It’s one of the biggest weeks of news in a while as WB announced a Smash Brothers clone called Multiversus, Sony had a Star Ocean full of news drop during their State of Play, Among Us is adding new roles in the next content update, and in sadder news, PAX South is coming to an end and apparently Pokimane owns EVO. Oh, you thought I was done? Amazon’s New World is a complete mess, Blizzard officially changed McCree’s name, Blizzcon was cancelled, and Bobby Kotick took a pay cut in a failed attempt at good PR. Far Cry 6 has horrible marketing, Resident Evil had a big week, the Wu-Tang clan are making an RPG and Shoji Meguro is leaving ATLUS to make his own game. Speaking of new games, A Quiet Place is getting a game tie-in from iLLOGIKA, Digimon Survive is now coming in 20222 and ConcernedApe has the Haunted Chocolatier in the works. We’re also getting a new third party DLC character in Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and Melty Blood: Type Lumina‘s DLC Rollout is starting this winter.

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The post VGCC Episode 377: A Scary Amount Of News appeared first on Gamesline.

“Where to start?” is the question of the day regarding a game for which I can’t name any positive thing that doesn’t come saddled with massive caveats. To catch you up, Curse of the Moon is more or less a “Castlevania for people too young to have played Castlevania.” It imitates everything from the canned jumps to the slow horizontal attack that has an active hitbox for *juuust* a little too long to make sense, to the candles that dispense ammunition and health. The aesthetics are a dead ringer for the 16-bit Castlevania the New Generation (Bloodlines for the US); with the framing of a few screens taken wholesale from Konami titles.

The previous Curse of the Moon went as far as to constantly quote passages from the Konami Kukeiha Club in its own soundtrack to a comedic extent. Curse of the Moon 2 does this as well, albeit much less, which sadly just ends making most of its music sound utterly generic. It sports the kind of lifeless chiptune compositions that you can tell is simply aping popular genres and adding the electronics for nostalgic appeal. And really that sums up Curse of the Moon 2 brilliantly: close enough to be cute, too far to be as good, and trying so hard to imitate that it doesn’t have much to offer once it fails to prove itself worthy of the Belmont legacy.

The two problems being stabbed right into Curse of the Moon 2’s heart are nearly inseparable from one another; the difficulty and the characters. The first 3 stages of the game seem normal enough as you start with Not-Simon-Belmont Zangetsu. Then you unlock Dominique who can jump higher, attack from more angles, has a longer range, and a slide manoeuvre, at the cost of being frailer and slower on the draw compared to Zangetsu. So far, so good. These first two stages prove themselves tougher than Curse of the Moon 1, which was so laughably forgiving I managed to beat it with 10 extra lives in tow on my first attempt. It’s a really promising start!

Then Robert, a sniper, joins your party and the game design goes out the window. Robert has a few different skills, but all you really need to know is that he, being a sniper, has no range limitations. Press X and the X axis of the screen is now an active hitbox. Robert essentially trivialises any enemy that wasn’t specifically designed to fight him this way, barring very specific setups. His introductory stage is a breeze, and he proves an overwhelming force. One could be forgiven for thinking this was only to make the player more comfortable with his novel mechanics. Then Hachi shows up. Hachi is a corgi piloting a mech who joins your party because life is cool like that sometimes. Hachi then proceeds to high-five Robert and the two of them climb onto the ropes to come crashing down on the game design with force to make the Mega Powers cower.

Hachi’s mechsuit moves very slowly, but packs the punch of a locomotive, can bypass some —but not all, and it is very poorly telegraphed which— environmental hazards, can hover at the apex of his jump for a couple of seconds —though I found this feature very unreliable to get to work— and can make himself impervious to all damage at the cost of ammunition. Does any of this sound overpowered to you? It should. Robert and Hachi team up to single-handedly trivialise the entire enemy gallery of the game, save for two very good bosses. The only moments in which combat will prove a challenge is if you had the misfortune to lose a character to platforming. Or if you let Robert get hit twice, I guess.

Platforming is the word that I want you to hear in your head’s voice with all the venom you can muster, because it is atrocious. In stage 4, someone had the idea to make all future platforming sections involve moving platforms, which mixes terribly with Castlevania’s canned jumps. Castlevania platforming works best when based around static landing points with enemies who put pressure on the timing of the jump. Moving both the jumping and landing point tightens the precision required to jump safely so much that it nearly made me pull my hair out. The moving platforms put pressure on a jumping arc that you flat-out don’t have control over.

In the end, it was the platforming sections that made me swallow my pride and change the game mode from “Veteran”, a faithful recreation of Castlevania  punishment systems, to “Casual”, a mode without recoil and with infinite lives, making you always restart from the nearest checkpoint. All this really did was give me more and faster chances at the platforming, but it didn’t make them particularly easier since the enemy positioning in them was extremely forgiving, like the rest of the game. My experience with the last 3 stages was continuously breezing through the combat rooms, being showered in health and ammo pickups, only to lose all my characters at the platforming sections and having to try again. Rinse, repeat, for up to 20 minutes at a time.

This made the difficulty curve go haywire and incoherent in strange ways. The first 2 of the 4 stages with sadistic platforming had incredibly fun bosses that required me to use all my characters in different ways to secure victory, and were only nominally soured by the frustration preceding them. But all the stages leading up to them, and the ones following them, are commandeered by a bunch of pushovers who will be vanquished by the heroic deed of standing in their face and tapping a drum beat on the X button. Just remember to hit the bumpers when your character is low on health and victory is assured. It’s to the point where it makes me think the whole game should be three or four times harder just to avoid the whiplash between the combat and platforming portions.

By the eighth stage I did not give a toss and was actively racing to the end in a way that minimised my every interaction with the system. The final boss was, of course, defeated by tapping X in its face a lot. I was then informed that I had unlocked “Episode 2” In which, for plot reasons, I would have to replay through all eight stages again with three of my four characters, plus a new member of the gang. This lit a final ember of hope that was swiftly stamped when the new combat areas made accessible by my travel companions were as generic and easily defeated as everything that had come before. The two bosses I fought in Episode 2 were the same as Episode 1’s so far as I could tell, if they had a new move I did not remember, and it certainly did not impact my chance to beat them.

Who knows, perhaps in the final chapter the whole Curse of the Moon 1 gang comes back, and they manage to make the combat sections feel more challenging whilst trivialising some of the platforming, but I was just not up to playing through the game thrice more to find out. I am really sorry to confess that. I loathed three quarters or more of my time with this game, and “Curse of the Moon 1, but more” is not enough of a carrot on a stick to drag myself through that three more times.

The most apposite description, I suppose, is that Curse of the Moon 2 has the unmistakable stink of a fan game. Indeed, one cannot accuse it of being cynical or callous towards the legacy it’s attempting to honour. There is a lot of heart here, but it’s just a clumsy implementation of every idea it tries to pull off. The characters have abilities that weren’t decided through an evaluation of the systems and the stages, but on a fleeting question “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” This is not a Castlevania game. It is a Mega Man game, staffed by characters whose abilities come short of, or sometimes eclipse, Mega Man’s, but never equal them. Inti Creates clearly loves the classic series as much as I do, but they didn’t think this one through.

The post Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 (PC) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

For me, this was a year where I started with a clear assumption that gradually got torn away as time went on. While I expected certain games to be in my good graces, and they absolutely still are, so many hidden threats seeped out of the woodworks and weaseled their way into my heart. On top of all the new hits, I actually went back to play a bunch of older games for the first time, such as games I’ve meant to play for years and years but never really got around to doing it. To start off my list, I’m gonna write a few bits about those games, and why I think they hold up, and should be given a shot even today.

The Atelier Series

I’ve been meaning to play the Atelier series for like, what, five years or something? I’m huge on the Neptunia games and they’ve always been sold to me as those but with an extra bit of polish and a whole lot more gameplay direction. For once I actually feel like that selling point was right on the money, and boy does it rule. The Atelier games are all about cute girls doing alchemy and going on adventures with friends and family members while they solve generally laid back mysteries. While there are some entries that go more serious than others, I’ve found myself especially enjoying the Dusk Trilogy of games, which take place in a really grim post apocalyptic world, but almost entirely ignore this. Using a grim spooky setting as the backdrop for upbeat lesbian adventures is like my fucking ambrosia and if you’re the type of person who maybe is into that sort of thing then I highly recommend picking up Atelier Ayesha or Escha and Logy if you get the chance.

Final Fantasy VIII

So I haven’t gotten incredibly far into FF8, but I am absolutely in love with pretty much everything it has going on. This is a AAA juggernaut revolutionary game for the time where they make you spend like five minutes watching a man freak out and get a leg cramp falling over himself trying to ask a girl out on a date. For the time especially that’s incredible, and I found myself continuously impressed by more and more of the game’s presentation and ideas. People say a lot of games were ahead of their time, and that usually applies to complete failures or overlooked niche hits. I’d argue, however, that Final Fantasy VIII was the type of game that was absolutely appreciated for specific reasons back in 1999, and can be appreciated for even more twenty years later. Oh yeah the draw system by the way? Kicks ass. You know it’s a good FF game when everyone’s a Blue Mage.

Titanfall 2

You know I do a whole lot of talking about how Halo Reach is my favorite shooter of all time, and like, one of the best games ever made. In the time since Halo Reach, I’ve been increasingly disappointed both inside and outside the Halo series, as everyone tried desperately to either throw out any semblance of clever design and balance in favor of aping Call of Duty, or worse, Battle Royales. Titanfall 2 however, is one of the best damn shooters I have ever played and it is a CRIME that it didn’t get the staying power of any other big name shooter. With tons of options for traversal, a bunch of different mechs that all feel meaningfully different, and a co-op mode that’s a thousand times better than the suckfest that is Call of Duty Zombies, there’s just so much to do that it’s always a fun time. Sure the game is a little rough around the edges, with a very freemium style UI and an aesthetic that is simultaneously the best and worst, but it’s still a game I kept having a blast in no matter how many hours I threw in. I still haven’t even done the campaign which everyone hypes up so much, and I’m this in love with it! Please try it if you can because it’s a hell of a lot better, and has a much more cohesive design philosophy than any other FPS released in the last decade.

Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age

https://t.co/bUyb7Lrf6R pic.twitter.com/RZ361MOIbl

— RMT (@horngal) June 18, 2019

I like the Dragon Quest games now! As someone who actively avoided the franchise because I thought they would be incredibly boring and ugly, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed playing through the eleventh major installment. Though I still don’t care for the overall appearance of the game, something about seeing high fidelity Toriyama characters works surprisingly well, and the monster designs more than make up for whatever disgusting humanoids the game throws at you over the course of its 100+ hour campaign. Though the series did end up being as faithful to the core tenants of a JRPG as I expected, that never made it boring, and the characterization of even the most simplest of mechanics made things feel much more impactful than they actually would’ve seemed to be. I’m excited to dig into a bunch of the back catalog of this endless thousand game long series now that I know more about it, and maybe finally understand what’s going on with that crazy “Rocket Slime” guy everyone’s always talking about.

Also!

So yeah! Go play those games! I also highly recommend Radiant Historia, specifically for the 3DS. It’s a great game that uses time travel in an actually clever and well considered way, and I really enjoyed it for its unique tone and feeling. Crosscode is a pretty good banger from last year too, taking the atmosphere and concepts of an MMO and popping them into a puzzle-filled RPG. Anyways, 2019.

10: Indivisible

Indivisible is by no means a perfect game, but it’s also one that I genuinely had a blast playing for almost the entire time I spent with it. Sure the backtracking got a little annoying, and there was a lot left to be desired in the story department, but I found myself completely unable to put this game down until I beat it which is something that has become increasingly rarer as the years have gone on. Hopefully with future updates inbound, Lab Zero can clean up any of the lingering issues with the game because there really is a lot to like. With a colorful cast, satisfying thwacks, and a whole bunch of womens for me to go “wahow!” at, I think Indivisible was well worth the time I gave it.

9: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

I might not be the wildest Castlevania head out there but god damn do I love me Symphony of the Night. With the rough history of Kickstarter-backed spiritual successors, everyone was afraid that Bloodstained might just sputter out and die at release but luckily this wasn’t even close to a Mighty No. 9. There’s so many systems in this game that it sometimes gets overwhelming, but interacting with them and fooling around with exploration and different character builds is still fun in a way that pretty much no other game in the Metroidvania genre has done in years. It was pretty easy to cheese most of the game, but you get to do so by turning into a bunny girl demon so who can possibly say if it’s bad or not? There’s still lots of content coming to this game down the line, and I’ll totes dive back in for some more hoppin’ and choppin’.

8: Kingdom Hearts III

Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever thought that a Kingdom Hearts game could end up this low on a top ten list, but Kingdom Hearts III really gutted me in a lot of bummerific ways. It was still fun, and it was an outrageous spectacle in the way that I expect Kingdom Hearts to be, but there was just something…off about the whole thing. I don’t know if it was an overfocus on the Disney side of things, a mostly sterile interpretation of those properties from a series that once pit Cloud Strife against Hercules with complete and utter sincerity, but after waiting over ten years for a true blockbuster follow up to Kingdom Hearts II, we got what feels like yet another side game. 

There are moments where Kingdom Hearts III shines, where it delivers on years and years of plot build up and emotionally resonates with the deepest most innocent parts of our brains. Unfortunately for each time of triumph, there’s a handful of “what could have been”s and “what should have been”s. Throw into that the series’ worst handling of female characters to date and damn, I just couldn’t help but shake my head. I still love Kingdom Hearts, and I’m excited to play the DLC, but Kingdom Hearts III deserved better than this.

7: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

I like that when i see a boss for the first time now this is how it goeshttps://t.co/aJ00OyZt11 pic.twitter.com/h0NPxAgUIB

— RMT (@horngal) March 29, 2019

When Sekiro is good? It’s easily one of the best games you could ever play in your entire life. Full of blistering high speed high stakes combat- the natural progression of FromSoftware’s design ethos after Bloodborne– this is a game that rewards your mastery of its mechanics more than almost any you or I could name. The fight against Genichiro on the top of the castle towards the middle of the game is one of the best vibe checks in gaming; one that’s patient but demanding. Gradually unraveling the ways you can use your sword to fuck shit up feels sooo satisfying, and the adrenaline you get from slamming your sword into any of the game’s bosses after a long battle feels amazing.

When Sekiro is bad though? It really just bums you all the way out. For a game that succeeds at 1v1 battles, it has a propensity to increase the difficulty by just…tossing in an identical second enemy that you have to contend with. This wouldn’t be a problem if you could use your tools more but all of your tools use up /the same/ currency that doesn’t even regenerate upon death so you always feel like you have to save them rather than actually experiment with them. Sometimes fights go on just a little too long (looking at you final boss), and sometimes they’re just way too short! While I appreciate FromSoft branching out and getting a little wild with their game format, and I think that they mostly pulled it off, I wish they had the courage to not rely on a lot of the trappings people have come to expect from Souls games to complete their package.

6: Death Stranding

God I wish I was the babyhttps://t.co/l3ZVZ9Qk8z pic.twitter.com/sp2Z3IJfEh

— RMT (@horngal) November 22, 2019

Speaking of games I wish weren’t held back by something hey when the hell is Kojima going to let himself have a proper invested editor again? I’m of the mind that when it comes to designing and executing on unique game mechanics Kojima is almost second to none. The man has an incredible way of nailing not only a consistent atmosphere that keeps you engrossed but incredibly wacky and imaginative things to do that no one else would even dream of trying. It’s just a shame he has to hold himself back with his weird hyper specific tastes and mediocre script writing! Why!

MGS V, while being one of my favorite Metal Gear games, already painted a troubling picture for what Kojima considered to be “a good story,” and Death Stranding pretty much followed its exact blueprint. While I loved the core gameplay loop of Death Stranding, the social narrative of creating easier ways for others to play the game alongside you, and the overwhelming and oppressive atmosphere the world cultivates, the core narrative was kind of just a bummer. More than anything it made me feel disappointed in the game as a whole, a cohesive whole brought down by some of the worst D grade TV writing has to offer. 

That said though the gameplay was truly incredible stuff that one would never have expected from a major AAA release. Walking is a big deal that actually matters, combat is a tertiary system you want to mostly avoid, and you spend most of the game building roads and other random structures out in the middle of the wilderness so that you get “likes” which don’t actually do anything! It’s great! When people call Kojima a visionary it’s because of stuff like this, these are really great, unique, and well implemented ideas that make Death Stranding a game like no other. I just hope that for Kojima’s next project he can maybe get someone else to proof his work, that way we can get a whole lot less of Die-Hardman telling us how to recharge a motorcycle’s battery over and over, and more of Die-Hardman telling us how stacking pizza correctly is real important shit.

5: Fire Emblem: Three Houses

There’s not much I can say other than I love Fire Emblem so of course this is here, here are some miscellaneous thoughts. 

• Some of this game’s writing sucks ass but almost all of the character writing is top notch stuff. It relies heavily on tropes, but the way that each member of your house plays off each other means you’re gonna have a hard time not falling in love with all of your rowdy students/soldiers/killing machine. 
• It’s not Fire Emblem Fates: The Incest Olympics! 
• Edelgard is my wife.
  

  4: Disco Elysium

Man we never get any fuckin’ real RPGs anymore! Ever since Mass Effect and the Bioware format in general took to the scene we’ve had to sit by and watch as voiced protagonists and bombastic set pieces limited what could happen in experiences meant to be molded out of various options. While there’s been plenty of stuff going on in the CRPG scene between hits like Pillars of Eternity and Divinity: Original Sin, the combat in those games has always been a huge hill I could never overcome due to various issues and personal sentiments. Thankfully Disco Elysium came, kicked ass as a completely original Role Playing Game, and didn’t make me do a million clickings or strategizings to experience what it had to offer.

I feel like everyone’s said what makes Disco Elysium good by now, but I’m just gonna reiterate that, it’s very good. Kim is one of the best partners in video games, and gradually seeing what kind of person he is over the course of your interactions humanizes him in a way that most writers could only dream. The character building is incredibly unique with a huge slew of unique personality options that most games would never consider “something you spec into.” I don’t want to spoil anymore of this game than what you might’ve seen online but if you love to read and enjoy leftist politics I cannot recommend Disco Elysium enough.

3: Control 

Control Rules https://t.co/eNF4P0fQXO pic.twitter.com/vNhOOyqRcb

— RMT (@horngal) September 1, 2019

I am the hardcore Alan Wake head. I think at Video Game Choo Choo, more than any other website, you will find a lot of Alan Wake heads. With good reason too! Remedy has this incredible style and direction that they put into all of their games that few can even dream of matching. Wearing their influences on their sleeves, Remedy has the courage to do what no one else in the business is even trying to do: Incorporate both musical sequences, and Full Motion Video to full effect in a 2019 big budget title. 

Seeing an SCP game brought to life outside of the clunky vaporware that is Containment Breach is the best shit ever, and having it all be delivered in a similar format to the best television show of all time, Twin Peaks: The Return? Incomparable stuff. Add in a strong female lead who doesn’t rely on any tropes to be sick as hell, a ton of easter eggs about Alan Wake, and some of the most thought out and realistic environmental design that actually encourages you to read signs to figure out where to go next (!!!) and you have a recipe for yet another Remedy classic.

2: Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers

1: Devil May Cry V

The hype shithttps://t.co/bdm1DWFHsT pic.twitter.com/2VIqxrJRhG

— RMT (@horngal) March 26, 2019

Pullin’ shots – aimin’ dots – Yeah I don’t miss

Branded by Fire – Born in the abyss

Red hot temper – I just can’t resist

All this vengeance inside me

All of these thoughts runnin’ through my head

Arm on fire, veins burnin’ red

Frustration is gettin’ bigger

Bang Bang Bang – Pull my Devil Trigger!

The post Rose’s Top Video Games in The Year of Pandering to Her appeared first on Gamesline.

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The post VGCC Episode 69×4: Is This Real? appeared first on Gamesline.

As always you can support us on our patreon, and follow us on twitter @VGChooChoo, @horngal, and @John_Michonski.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes, and tell a friend about the show! If you want to send in questions send them to podcast@videogamechoochoo.com, via twitter with the hashtag #AskVGCC or into our ask box at videogamechoochoo.tumblr.com/ask

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Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

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The post VGCC Episode 272: Kiryu Teaches Typing appeared first on Gamesline.

1997 — Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Symphony of the Night is a singular release in many ways. It broke with a longstanding tradition of following the Belmont Clan in their quest to stop Dracula from resurrecting every 100 years. Instead following Alucard, Dracula’s creatively named son, who investigates the untimely re-emergence of his father not but 5 years after he was defeated by Richter Belmont. It was the first Castlevania game for the fifth generation of consoles and whilst the series would follow plenty of its contemporaries into disastrous dalliances with the third dimension, Symphony decided instead to remain sprite-based and use the new hardware’s capabilities to improve quality and expand scale. This is, in part, because the studio behind Symphony didn’t believe themselves to be the “main” Castlevania team at the time, and decided to leave the task of a “modern” game the studio they believed held that title.

Armed with relative creative freedom, the Symphony team led by Koji Igarashi set two goals for themselves: to improve the controls and to extend the game’s durability. To this end they looked to The Legend of Zelda for inspiration. That’s right, not Metroid. Despite their core, critical similarity of a large side-scroller map full of secrets and items to both enable progression and power up the player character, Igarashi asserts these came about simply because an exploration game with ample backtracking that happens to be a side-scroller would organically come to resemble Metroid even when not influenced by it.

The many differences between Symphony of the Night and Metroid begin to make ample sense when observed through this lens. Apart from side-scrolling exploration, Symphony of the Night features a rich inventory system with abundant healing items, diverse weapons and armour sets, and status-inducing items which can all be obtained as enemy drops or hidden in the world. It also features an economy system with an accompanying vendor that will buy from you too, specifically gems you can find them around the castle. In a cute little mechanic that can be entirely ignored, Symphony includes a magic system based on MP that fuels diverse spells which you have to input specific commands to execute. Some of these spells have to be purchased whilst others are found throughout the castle. Another use for the MP were the transformations; diverse forms Alucard could adopt for a limited time such as a bat, a wolf or a mist cloud. It even contains a light JRPG-style experience and level up system, with all your characters stats going up slightly at each level.

Most (but not all) of these elements have become staples of the Metroidvania style and constitute Castlevania’s main contributions to it. Metroid, after all, had already extensively expounded on the sidescroller open map by 1997. And they can all be found in various Zelda iterations to different extents. However, dear reader, I posit to you, that it is not necessary to remit all the way to Hyrule and outside of Transylvania to see how most of these elements worked their way into this new, radically different take on the series.

As a charismatic young man once explained, the birth of Castlevania was actually that of twins. Both titled Akumajou Dracula in their native Japan, but better known outside of it as Castlevania and Vampire Killer. The clever philosopher also details the difference in their nature and development team: “Vampire Killer was headed by Akihito Nagata, […] and is more of an open ended platformer with some puzzle elements. Whereas Hitoshi Akamatsu was responsible for the more aggressive and action-focused NES title.”

I would propose that Symphony of the Night, whatever else I might think of it, was the fruit of the seeds planted all the way back in 1986’s Vampire Killer and that nearly every release in the series since the original represented a spurt of growth in that direction. Making it less an unrelated piece, and more the minuets that would eventually evolve into a full symphony.

This is a relatively comprehensive list, but it is by no means exhaustive. One man can only whip another so many times, after all. Introductions out of the way, let us jump right into ten years of the Belmont clan’s struggle and how they paved the way for Alucard settling his grudges.

1986 — Vampire Killer

Though the harrowingly funny bloke cited above makes a good enough attempt at summing up Castlevania in his video, he scarcely goes into detail about the younger twin. Barely describing it as containing “puzzle elements” and “key hunting” due to time constraints. Despite being just as short and almost as simple as its console counterpart, Vampire Killer features elements that fundamentally change the experience.

The MSX game features not only missable rooms, but missable items, and it requires the player to collect certain objects and keys to progress. This makes backtracking and exploration beyond possible and instead required. The constant and relentless advancing of Castlevania is replaced with a much slower meditative walk through the castle, as you learn the layout of the rooms and hunt for the necessary items. Moreover it allows the player to outright skip certain rooms and battles if they plan their route accordingly; an inconceivable thing in the NES, all about thinking through encounters and deconstructing each engagement. There’s also a complete array of secondary items completely missing from Castlevania. Whilst the sub-weapon selection remains the same in both titles, Vampire Killer also features magical items including crystals, shields, boots, wings, bibles and rings. All these confer the player different abilities and effects, and only a few made the jump to the console such as the rosary and the invisibility potion.

This description already begins to sound familiar to Igarashi’s own design goals for Symphony. Given that backtracking in a side-scroller was his initial conception for it. Other ideas from Symphony such as additional help items apart from the sub-weapon system, and hunting down specific items to progress past a certain point also begin to take shape here. The biggest differences being that Vampire Killer, whilst open, remains heavily linear. And once you’ve solved your way past a certain screen there is no way to go back and nothing of use to you in the earlier levels of the game. As well as the fact that the progression-critical items in this are simply variations on the theme of keys. Meanwhile in Symphony these will often take wildly imaginative shapes such as an item that allows Alucard to fly, enabling the player to traverse through complex tunnel systems full of spikes.

1988 — Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest

The second entry in the series paradoxically represented the closest it ever got to Symphony of the Night’s design before that game proper. Whilst the numerous failures in its execution are infamous by now through a highly exaggerated—but not inaccurate—comedy skit, the concepts behind many of its features are the same as Igarashi’s lauded title.

Simon’s Quest is, unlike any of its siblings, structured more like an RPG than a traditional sidescroller. The player begins in a town and can travel to others by fighting their way through forests and roads full of monsters. On these journeys they will eventually gather the information and equipment necessary to tackle a series of dungeons housing the game’s bosses. Though Symphony doesn’t take the same from them as Simon’s Quest, it is noteworthy that the RPG influences had already begun to seep into the series. Although amusingly this could also be seen as the beginning of the Zelda influences, since it bears similarity to the equally mold-breaking Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

Among its many firsts for the franchise, Simon’s Quest can claim a money system, an upgrade system, equipment switching at will, and particular points in the map that will restore you back to full health at any time. Funnily and fittingly enough this last one is almost carbon copied into Symphony, albeit with a different veneer; whilst Simon is rejuvenated at churches, Alucard only finds respite in coffins. Even grinding is here, though I doubt that is an intended feature in any title its featured in.

Whilst a clumsy implementation of these systems weighed down the game in the eye of many Japanese players, the abysmal English translation proved the anchor around its neck in the international market. Unintuitive in the best of cases, Simon’s Quest became almost impossible to complete without a strategy guide after it was put through the meat grinder that was 80s game translations. This has made its ambitions go unnoticed by the western audience, but its brave attempts at non-linearity and exploration are vastly more effective when the text is made intelligible with various fan-patches. And it comes to show that the Castlevania team was aiming to create sprawling, exploration-based games from the earliest instances of the series.

It is obvious that one of the most important changes that had to be made to the Castlevania formula for Symphony of the Night to work was the level design. In the original Castlevania, and in most titles to follow, the levels were essentially tightly choreographed obstacle courses. They were intended to be understood and traversed one way exclusively to maximise the depth in that experience. This is just not feasible in a Metroidvania.

Simon’s Quest and the game that would follow it, then, represent earlier versions of the two answers that Igarashi’s team arrived at to tackle this issue. Firstly, Simon’s Quest sees a simplification in enemy layouts. They are not as tightly packed or as well synchronised as they were before. Instead they are spaced out more evenly in a way that maintains a threat when travelling the world but doesn’t make every small errand to and fro an ordeal. This is the philosophy that Symphony of the Night adopts for most of its rooms as well: evenly distributed enemies at prudent distances from each other. Rarely will there be a room like the eagle run or the different pairings the knight sees along stages 14 and 15 in Castlevania. Whilst I have my own opinions about what this does to the quality of each encounter, there is no arguing that it is a smart solution to the problem of easy traversal required of such colossal maps.

Simon Belmont’s final adventure on the NES finishes with another signature feature of Symphony of the Night: different endings corresponding to your play. Albeit Simon’s Quest’s (how’s that for S’s?) aren’t based on completion percentage, but on speed. And then there’s the fourth ending where you just live squatting with the old lady in that one village which is, of course, analogous to never finding the inverted castle.

1989 — Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse

After the previous game’s lukewarm reception Castlevania III was scaled back considerably, returning to the linear action-platformer comforts of the original Castlevania. However, even then the sounds of the orchestra’s methodical tuning can be heard.

Its major deviation from the original’s formula comes from nearly every stage in the game having a counterpart, with the player having to pick between two paths forwards. This adds replayability, since it’s impossible to see everything in a single playthrough, but more importantly it leads to hidden scenes and characters. By having enough stages for 2 playthroughs and numerous possible combinations of player characters and stages to go through, it encourages the player to keep revisiting the game to experience its many permutations. Mirroring even Igarashi’s desires to greatly expand the lifespan of a Castlevania title.

Stylistically Castlevania III is the classic game that most resembles SotN, barring its immediate predecessor Rondo of Blood. This much is obvious when one learns that this is the first game to feature Alucard as an ally to Trevor, the Belmont in turn. However, alongside him also come two other playable characters: Sypha Belnades and Grant Danasty. Together these three mark the series’ first experiments with several ideas such as transformations, alternative weapons to the whip, magic spells, and the very concept of multiple playable characters.

Enter then your hot take for today: Castlevania III already displayed the kind of thinking that lead to the inverted castle in Symphony. You see, some of the levels in Dracula’s Curse don’t actually advance the journey itself. Instead proving dead ends and deviations that only serve to introduce other elements, such as the playable characters. The game simply solves this issue by having the player travel through the stages in the opposite direction, and exit the way they entered. With minor alterations to the enemies and the stages, the same assets and locations can become entirely new experiences simply by tackling them backwards. Though, of course, the radical way in which Symphony reused its own locations is both more technically impressive and experientially different.

1991 — Super Castlevania IV

Intellectual honesty dictates that I must acknowledge the antithesis to my thesis. So with a heavy heart I recognize that Super Castlevania IV goes against every other word in this article. Including these ones. And these ones. Not these ones, though.

Super Castlevania IV is a linear action platformer that revisits the events of the original title. It contains virtually no exploration, no divergent paths, no weapons that substitute the whip, no money or experience systems, no extra playable characters, and apart from a few that only concede points, no missable rooms.

Venturing a guess as to why it breaks the pattern I would infer that the design goal of Super Castlevania IV was not to be the next step forwards for the series, but rather a do-over of the original game with all the bells and whistles modern technology would allow. But this is just speculation, and I simply have no way of reconciling this title with the model traced until now. Consider it an anomaly, I suppose.

1993 — Castlevania: Rondo of Blood

This was a Japanese exclusive title for the PC Engine console, which was sold in the west as the TurboGrafx-16. Until being included with its 2.5D PSP remake in 2007 it was only known outside of Japan through a heavily reworked port named Castlevania: Vampire’s Kiss in European territories, and Castlevania: Dracula X in the Americas. X what, exactly? DraculaXSimon? Should we be so lucky as to have DraculaXReader?

Rondo is in multiple ways the culmination of everything that Castlevania had been building up to. It’s an explosive and dynamic action game, with several set-pieces that easily eclipse anything Super Castlevania IV had to show. From fighting the grim reaper aboard a stagecoach to being pursued by a bull demon demolishing everything in its path. Of perhaps greater importance to us is that the manners in which this game paved the way for Symphony are almost too many to count.

Of course you have the main cast, who would go on to become the deuteragonists to Alucard in Symphony. The adorable Maria Renard who grows up to become a dapper young lady and Richter Belmont, who basically joins a Glam Metal band. Each of their movesets would also carry onto the vampire heir. Richter’s “Item Crash” moves as well as the special commands that he and Maria can execute would be transplanted to Alucard both in concept and input method. The former would do so to a T, whilst the latter would be lightly reworked into Alucard’s spell system.

Rondo marked the series’ movement towards the aesthetic it would be most associated with for the coming decade. Ditching the western fantasy aspirations of previous titles and taking a full swig of Japanese animation-inspired designs instead. This paved the way for the preternaturally skilled Ayami Kojima to leave her mark on Castlevania’s visual identity in coming titles. Additionally it featured a slightly stronger focus on narrative, with animated and fully voiced cutscenes appearing throughout. It also began the nomenclature that would become synonymous with the series; the “musical form of X” style that then quickly devolved into the “something of stuff” format.

Perhaps the only way in which Rondo of Blood did not foretell the beginning of the Symphony was in its decidedly more linear approach when compared to titles like Simon’s Quest or Dracula’s Curse.

1994 — Castlevania: The New Generation

Also known as Castlevania: Bloodlines. Look. Castlevania: The New Generation is weird. It’s a spin-off, for starters, plus it seems to take a large inspiration from various action games across the Mega Drive’s catalogue. So Ironically the blood isn’t all of the same stock here.

New Generation doesn’t deviate too greatly from what one would conceive as the “classic Castlevania gameplay”, for the most part. Its biggest attempt at progression is once again the inclusion of different playable characters. The first wielding the traditional whip, and a spear for the second.

Perhaps where New Generation can find the most common ground with Symphony is in its story and world building. It begins to show a desire to move past the Belmont Clan as the stewards of the series. The wielder of the whip in this entry is not a descendant of Trevor, but rather John Morris, the character from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The spear user for his part is Eric Lecarde —who is the second character in a Castlevania game to have a Spanish surname turned more Frankish sounding by translation. From Ricardo to Lecarde. The first one being Sypha, who was originally named Fernandez (hence her Spanish accent in the recent Netflix adaptation).

Eric wouldn’t have much weight in the larger Castlevania lore that would develop following Symphony of the Night’s release, save for being a very annoying child in the fighting game Judgment. But his spear turns out to be fairly significant. Originally translated as the “Alcarde Spear” it was in fact meant to be the “Alucard Spear”. A symbol of Alucard’s turn towards mankind and his allegiance to the Belmonts. Keep in mind, too, that by this game’s release Alucard had only appeared in one game. However, these events would soon take on much greater importance.

As Castlevania progressed in the direction of Symphony, the Belmonts would increasingly take a backseat to an ever-expanding roster of allies and acquaintances and Alucard would approach a more central status in the pantheon than even Simon. It is fitting, then, that the final game preceding Symphony of the Night saw no Belmonts take down the Count and instead had one of its heroes wield a weapon that had its power conferred by Alucard.

1997 — Symphony of the Night: Reprise and Coda

I must confess a dark secret, dear reader: I don’t really care for Symphony of the Night. It’s a game I tried to play roughly 6 times and could only bring myself to finish on the final attempt. However, not even I could deny its incredible influence in the medium or its numerous artistic achievements in its time. The beautiful detail in its multitude of sprites is an achievement to contend with to this day. It comes as no surprise that later entries in the series would reuse much of that sprite work and have it barely stand out amongst newer assets. It has also served as an inspiration for plenty of games close to my heart such as the frenetic Strider (2014) and the Ikaruga-influenced cross-genre experiment Outland.

It is my hope, however, that throughout this article I shed some light on how this uniquely momentous game came to be. How the elements in it that I personally don’t like have its roots in the arcadey Castlevanias that I adore. And how the aspects of it that many see as trailblazing and inspired can often trace their origins to those very same games.

Symphony has often been cited as an example of prudence. The story goes that it was a safe choice to remain two-dimensional and sprite-based rather than attempting the jump to both 3D and polygonal models, but I think it showed a very cunning type of ambition. At some point a difference in scale becomes a difference in kind, and it is here where Symphony of the Night found the impulse to separate itself so much from its forebears. By the overwhelming processing power of the platform it was developed for, it was capable of taking a higher flight on an old design. To transform Vampire Killer’s 6-screen maps into gigantic halls that showed you the entirety of Dracula’s castle. And how it was able to populate it with a bestiary nearing 150 enemies, such that they remain fresh until the final hours.

Creativity rarely exists in a vacuum. Ideas strike less as lightning from the sky and more like a slowly eroding rock rolling down a chasm. I may think that Castlevania kind ill needs a saviour such as Symphony of the Night but it was not by an iconoclast’s hand that it was given flesh. It was called here by humans who wished to pay the original c tribute. A concert 10 years in the making. And whatever else can be said about it, 22 years later we’re all still humming its tune.

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As always you can support us on our patreon, follow us on twitter @VGChooChoo , @solonface, @YourPalNiall, and @John_Michonski.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes, and tell a friend about the show! If you want to send in questions send them to podcast@videogamechoochoo.com, or into our ask box at videogamechoochoo.tumblr.com/ask

You can also join our discord channel at thegamezone.zone !

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

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The post VGCC Episode 252: Real Strange appeared first on Gamesline.

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon will be available on May 24th for just $9.99. You’ll be able to play on Steam, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, 3DS, and Vita, which is a hell of a lot of consoles. The game seems heavily inspired by Castlevania 3, which is a game that owns super hard and tried a lot of different and innovative things given the time of its release. Like Castlevania 3, you’ll be able to swap between multiple characters on the fly, including a swordsman named Zangetsu, Ritual of the Night protagonist Miriam, or some spooky dude in a cloak named Gebel who is basically just the Alucard stand-in. The game looks just like what you’d expect from an alternate universe version of Castlevania 3, which is super good for massaging that nostalgic whip-focused corner of our brains.

If you’re more of a Megaman type of gamer, then Inti Creates also has your back in the form of a new Gunvolt game: Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger IX, which is seemingly based off of a more Megaman X or Zero style of game.

I’ve yet to play any of the many Gunvolt games that are out right now, but after seeing this trailer I am hella excited to try and pick it up whenever it ends up launching on Switch in the next year or so.

Inti Creates got in my good graces with the first game I knew them for, Megaman 9, way back when, but have since not exactly courted me in the best of ways (cough cough Mighty no.9). Regardless, I am still hopeful and excited for both these games, and for the real and proper Bloodstained, when it comes out later this year.

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