Castlevania started off as a pretty straightforward
series. These were side-scrolling action games where
you whip your way through a handful of distinct levels, filled with Halloween monsters. Sure, the series experimented in exploration,
like with Rondo of Blood’s hidden paths, the level select screen in Belmont’s Revenge,
and the absolutely incoherent Castlevania 2. But, mostly, the series was completely linear. That is, until Koji Igarashi joined the team
to head up a new entry in the franchise. He wanted to try something different, something
that would make Castlevania games last a bit longer for their players. And so, inspired by The Legend of Zelda - not
Metroid, as one might assume - Konami made a Castlevania game that took place in a single,
giant level: a twisty, maze-like, interconnected castle. A game where you find new powers to unlock
new paths, hunt down secret rooms to discover hidden loot, and grow in power over the course
of the game. Which all makes 1997’s Castlevania: Symphony
of the Night a perfect game to look at in my video series about open-ended level design:
Boss Keys. At the start of this game, though, you perhaps
wouldn’t guess that Symphony of the Night is a non-linear experience. We begin with a playable flashback: the ending
of Rondo of Blood, redone for the PS1. The game wants to start on an action packed
high note - this fight between Richter and Dracula. And this is a trope that lots of games will
go on to use, like this gory 300 style battle at the very beginning of Assassin’s Creed
Odyssey. And then we get to take control of our actual
character: Alucard. And again, the game wants to start on a high
so Alucard begins with some of the best weapons in the game and can murder pretty much everything
with one hit. Until, Death shows up and steals your stuff. This is another well worn trope: the abilitease,
where we get to play with all the best stuff in the game before it’s cruelly taken away
and we’re left weak and underpowered. This lets the game preview just how complex
the game will eventually get, and also gives players the motivation to keep playing so
they can get all of that power back. But even after this, Symphony still plays
out more like a classic Castlevania game. The first part of the adventure is this linear
progression through a bunch of rooms. There’s a few branching paths and dead ends
to note - like this room that’s locked by a magic door - but mostly you’re just making
straightforward progress. Where Super Metroid immediately constrains
you in a small area, and quickly asks you to backtrack to show you that the path forward
isn’t necessarily in front of you, Castlevania gives you a good hour or so of just marching
onwards. Eventually, you’ll get to the outer castle
wall and if you open up your map, you’ll see that you have walked the entire width
of the castle. In this opening trek, the game has shown you
just how big the world is going to be: except, you’ve only explored on one axis. This is also a good navigational trick: in
real life, we orientate ourselves by having a big central hub that forks off into different
sub areas. Think of high streets that spill off into
side roads, and shopping malls that have central walkways that connect up to shops. In Symphony of the Night, almost all of its
main sections connect up to a central pathway that runs horizontally through the castle:
the central pathway that you just walked through at the beginning of the game. Anyway. This is where we finally hit a dead end: the
path here keeps falling apart underneath our feet and we simply can’t move on with our
current abilities. If we explore in here, though, we’ll find
the librarian turned shopkeeper. And his cheapest two items will prove useful:
the Jewel of Open, which takes care of magic blue doors. And a castle map. At this point, Symphony of the Night is finally
a Metroidvania. We’ve got a new power, but we’ll need
to go back to go forward. Handily, the unfinished map we just bought shows
us two potential areas to explore: this staircase on the left, and this area down below. So we can either walk back down here, or use
the fast travel room to zip back here, and explore the staircase. However, only one route is correct: we really
should go to the royal chapel over on the left. But you can also end up going completely the
wrong way and find yourself deep down below the castle. This is something that happens a few times
in Symphony of the Night: it lets you got the wrong way and explore areas way before
you’re supposed to. And that has both advantages and disadvantages. It’s cool because it lets you explore the
castle on your own terms: you’re not just locked into doing exactly what the designers need
you to do next, but you’re wandering around, and organically stumbling upon interesting
places and spooky bosses. It also lets you add to your mental map, and
the in-game map, which will prove useful later. And most importantly, while this lower area
is a dead end in terms of progression, it’s not entirely a waste. There are items to find that boost your health
and your ammo. There’s an unlockable relic that lets you
breath underwater. And all sorts of items and swords and shields
that you might fancy using. But this diversion can be a touch confusing,
and leave players wondering if they’re just missing something or should cut their losses
and explore somewhere else. Anyway, the actual correct path is the royal
chapel. And this area really shows how Symphony is
filled with distinct, memorable locations. This massive staircase and these giant bell
towers and this epic stain-glassed room are all very eye-catching. And it’s completely different to every other
place on the map. This really helps with your mental organisation
of the castle’s layout, and the world design is similar to Dark Souls in its variety. At the top of the Royal Chapel is the Leap
Stone, which lets you double jump. And the game opens up a fair bit, again. Here’s how much of the castle we could explore
a second ago, and here’s how much we can explore now we have the leap stone. Again, though, the game gives us a bunch of
places we can explore that actually end up being dead ends. We can pop into the catacombs, but we can’t
go on without the echo of bat power-up. We can now jump across these areas in the
castle keep, but we can’t reach Dracula’s room. And we can explore more of the long library,
but we’re stymied by this grate. This time, however, it’s way more painful
because the actual path forward is really tricky to find. It’s actually here: in this clock-room at
the centre of the castle. Only, the path only opens up once every other
minute, or something, so you could completely miss that there even is a path when you first
visit the room. I certainly did. And there’s no strong association between
being able to jump higher, and this clock room. It’s not like Super Metroid where you know
you want to jump up to this spooky face, but you just can’t leap high enough yet. Okay, so if you actually do find your way
up here you’ll get to the coliseum and can unlock the mist power-up. Unlike before, there’s only two places where
you can use it: one takes you into a single room with a couple items. The other immediately gives us the next power-up:
the form of bat. If you forgot about those areas, though, or
hadn’t seen them before now, it’s going to be hard to find them. Symphony of the Night has a large world map
and it opens up quickly. It’s kind of like Metroid 1, in that after
only getting a couple critical abilities, the player is presented with so many places
to check, in order to find the path forward. At this point of the game, I personally found
myself just sort of poking at the unexplored bits of the map. You know, I’d spot doors that I haven’t
been through yet and rooms that I haven’t checked off, and just went over there to see
if I could make a little extra progress. I also started to notice how a lot of the
rooms are quite boring to backtrack through. The wolf power-up, and its upgrades, certainly
help. And the fast travel points that are dotted
around the map speed things up, also. Once you get the bat power-up, the game opens
up even more. This is only the fourth critical power-up,
but now you can explore pretty much the entire castle and go off and explore loads of new
routes. In fact, while you can get five relics at
the beginning of the game, three after getting the Jewel of Open, two after getting the Leap
Stone, and one after getting the Mist form, you can now go get a whopping 10 different
Relics with the Bat, littered all over the castle. It might have been nice to spread them out
a bit more across the game. One other place we can go with the bat is
to Dracula’s keep. And fight Richter. And end the game. Wait, what? Oh yes! The classic “bad ending” fake out! Hopefully at this point you’ll realise that
the ending was a bit anticlimactic. And that there’s loads more of the castle
to explore. And Richter probably isn’t a bad guy. And so you should probably load up your save
game and see what else you can find. I really like this idea. It makes the game feel mysterious and surprising. And it encourages some proper exploration
off the beaten track. Like, maybe you’ll fly down here and find
this gold ring. It’s relatively easy to find, and it’s
got an interesting item description. “Wear…. Clock”. Hm... A clue in an item’s description? That certainly reminds me of something… The other ring is a lot harder to find. You need to go here and get the echo of bat. Then go down into the catacombs and fly through
this dark corridor. This gives you the spike breaker so you can
go all the way back here, and get the silver ring. Put the two item descriptions together and
they say “Wear in Clock Tower”. So you do just that, a new area opens up,
and Maria gives you a special item that lets you see that Richter is being controlled by
Shaft. Kill him, and something absolutely bonkers
happens. The game isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot. Because there’s an entirely new castle to
explore. Well, it’s just like the old one, only it’s
now upside down and filled with harder enemies. Personally, I found this section to be totally
lame. Traversal is really annoying unless you just
go everywhere in bat form. There’s no longer any real surprises about
what rooms will be around the next corner. And pacing wise, I just kind of wanted the
whole thing to be done by this point. It felt like this annoying extra epilogue
that I didn’t want to bother with. What I do like, however, is that the only
mission in this part of the game is to hunt down five items: the ring, eye, tooth, rib,
and heart of Vlad. And you can do them in any order! Where the beginning part of the game is strictly
linear - get the Jewel, then the Leap Stone, then the Mist, then the Bat - the latter half
is more open. Now you're familiar with the game you can get the gold and silver rings in either
order, and can get the five pieces of vlad in any order you like. This is what I wanted in Super Metroid, where
I said it would be cool to let you fight the last three bosses in any order. And it’s similar to the four Lord Souls
at the end of Dark Souls. If you get all of those pieces of Vlad you can
finally fight the actual final boss of the game, and see the proper ending. So, Symphony of the Night is a thrilling game. Its gothic castle spills out in all directions,
with distinct areas, gruesome bosses, and tonnes of tiny surprises. But I think it makes a pretty fundamental
mistake: it allows a lot of exploration, by opening up the castle very quickly as you
unlock key abilities. And I admire that - I like how it’s so open. But because the first half of the game sticks
to a very linear structure, it means that you can be wandering around a huge castle for
ages, just finding loads of dead ends while you’re looking for the one single location you can go to next to make any meaningful progress. Of course, there’s lots of other things
you can find in those “dead ends”, like relics and items and health potions. But a lot of that stuff is pretty pointless
because the game is so easy, and because most of the swords, shields, and armour will be
actual trash in comparison to the stuff you’re already carrying. So ultimately, it’s a game that is at once
both really open, and really closed, and that can lead to some frustration. I hope that didn’t come off too harsh. There’s loads to love about Symphony of
the Night. It just makes a few stumbles in its world
design that other games might want to avoid. And games have definitely been taking inspiration. New indie releases like Chasm and Timespinner
are totally influenced by Symphony, and I swear there’s a little of this in Dark Souls,
as well. Plus, the entire Castlevania series pretty
much exclusively shifted towards this style of level design, in games like Aria of Sorrow
and Portrait of Ruin. Players just needed a way to differentiate
these new, open-ended games from the more linear ones of the past. One player suggested, a little snarkily, to
call them Castlevanias… and “Metroidvanias”. And it stuck, giving us a name for all sorts
of games that fit this level layout. And speaking of Metroid, that’s where we’re
going to next, for our first 3D game of this season: the Gamecube’s wonderful Metroid
Prime. See you then.
I think boss keys is a really good series to watch if you need some inspiration or advice (albeit not direct advice) on how to structure a dungeon in games. It’s was also a really smart move on marks part to begin the series on zelda dungeons since there is so much variety and they show off design in 2 different perspectives(2D and 3D). Great series overall!
oh wow I forgot about Boss Keys! So many videos to catch up on!
I love this series. That and Game Developer's Toolkit. Fantastic work.
Honestly I’ve been waiting for Mark to do a video on this game. I tend to see CSotN through rose-colored glasses, so his perspective on some of the game design choices was illuminating for me.
Mark didn't seem so happy about the fact that the player is allowed to go on the wrong place at the wrong time often and get disoriented. In my opinion is a perfectly legitimate choice
It could have been a much better game by combining more enemy types together on the same screen. Like the long hallway that has plants that petrify you. No issue because there's literally no other enemies there.
I feel like The Messenger does the same thing as the first half of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night by taking you on a linear adventure through the world first, and then opening up the world to exploration, but I haven't played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Is the Messenger inspired by it?
Love this series. I know what I'm watching later.