Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

System: Playstation
Release Date: 1997
Published By: Konami
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

If I had a Spinal Tap-esque option to make my ratings go to eleven, I would use it here. Symphony of the Night may well be the best game I've ever played, any time, on any hardware.

Everything about the game oozes quality. Okay, almost everything; the translation is weak, though not terrible, and the voice acting is among the worst I've ever encountered. It's bad enough, actually, that it becomes a strength; there's enough entertainment value in the acting that I still laugh every time I hear Alucard say "My mother never said such a thing!", and I've played the game ten thousand times.

Except for that, then, the game is high-quality. The selection of items is so vast and the drop distribution so well worked out that you'll always have new toys to play with every time you play the game. It gives you enough equipment of good enough quality along the main path of the game that you'll never be wanting, but if you want the really special weapons that do really cool things, you need to hunt them down. And there are a lot of them to hunt, too; I sincerely believe that the quantity and quality of the weapons is a major reason the game is so much fun. It also features what is probably the most ballsy single "fake-out" a video game has ever performed; I won't spoil it in case anybody doesn't already know, but suffice to say there's a good chance that you'll think you've finished the game when you're only in fact about 40% done with it. The good side to which is, when you're tooling around trying to fill in the spaces on your map (hey, you have to do something. I mean, you can't just sit around) and you discover that there may be more than meets the eye, that's a remarkably fun discovery.

The game is often referred to as the first of the "Metroid-style" Castlevania games. That is a designation I wholly fail to understand, since the only thing in this game that reminds me of anything to do with Metroid is that I guess there is some similarity in what the map screens look like. Just a passing observation.

Seriously. If you like video games at all and you've never played this, seek it out. It's worth your time, and it's worth the money.

Buy this game from Amazon.com!