Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Its very slow paced and vanilla

Aria/Dawn, OoE are all better. even PoR

Yes it is, faggot, because when I look for 2D action RPG I won't fucking find metroidvania or anything of the sort. That being said, metroidvania should be a term reserved only to games resembling SOTN, because stuff like shantae and guacamelee are more metroid than fucking castkevania.

Nah, that's retarded, because "metroidvania" only describes castlevania games with a structure similar to SotN, yet retards heard this term and inferred the idea that it refers to every single game that tries to copy metroid. It's not a genre, so eat shit.

"metroidvanias" always seem to lean more towards the metroid side of things which pisses me the fuck off
I want items and RPG elements damn it

I enjoyed it but it didn't hit all the spots like SotN did.

I guess Doomlike it's not a genre either then, faggot.

That's the problem.

I loved and played the shit out of SotN when I was younger but every time I try and play it again I get to the doppelganger fight, beat it, save, quit, swear I'll pick it up again tomorrow, and then never do.

...

I just want it to be spook themed and for it to back way off the bishie aesthetic. Ans I don't want to spend the entire game stuck in one fucking castle.

and then 20 minutes later

knuckledragger IQ, I tell ya
off-topic

How does it run on Vita?

Nice revisionism, faggot. Everyone knows that "Metroidvania" as a term originated with the release of SotN, and Simon's Quest was universally shat on for being a clusterfuck that nobody wanted to play. Go ahead, continue shoving your head up your ass, though, you're bound to strike gold sooner or later.

They use to refer to autos as horseless carriages and trains were literally called the iron horse. That isn't a very good analogy.

>beat SotN on __Xbox___
>I am the Wind DOESN'T play

The point was to illustrate that just because something possesses features that are similar to the features of something that came before it, doesn't mean that it was directly built upon the previous object's legacy. Also, nobody seriously referred to trains and vehicles as horse-like in an attempt to categorize them as some new type of animal; it was more like a nickname than a categorical description.

basically castlevania series: sotn + gba castlevanias + ds castlevanias and everything else you can ignore because no rpg mechanics makes it boring as shit
Is that right? yes it is

How does it make you feel that the most profitable entry in the series was Lords of Shadow?

Lords of Shadow was… pretty.

What are some good Classicvania clones?

Didn't that release right around the time that normalfags flooded the hobby but before they had time to become disillusioned.

Odallus

kill yourself, you shitposting redditor

already been filtered, mongoloid. better luck in the next thread you go and shit up

Replaying after every other new Castlevania and metroidvanias galore, I found it pretty lacking in comparison. The music and art are still amazing, but the amount of loading screens and long corridors before you have a chance of going faster than on foot is really fucking jarring at times. When you get the Moon boots though, it's a really tight feel, one of the best abilities in metroidvanias by far, it just feels so good and looks great.

Normalfags have always been in the gaming scene.

just remembered Insanity's Blade, as well. it borders on Castlevania meets Altered Beast.

what does in its place? Nothing?

No, they have a new song.

And that's how you can spot a kid who never played Castlevania 2

Woah dude you really showed me
Now everyone in this chinese darkweb forum thinks you're so cool for having played the worst game in a series

Great job man, so proud of you

Pick one kiddo

...

By far the worst in the originals

Why did you reply. You had one job

I'm sorry

Some memes are only dreams my friend

Nigga I'm sorry you're mad people dislike your favorite game but this ain't on me

I played through it at release. It was just wonky and bad. I don't remember it being any harder or anyone complaining about difficulty. The town thing was not a good change to the formula.

I played through it at release too. I liked it even better than CV1.

lol it's not even in my top 10

Hello, slow 80's child.

ok, now BACK AT THE TOPIC, what you guys like to use other than crissaegrim?
I like to use moon rod to farm xp from gold knights, Chakram, heaven and rune sword because you can keep spawning if you have one on each hand. For the fun i like to use sword of dawn and keep summoning skeletons and watch them fight.

Sup,

reddit

friend.

Then stop being a faggot holy christ

Play Richter mode you whiny little bitch.

...

are

you

experiencing

vexation

my

friend

?

Nah. CV2 is good. Where's your god now?

>Faggot getting this salty over formatting your paragraphs

God, how petty and pathetic.
How do you know so much about Reddit, anyways?

Go back to cuckchan/cuckkit where you belong, soyboy.

Castlevania II is shit.

The entire game is about guessing the order in which you traverse a series of straight lines and when to use what items.
Also waiting for the sun to come up so you can buy items with your grind money.

Compare its mansions to the levels of the first game and it's obvious how lacking the game's structure is.

It also has three music tracks for the entire game and three bosses as well.

The N64 games are gold compared to it.

Funny OP, I replayed it a couple weeks ago and remembered just how shitty it was.

And this is how you can spot a kid who never played Castlevania II.

My bare fists, because every weapon in the game makes it even more of a pathetic fucking joke.

Yeah sure whatever you say user.

You're so hardcore. Tell us more about your monumental accomplishments in video games.

Sure fam, I once beat Circle of the Moon skipping all normal enemies and only fighting bosses. Now that was a fun challenge, quite unlike the equivalent feat in Symphony of the Night.

What is with these muh hardcore gaymer posts?

...

Dracula is the toughest because his meteor attack is so random.

I DO NOT recommend hard type.
It encourages grinding and cheesing instead of skillful play.
I beat the game with it, and it was ok, but vanilla is just more balanced and fun experience.

The only half way decent complaint and still you have to fight one of them to progress.
One Empty Castle
Not the game's fault
Welcome to Castlevania and gaming on the NES ingeneral
Not a problem.
Damn right it is.

Not him (obviously), but this is made trivial with the DSS card abuse to do 10:9 (I think) for the invincibility, running past to bosses, then either summoning cockatrice or thunderbird until shit dies. Easy.

It also wouldn't be too difficult to make a romhack that makes it so that either a.) Only enemies give experience, or b.) Only bosses give experience, and then tailoring the stat/xp curve to be based off that.

DSS glitch only works when you have a working combination though. You can only do that on Magician mode, if you're not going to be killing any normal enemies to get their cards.

Shanoa is mai waifu.

This is true. Also

You can only skip Death without DSS tricks, if I remember right. Zombie Dragons open up the path to the waterways.

Are you sure? You break the statues with Adramelech's death, where you're supposed to fight the dragons for the Heavy Ring, then fight Death for the Cleansing.
I'm pretty sure that once the statue is gone, you can skip through the waterways with some frame cheese

I forgot to mention the final boss is an absolute joke. In general the games level design sucks. Instead of specifically designed challenging encounters that you have to use timing and strategic use of items to overcome, there's just shit thrown everywhere.
If you eliminated the flaws of bosses, invisible blocks etc, you could maybe argue it provides a better overall experience than the first game, but the first game is still largely more engaging and interesting to play and uncover.

Nope, yeah you're right. I've skipped both of them a number of times before now that I think of it.

kek

As the other user pointed out, that's a poor analogy. The reason vehicles were compared to horses was because horses were always the main form of transportation. Once they stopped being such mainstream forms, cars were no longer "horseless carriages", just cars.
The point is, you're a faggot, since SOTN is not only established well enough to be it's own genre, but nothing is quite like it except the following games and maybe Valdis Story, and even then.

CV2 is pretty shitty and it isn't anything like SOTN, though.

Did you even play the damn thing? It's a mess, there are only 3 fucking boss battles that are shit and 2 that can be fucking skipped because the third fight is dracula, the rest is one of the worst explorations ever and somehow it looks worse than the original.

Hardly. Sure, hard type corners you, but you can still go through it normally, which is what I did. Honestly, I understand what you mean, but it's a nice change of pace after playing and finishing SOTN for more than 10 fucking times.

What is a man?

Can you repeat the question?

What's the real reason people don't like CotM? Felt like a good mesh of classic Castlevania and the soul system. Sure it was clunky at first, but got pretty fluid later.

A miserably shitty remake released on Netflix.

Actually, I'd say is the contrary, you always see faggots cocksucking CotM and they are either a majority or just really vocal.
The reason I don't like it is because it tries really hard to be a classicvania with metroidvania elements but it runs short at both. People praise it because muh difficulty, but it's hard for all the wrong reasons. The original Castevania was good because the whole thing was made considering the limited character movement. CotM isn't exactly designed around Nathan's shit movement except the first few levels, and as for metroidvania aspects, there's barely variations when it comes to items and weapons, so you don't have a reason to collect things, not to mention that the castle is either empty or just have a shitty HP up at the end of a hallway, so exploration feels unrewarding.
As I said, it fails at both Classicvania and Metroidvania.

Reasonable, but the DSS system was pretty fun. Could do with a redesign in a future game.

Aria had better exploration, since you got weapons and tools and shit, but ultimately was pretty shitty in that regard too.

The only truly good weapon was the Claimh Solais, and it was NG+-tier sorts of OP. Even the ion rifle from boss rush was shit. Elemental weapons were shit. The best soul was the Red Minotaur Up+B, where it could hit the entire screen 3 times per use, and kill Graham and boss rush and Chaos trivially

CotM seems like a love it or hate it game

I always forget about the DSS system because of the random drops. It is fun when you get to know the combinations, but it isn't neatly designed either.
Never said the formula was perfect and this is pretty much one of the worst things in metroidvania, lack of balance when it comes to weapons and items, you get to explore and you get a weapon that is ultimately worse than the one you already have, however, in my case, what I like it the collection, not the practicality of whatever I find. It keeps me motivated because I know I'll find something different, whether is good or not, and having in mind that what I'm going to find might be good keeps me moving on too.
It would be nice if someone finally made a metroidvania where instead of relying on stats even though I like it but I know it's part of the problem it relied entirely on items as you progress, like Terraria but without the attack damage stat, that way, the weapons you collected would matter because it would be a question of practicality instead of raw stats, with different uses too, and maybe drop some element damage so you have to swap constantly depending on the monster.

Pretty much.

Now this will be an interesting one but thoughts on lords of Shadows?

It would have been a lot more enjoyable for me if they didn't take the Castlevania logo and slapped it on the game. I only played the first one, and that was like 4 years ago. I honestly liked it for what it is, a clone of God of War that honestly makes a better work than GoW and with a really cool aesthetic and themes in general. I liked the concept of the fight with Satan, the whole "you're dracula now" and the such. I've been thinking about replaying it in order to play all the other sequels, but I won't be doing that for a while.

I kinda like some of the ideas and themes in the two games, they are fun GOW clones but shit castlevania games.

I'll take Nathan "shit movement" where he can actually fucking sprint around the castle over Alucard's fucking shit movement any day. Especially in that shitheap of level design the upside-down castle.

So we're all in agreement that Haunted Castle is the best Castlevania game right?

Alucard's movement speed is constant, it's good paced for exploration and, originally, there was supposed to be sprint boots but were implemented in the Saturn version among other scrapped things. As for Nathan's sprint, is retarded, he goes from retard walk to mach 1, whereas Alucard is always in the middle. That's ok for shit like Belmont's mode since you are supposed to have everything unlocked from the beginning, but start as slow as an snail and having to double tap for the entire game is pretty shitty.

Just no. C'mon fam, don't even try to argue this. Maybe they rectified it in the Saturn version, but slow pacing is certainly one of the fundamental flaws of the Saturn original. Super Metroid resolved the problem of timely navigation in open worlds years before Symphony of the Night with its own run feature and somehow that hack Igarashi failed to catch on to it.

Funny how I never hear people bitch about double tapping in Kirby Super Star or fighting games. I wonder if it's just because SotN fans are casual faggots. Do you think they even bother with Richter mode?

I mean seriously now, I'll take double tapping and holding a direction for a smooth sprint over the awkwardness of mashing backdash at all times to get anywhere. What a shit complaint.

No it isn't, particularly because the same pace is present in all the subsequent games and guess what, nobody bitches about it either. Sure, subsequent games also add a late game spell or item that allows you to run fast in order to avoid this problem, but that's mostly because SOTN was a prototype of the current games, and as so it's the most flawed of them all.
In fighting games you don't even explore, retard, and in Kirby Super Star Kirby's movement are silky smooth, even fluffy. Nathan is an stiff piece of shit, and that only makes the game even worst while running. The fact that you can't even change momentum with Nathan mid air is simply terrible, combine that with float time mid-air and running jumps and you have a shitty mechanic. The problem is not the double tapping itself, which is why I mentioned specifically that Belmont's modes do that a lot better, it's how shitty is implemented in CotM.

I'm convinced you're just retarded.

It's certainly got some of the best music in the series!

CASTLEVANIA RANKINGS
Perfect as all hell. Required playing. Unfortunately very short and has the unfortunate first installment oddities (minimalist animation etc).
FIRST POST BEST POST/ 10

Cute experiment. I like some arrangements of the soundtrack. If you like how straightforward and arcadelike the Classicvanias are, you will hate this game. If you like getting lost, you'll love it. You're forced to 1cc it.
SkeleDrac / 10

A strange beast. Could have been a better game were it not for incredibly stupid design choices.
Why won't you let me love you / 10

Worth playing for the OST alone. Sloppy as shit but fun once you get into the 1cc ethic. Not for casuals.
Poopoo walking animation / 10

A fun Mega Man-esque romp. Great except for that stupid quiz question bonus game.
Is that ghost a Klansman? / 10

Spectacular follow up to what made Castlevania 1 great. Alucard is unfortunately a bit underpowered, but still useful as a knockback safety net. Play the Famicom ver. for GOAT sountrack
Press F for Grant / 10

Super Castlevania IV
This game is fucking stuck on easy modo thanks to the multi directional whip while still being designed as though you have the NES whip. Excellent visual presentation, but most don't dig the atmospheric soundtrack.
DUDE MODE 7 LMAO / 10

Castlevania 1 Super Turbo. Presentation is incredible. Soundtracks (and the various sound modules) are an acquired taste, but amazing once you get the ear for them. Not for casuals. Except for Arrange Mode with bishonen redhead Simon.
8 PLAYTHROUGH LOOPS OF PAIN/ 10

Greatest Classicvania OST hands down. surprisingly gory. Best reason to own a Sega Genesis.
Nazi Skellys /10

Aesthetic as fuck. Somehow manages to be more straightforward than Castlevania III. Has some presentation issues IMO. Anime cutscenes are odd, but are likely there thanks to the CD Rom format. Maria is cute but sucks all the challenge away.
C A S T L E W A V E / 10

Soundtrack is adapted as well as it could be to SNES. Has questionable stage design choices. Best Stage 1.
NO MARIA/ 10

Just when you think nothing could surpass Simon's Quest in terms of clumsy design, this comes in. Choppy as fuck. Decent ost. Don't play it.
WTF did I just lose my whip? / 10

Makes amends for how shitty The Adventure was. Weapon selection is region dependent. Amazing Gameboy soundtrack. Sluggish.
Not bad / 10

Sonia is a decent CV waifu, but the level design is just ungodly bland and the stages overstay its welcome. Has the distinction of having the most ear rape Bloody Tears ever.
NONCANON/ 10

An unfortunate misstep with numerous design flaws, but fun with the right mindset. Carrie is best grill.
Motoskellies /10

Singlehandedly responsible for casualizing the franchise. Hauntingly beautiful presentation and soundtrack. Worth a playthrough or two.
Worst second half ever /10

Strangely unbalanced metroidvania in terms of design. Enjoyable nonetheless. DSS system is novel but horridly implemented. Great soundtrack for GBA's pitiful sound capabilites.
Y CAN'T VANIA RUN /10

Soundtrack is an acquired taste (lets be honest, it's cacophonous). A goddamn mess. Why is Juste an Alucard clone?
Albino Belmondo/ 10

Makes up for the mediocrity of the rest of the GBA trilogy. packed with stuff. Great ost.
Bathhouse succubi / 10

Touchscreen is shit. surprisingly good presentation. Unlike Rondo, Anime character designs here are blaaaand.
Eh / 10

Has a lot of Dracula X fanservice for some reason. Not a bad thing. partner switch mechanic always felt odd to me.
JONATHANCHARLOTTEJONATHANCHARLOTTE /10

GOD… DAMN. Brilliant sendoff to the Metroidvania subset of games. Shanoa is sexy as fuck. Surprisingly hard. Undertaker as an elite enemy makes me laugh.
Magic Tramp Stamp /10

This is everything I ever wanted in a modern CV release. Odd bits of flash ish animation here and there. Soundtrack is GOAT.
Laser Grim Reaper / 10

Never played
Never played

Eww nigga

Damn right.
And a lot other castlevanias too, there are always reference about the old games here or there. It's a shame the game isn't that respectable, and although there are plenty of reasons for that, I think PoR is the game that respects it's predecessors the most, taking in account a lot of things about them. I think it could have been even better though, and the game obviously has it's problems, but honestly I think is as good as OoE, if not better in terms of content and how enjoyable it is.
It always felt cheap for me. I can see why people like it, but damn, it's not just bits of flash animation, it feels like the whole thing was made in flash.

Give the PS2 CVs a try. Curse of Darkness is pretty good, only problem is level designs, same with Lament of Innocent. If you can get over "Long Hallways: The game", the innocent devil system is pretty good, same with weapon forging and the different weapons are top notch.

My vampire killer!

Forgot I had an embed and it ate my pics.

I never liked the arranged versions I've heard. They doesn't feel quite right, never pack the punch they should.

I don't think SotN's second half was that bad.

You're right, it wasn't bad. It was terrible and lazy as fuck.

What was so bad in your opinion user.

The game was rushed towards the end and it shows, particularly the shitty music that repeats itself in almost the entire thing. Seriously, they pick the 2 worst tracks to repeat them in the whole upside-down castle. I don't think the concept was bad, it does double the length of the game, even if artificially, it was just badly implemented. There are highlights like the bosses from the original castlevania and all the other bosses being really cool, except Death, or how Olrox's Quarters now have spikes in the floor instead of the ceiling, and that is an interesting concept, but most of the castle simply isn't suited to be upside down.

All the user above said. It's extremely lazy, rushed, repetitive and the only good thing was some of the bosses. If it's an ura-castle, make something of it, make a hellish landscape or something that really shows the true nature of the Castle and Dracula, don't just turn it upside down.

You post like a gigantic faggot

I was actually thinking about this and I would have been a lot more happy with a mirrored castle with a really fucked up scenery, but that would imply actually changing a few things in the background. They tried a similar concept in Harmony of Dissonance, but that came out as an even more lazy attempt.

Pretty sure he does that in all threads.

rofl what, almost all the bosses in the upside-down castle are fucking trash. Death is just about the only boss in the entire area that has mild thought put into its attacks. Most of the bosses in the upside-down castle are little more than damage sponges with stupid attacks that are trivial to avoid. Even Galamoth, while difficult, is basically two repeating attacks with hardly any thought put into them. Of course most of this applies to bosses in the normal castle too. Symphony of the Night's bosses in general are total garbage.

I meant that from a design perspective, fag. Death's battle is also really easy and somewhat depressing considering the foreshadowing. Fucking PoT Death is better, even DoS is better. Hell, his sprite during the fight isn't even the same as the one where he appears in the beginning.

I guess this a fair point.

Yeah most of the bosses lack context and power to them in SotN. The game is good but goddamn a lot of disappointing, unmemorable bosses with next to nothing to them.
I remember Olrox, Death, Dracula (and by extension shaft), Galamoth, Beelzebub and the succubus
imo the succubus was probably one of the best bosses in the game in terms of making it a memorable experience. She wasn't very difficult at all though, at least with my set up