In an effort to make a change of pace while I deal with various real-life issues (nothing earth-shattering, just annoyances and inconveniences), I dragged out a bit of old-school goodness: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
I had the good fortune of finding a black-label PS1 copy a few years back, and I trot it out occasionally to get away from both the daily grind and the daily level-grind. This treasure is chock-full of old sorts of gaming goodness, and combines some of the better mechanics found in old-school platforming with the exploration of adventure games, with a dab of RPG-style stats and loot. There's even some fighting game style button commands; I'm terrible at those, so they're not all that relevant to me, but even I think it's a nice touch.
Even for the gaming vet, there's just no real substitute for storming your way into a gothic castle of doom, smashing aside the horrible, grotesque minions of evil and walking away with all sorts of goodies. Overall it's very satisfying, and one can easily see why Konami was so eager to stick to this formula in some shape or form for a good while afterwards. Your main character, Alucard (ala Adrian Farenheit Tepes) showcases a good sense of loss and regrowth, losing most of his power soon after entering and then proceeds to smack evil anyway, becoming an engine of awesome judgment upon the castle's denizens before taking on Big Bad Dad Dracula himself.
SPOILERS!
There is a nifty concept that Konami tried out here: As above, so below. After following certain fairly intuitive (translation problem or maybe just a straight up lie notwithstanding) steps, you actually wind up in a second castle, which happens to be a complete inverse of the first one. That's right, the already crazy castle in completely flipped upside-down and filled with even more evil freaks. Unfortunately, it wasn't executed all that well. A smart player can 'cheat' by just flipping the first map upside-down and following it accordingly, including all the hidden passages and rooms, but otherwise you have no real sense of where you need to go. Things are also hurt by having several sections share a music theme (each one in the first castle gets a unique one), and with a few places all but outright forcing you to use either cheesy techniques or outright avoidance to get through. The latter is somewhat ameliorated when you get your stats back up to snuff, but the difficulty spike is pretty nasty all the same. Still, it was a nifty idea overall, and a good twist that fits the franchise very well.
END SPOILERS
One of the things I liked a lot is the enemy variety, even within some subsets you get all sort of unique critters and baddies to fight. The two big families are skeletons and knights/armors, with all sorts of different weapons and features. One of my favorites is the Nova Skeletons, bony wizards that patrol about and unleash arcane laser death; those can really hurt if you get hit. The bosses enjoy the same level of variety. Admittedly, we have a lot of the usual horror cliché monsters, but Symphony is where they got codified and established (especially Granfaloon aka Legion and Galamoth). I would've liked to see a bit more (Super Castlevania IV's Dancing Ghosts really amuse me), but even so things are rather wonderful. The triple threat of copy Trevor Blemont, Sypha, and Grant was one of the best moments, and a fine tribute to III.
On a final note, you've probably heard it all before, but it bears repeating: if you want to see what old-school gaming was really capable of back in the day, you need to try this puppy out. PS1 physical copies are fairly common, and fairly reasonable in price, you can download them on both Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network, and finally there is a tweaked version bundled with Rondo of Blood for the PSP. Matters are helped that this is a 2D game (though built on a 3D engine), so it stands up a fair bit better visually to a lot of its contemporaries. Game on, and never let the Harvest rest!
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