Symphony of the Night (1997) 7.5/10
Unfortunately there's nothing to be learned from by functional video games. "Functional" meaning that it presents an idea and executes the presentation well enough for the player to stay invested until the end, but leaves the player caring little for the overall product once the game is over, bereft of sentiment. To be "functional" is to be like a tool, an item useful to safely fulfill a need, which is in this case, an entertaining distraction. This is not the case for works of art, items that boast a certain "edge" of audacity that surprises and humbles the individual in ways which inspire simultaneous glee (from the liberation of seeing the"edge") and intimidation (from seeing the boldness of that "edge" freely out and brandished).
Sadly my relationship with more than half of the games I play ends at seeing the game as "functional", hence my condescension with the very term "video games" and my worship of those that I look back upon with actual fondness and that I consequently label as separate entities of the "video game" format completely -- that new term/label being "DIAs".
So despite all of its fun, Castlevania Symphony of the Night is yet another one of those games that is "functional": bright and exciting once I pick it up to play, yet uninspired and trivial once I'm left with nothing but my thoughts to reflect on it.
The Castlevania franchise has never shown much ambition with their releases, aside from their pandering to the giddy fans of retro 2D action-platformer-adventure games you can play at home on the TV instead of those huge monolithic arcade machines you play in public; yet at the developers' creation of Symphony of the Night some changes were implemented to make the game closer to an RPG; changes that didn't change the gameplay significantly, but enough to make it basically fresh and "new". Of course the fusion of RPG elements was merely the cliche design system of acquiring Exp points, new abilities, and sifting through your inventory to decide what gear to equip as you accumulate more items to choose from. And this implementation of the very standard "RPG elements" really works -- the elements weren't added just a lazy fashion of roping in RPG fans; the only reason why leveling-up and obtaining powers throughout games has become "formulaic" is because the formula still works: there is a stronger motivation to complete the rest of the game since that thrill of getting your player-character stronger to overcome harder enemies excites us. Plus, with this catharsis of growing as a player-character there emerges actually two motivations for the player to play all through Symphony of the Night: priority one is to achieve that godly state of power so you may leisurely and bloodily disintegrate your every enemy and obstacle; the second is finding every playable room in the game-world (the castle) that has new powers and loot for you to collect and help you reach this godlike state of power quicker -- after all we don't want to grind Exp points on weak enemies respawning in the same room for hours on end to get up to level 3; we want to be at level 10 and we want to be at level 10 soon or RIGHT NOW, DAMMIT!
But enough talk of why this game is "fun"; I went into detail to show that I do fully understand the charm of this game and why so many would dub it a "masterpiece". I just had to get the gushing out of the way so I could voice all my disappointments without guilt:
First of all, the voice acting and writing of this game is downright idiotic; there is the point that the stupidity of this game's story actually adds to the fun mood, and up until the story's conclusion, I agree with that. (The goofy exaggeration of the story and the setting is even well topped-off with Alucard and Count Dracula resembling the Gothic equivalent of David Bowie from Labyrinth). The ending, however, is abrupt and unsatisfying, even in the "dumb fun" sense; it tries to be meaningful with a pretty hilarious line from your player-character Alucard telling the dying final boss that his one weakness was "he forgot how to love." This scene is followed with an altogether gloomier one where Alucard states that he will "disappear from this world" and leaves the other two side characters to pretty much just stand around and say, "Huh," then it's cue End Credits...
As I said, it's not like I cared for the story much to begin with, but they could have at least delighted me with another hysterical attempt at being "deep" like the "love" thing, or something else stupid and crazy rather than the unfunny "I go alone" cliche ending for the protagonist and basically nothing else.
Second of all, I was peeved at how the makers designed the inverted castle; I was expecting to be wowed with demonstrations of every level area contrived to perfectly work with gravity going up or down, but instead it's the very same conventionally-designed castle literally just upside down with new enemies and traps sometimes. Keep in mind this would not bug me if I didn't struggle just to jump a little bit higher to reach a door or didn't reach multiple points where the design simply failed or worked counter-intuitively with the player on the ceiling. This entire portion of the game was a novel concept that called for more tactful execution, but the makers just released it for what it was and didn't look back. Maybe there is more audacity in this than I give credit, but here I just think the game just objectively worse in design as soon as the novelty wore off and the player is just struggling through a broken area of misplaced platforms and disorienting backdrop textures.
Third, it is terribly frustrating to work with Alucard flinching or flinging himself back at every attack he receives -- and the program of having every enemy per area respawning as soon as you leave is just cruel if you reach a point where you are close to zero health and faced with some tough enemies, and you take them all down successfully... only to have one suddenly charge at you from off-screen, knock you back into the next room with even lower health than before, and now you return to this same room with ALL OF THE ENEMIES BACK. Yippee!
Pretty much anything else I could say from hereon are nitpicks which would be easily overshadowed by those main three issues I have with the game. Outside of this, I'd like to add that Symphony of the Night's visuals are still evocative and slick -- the gothic style of Castlevania for the time couldn't look better -- and the pompous soundtrack nicely fits the variety of atmosphere boasted stage by stage.
There are loads of spooky monsters and action, and, as I said before, as a "home arcade game", I'd say that it still holds up in terms of being able to have dumb fun. Symphony of the Night is not a sophisticated "DIA experience", no; but it still shows enough effort as a video game to earn my respect, especially for a series so lacking in artistic integrity.