Game:

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997)

Duration: 1:48:09

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4

One of the most common complaints leveled towards Symphony of the Night is that it's "too easy." For a series like Castlevania, marked since its very beginnings by its high difficulty, this criticism is particularly cogent. When it came time for me to revisit the series, I decided that I would do for Symphony of the Night what I had done for Harmony of Dissonance: create additional stipulations for myself with the object of increasing the game's difficulty and thereby making it more engaging. I gave myself two such stipulations: that I would not wear any armor, since one of the major reasons for Symphony of the Night's low difficulty is Alucard's tankiness, and that I would go straight to Dracula without doing any unnecessary exploration or fighting any optional bosses.

While the benefits of that first condition are obvious, the second one was one I decided on in order to both decrease the overall time of the run (making it feel more like a classic CV) in general and to decrease the amount of time I spent in the Reverse Castle in particular, since I think the game gets a lot less fun when you have to flap-flap-flap around everywhere. So that means no Beelzebub and no Galamoth - Sorry! - but the pacing in general is a lot better.

Overall, I still think Symphony of the Night is a great game no matter how you play it, but I find that minimizing the Reverse Castle part of the run does make it more fun.

Done on emulator, Duckstation.

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