Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

• 1. Introduction

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  Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is a 1997 action role-playing game made by Konami for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn. Its most talked-about moment is a trick of architecture. Deep into the adventure, the entire castle turns upside down. Edge placed the game 35th on its list of The 100 Best Games To Play Today. Its verdict on the flip was this: "When you get to that moment when the castle turns on its head, you see that it's a work of genius." The castle belongs to Count Dracula, but the hero is Dracula's own son. How does a series built on whips and straight corridors end up with a game like this? What is the son trying to stop? And why does an entire genre of games carry part of this title in its name?

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• 2. Inside the Castle

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  Alucard, the dhampir son of Dracula, explores a 2-dimensional side-scrolling castle where most of the rooms begin out of reach. Doors open only after he collects items and abilities. These include the power to turn into a bat, a wolf, or mist. A map fills in as he uncovers more of the castle.

  Characters in earlier Castlevania games typically relied on a whip. Alucard can instead find and use a wide variety of weapons, and the game adds an inventory to carry them.

  Role-playing rules sit underneath the action. Alucard's hit points set how much damage he can take before dying, while his magic points govern how often he can cast a magical attack. Hearts dropped by candles and enemies fuel sub-weapons, just as in earlier games. Four more attributes shape his fighting. Strength is the power of his physical attack, and constitution is his resilience against monster damage. Intelligence powers magical attacks and sub-weapons. Luck decides how often enemies drop items and how often he lands a critical hit.

  Defeating monsters earns experience points, and each level-up raises his attributes. Life Vessels and Heart Vessels hidden around the castle permanently increase his maximum hit points and hearts. He can cast eight different spells, each entered as a directional combination that costs a varying amount of magic points. Later he gains familiars, which fight beside him and help him explore.

  The main objective is to defeat Shaft, an entity controlling Richter Belmont, the self-proclaimed lord of the castle and hero of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood. The player must acquire a particular item and use it during the fight with Richter to free him. Success reveals the second half of the game, the Inverted Castle, an upside-down copy of the first with new enemies and bosses. There Alucard must find five specific bosses and collect five pieces of Dracula, a nod to Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. That hunt leads to a final battle with a newly awakened Dracula.

  Finishing the game opens alternative modes. Entering Richter Belmont's name as the username lets the player take control of Richter, who fights with a whip and various sub-weapons.

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• 3. A Son's Burden

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  Symphony of the Night begins inside the ending of the previous game, Rondo of Blood, where Richter Belmont confronts and defeats Count Dracula. In 1796, four years later, Richter goes missing. Dracula's castle reappears a year after that.

  Alucard arrives intending to destroy it. Inside he meets Maria Renard, who once fought beside Richter and is searching for him. Richter himself claims to be the new lord of the castle. Maria is convinced someone else controls him, so she begs Alucard not to hurt him. She also hands over the Holy Glasses, which let him see past illusions.

  In the castle's keep, Alucard learns that Richter plans to resurrect Dracula so the two can fight for eternity. During their duel Alucard breaks the spell. Then Dracula's servant Shaft appears and warns that Dracula will still return soon.

  Shaft, it turns out, had a plan to end the threat of the Belmont clan. He would control one Belmont and force the family to fight itself. Alucard defeats him and then faces his father. Dracula vows to bring an end to humankind because Alucard's mother Lisa was executed as a witch.

  Alucard refuses to join the revenge. He tells Dracula that he has been thwarted so many times because he lost the ability to love after Lisa's death. Her final words, Alucard says, were of eternal love for Dracula and a plea not to hate humanity, or at least not to harm it. Before he dies, Dracula asks Lisa for forgiveness and bids his son farewell.

  Alucard escapes the collapsing castle and rejoins Maria and Richter. Maria is relieved. Richter blames himself for the fight between father and son. Alucard answers with a line attributed to Edmund Burke: "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Because of his cursed bloodline, he resolves to disappear from the world.

  The final scene depends on how much of the castle the player has explored. Maria either chases Alucard in hope of changing his mind or resigns herself to his fate and leaves with Richter.

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• 4. The Bargain Bin Problem

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  In 1994, Konami began work on a Castlevania game for the 32X, later known as Castlevania: The Bloodletting. The team built a playable prototype. Then Konami chose to refocus on the PlayStation, and the 32X game was cancelled. The ideas changed shape and became Symphony of the Night.

  Toru Hagihara directed and produced the game, having directed the previous entry, Rondo of Blood. Koji Igarashi had creative influence and worked on the story and the programming. Part way through production, Hagihara was promoted to head of the division. He asked Igarashi to finish the game as assistant director. Igarashi, a noted fan of 2D games, was instrumental in refining the controls.

  The push for a radical change came from a sight in Japanese video game stores. Dozens of Castlevania games sat in bargain bins. Linear Castlevania games offered little reason to replay them after the credits. Igarashi also felt that regular action games were too short, and he wanted one that "could be enjoyed for a long time." He later described the project as starting out as "something of a side story for the series, we were able to break a lot of Castlevania conventions and introduce a lot of new elements that we still use today."

  The team dropped stage-by-stage progression for an open castle that the player could explore freely. Igarashi looked to Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda series, which stretches its playtime through exploration and backtracking. Making it a side-scroller brought the design close to Metroid, and Super Metroid directly influenced the game. From Zelda came the idea of keeping most of the castle out of reach, with items and abilities gradually opening it up. The aim was to reward exploration while keeping the hack-and-slash action of earlier games.

  The team also replaced the whip-wielding hero with Alucard. They worried that the whip attack took up too much of the screen. They also wanted to give players more distinctive moves, such as transformations.

  Role-playing mechanics came from another judgment of Igarashi's: earlier Castlevania games were too challenging for average players. A leveling system with experience points rewarded players with better attack and defense statistics as they beat enemies. Combined with a variety of items, armors, weapons and spells, it made exploration less difficult for unskilled players.

  To sell the idea to Konami, Igarashi pointed to the critical reaction to Simon's Quest, an earlier entry that focused more on exploration than action.

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• 5. Look and Sound

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  Ayami Kojima made her video game debut on Symphony of the Night as a character designer. She conceptualized both the main and supporting cast. Her designs are heavily influenced by bishōnen-style art.

  The game is presented mainly with 2D sprites animated over scrolling backgrounds. The PlayStation had no hardware for scrolling, so the developers drew the backgrounds with the same methods used to display character sprites. The console's 3D capabilities appear only occasionally.

  Another group at Konami created the opening and ending cinematics. Igarashi and his team were disappointed in them, since the sequences featured flat models lacking textures.

  Michiru Yamane composed the music. Her soundtrack draws on classical, techno, gothic rock, new-age and jazz, along with subgenres of metal, specifically elements of thrash metal.

  A vocal ending theme, "I Am the Wind", plays over the credits. Rika Muranaka and Tony Haynes wrote it, and Cynthia Harrell performed it. Licensing and new versions would later replace the song more than once.

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• 6. Ports and Returns

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  Japanese players received the game on the 20th of March 1997, with North America following on the 3rd of October 1997 and Europe in November 1997. The Japanese release was packaged with an art book. It held a small manga based on the game, plus a soundtrack compiled from most of the earlier Castlevania games.

  Jeremy Blaustein handled localization for North America and Europe, although he was not present for the voice recording. He added the line "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets", taken from the works of French novelist André Malraux. Other localization changes included AI improvements, a sound test, and a fix for a game-crashing bug found in the Japanese release.

  In 1998, Konami Computer Entertainment Nagoya ported the game to the Sega Saturn in Japan. Maria Renard became both a fully playable character and a boss fight, and Richter was available from the start. Alucard gained a "third hand", but only for stat-altering items such as food and potions, not weapons. Exclusive items included the Godspeed Boots, which let him run like Richter. Two new areas, the Cursed Prison and the Underground Garden, added new bosses. The port also contained remixes of songs from earlier Castlevania games.

  The Saturn version paid for those extras. Loading was more frequent and took longer than on other versions. The Saturn had limited hardware transparency, so effects like the mists and the waterfall became dithering. Partial translucency survived in a few places, such as Saturn-exclusive enemies and one of the final boss fights. The graphics were stretched to fill the screen instead of using the console's higher resolution, which distorted some sprites. Igarashi said the quality was lower because a different team handled a simple port that was not programmed for the Saturn's 2D strengths. He expressed disappointment overall. By the time the Saturn version appeared in Japan, Konami had already confirmed it would not be released in the United States.

  A port for the Game.com was planned but cancelled during development. An unfinished prototype was found and released onto the internet in 2022.

  In 2006, Konami announced that the PlayStation version would come to the Xbox 360 through Xbox Live Arcade. Backbone Entertainment handled the port. It became the first Xbox Live Arcade title to exceed the service's 50 MB size limit at the time. Xbox Live Arcade group manager Greg Canessa said an exception was made to "ensure that the gameplay experience is the best it can be." The release arrived on the 21st of March 2007, with leaderboards that track progress through the castle and 12 achievements worth 200 points. To save space, the North American and European versions dropped all full motion video sequences. Those have since returned to the Japanese version, which is about 25 megabytes larger. A later patch swapped "I Am the Wind" for "Admiration Towards the Clan", the closing song of Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, for licensing reasons. The patch also fixed a distorted background image in one ending. In 2009, the game appeared with Super Contra and Frogger on the Konami Classics Vol. 1 compilation for Xbox 360.

  The game became a "PSone Classics" title on the PlayStation Network store. That happened on the 19th of July 2007 in North America, the 16th of December 2010 in Japan, and the 12th of December 2012 in Europe. It runs on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable and PlayStation Vita.

  Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles for the PlayStation Portable included a port as unlockable bonus material. It came out in North America on the 23rd of October 2007, in Japan on the 8th of November 2007, and in Europe on the 18th of February 2008. Outside Japan, it has a new English script and newly recorded voice acting, with the option of the original Japanese voices. Maria Renard is playable and a boss, with a new moveset modeled on her abilities in Rondo of Blood. "Mournful Serenade", a new piece by Michiru Yamane, replaced "I Am the Wind" as the closing theme. An English-recorded version of the song "Nocturne" returned along with several familiars, both removed from earlier international releases.

  In 2010, Castlevania Puzzle: Encore of the Night, a puzzle game based on Symphony of the Night, was released for iOS. The Dracula X Chronicles versions of Symphony of the Night and Rondo of Blood reached the PlayStation 4 on the 26th of October 2018 in the Castlevania Requiem compilation. Android and iOS ports, based on the Dracula X Chronicles version, followed on the 4th of March 2020.

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• 7. Critics and Cult

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  In the United States, Symphony of the Night was treated as a long shot. It received relatively little advertising and limited funding for its North American production. Its commercial performance began as mediocre, in the United States most of all. Japan gave it a second push with a "PlayStation the Best" re-release on the 19th of March 1998, and North America followed with a "Greatest Hits" edition in 1998.

  Critics, however, were enthusiastic from the start. They praised the massive world, free to explore and packed with secrets. They also liked that role-playing elements joined the series without weakening its basic gameplay. Several noted the cleverly designed enemies and the many plot twists. GameSpot called it "easily one of the best games ever released." Computer and Video Games said it felt like "the freshest thing of the year." Next Generation judged that it had "classic written all over it." GamePro gave it a perfect 5.0 out of 5 in graphics, sound, control and fun factor.

  Many reviewers expected 2D to look outdated beside 3D games. Instead, they praised the smooth animation, impressive effects and atmosphere. John Ricciardi of Electronic Gaming Monthly wrote that "everything is animated with an amazing attention to detail." A few dissented. Entertainment Weekly called the visuals dated and flat next to the 3D environments of Nightmare Creatures. IGN found the character animation unremarkable. The music met almost unanimous approval, with IGN calling it sometimes daunting, sometimes rousing and always enhancing the action. A few critics disliked the voice acting, while GameSpot praised it.

  Awards followed. Electronic Gaming Monthly named it "PlayStation Game of the Year" and "Side-Scrolling Game of the Year". It was runner-up for "Best Music", behind PaRappa the Rapper, and for "Game of the Year", behind GoldenEye 007. The magazine also gave it "Best Sequel" in its annual Buyer's Guide. PSM named it "Game of the Year" in its top ten games of 1997. The AIAS nominated it for "Console Game of the Year" and "Console Adventure Game of the Year" at the first Interactive Achievement Awards.

  Word-of-mouth did the rest. The PlayStation and Saturn versions sold 225,862 units in Japan, and the PlayStation version sold 477,304 in the United States. Together that is over 700,000 units. A cult following grew, and copies of the original PlayStation release are now collector's items.

  The praise has lasted. Electronic Gaming Monthly ranked it 12th among console games in the year of release and later put it 4th on its list of the 100 greatest games, the highest PlayStation game there. IGN placed it 16th on its "Top 100 Games of All Time". Game Informer ranked it 24th in its "Top 200 Video Games Ever", six places down from its 2001 ranking. GameZone called it the best Castlevania ever made. GamesRadar named it the second-best PlayStation game of all time, behind Metal Gear Solid. GamePro listed the discovery of the inverted castle as the 26th-greatest moment in gaming.

  The game also proved that 2D remained popular during the 32-bit era, when 3D was advancing rapidly. Press comparisons to Metroid are constant, and Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night are seen as pioneers of a style of game. That shared ancestry gave the genre its name, Metroidvania, blending Metroid and Castlevania. Several later mainline Castlevania games adopted the exploration model that Igarashi's team introduced.

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