PS3 game you can actually run it in a PSP emulator and use fast-forward
Good opening vibe
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