10 Things I hate about Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

10.) The way special items are picked up – In this game you gain money, hearts, and special items by whipping objects that are in the room. This can be any thing from a clock to a lamp or even a chair. Since every thing falls from these objects you have no choice but to whip every single one of them. The problem I have is with the secondary weapons and how they follow the same guidelines as items. To pick up a secondary weapon in this game you walk over it. The problem I have with this is that sometimes you have a secondary weapon you want to keep. This automatically throws the secondary weapon you have and picks up the new one. The one you previously had sticks around for a few seconds on the ground and will eventually disappear. Another agitation is that sometimes the throwing of the old weapon will throw it off the screen entirely, leaving you with out the option of picking it back up. It could have easily been resolved by requiring you to crouch down on the new weapon to pick it up.

9.) The map screen – There are an awful lot of areas in this game so it goes with out saying that there is a map in it. The map is very similar to the one found in Super Metroid with one exception: there aren’t labels for the rooms or areas. You never know which room is which or where you are going. It just kind of feels like this huge memory game. For example, you remember that you want to go back to the Library, but you have no idea which blue chunk is the library.

8.) No real direction – This almost goes along with my last complaint. You have no way of knowing where to go next. Resident Evil forced you to go to certain places by locking off rooms with particular keys, Double Dragon had a hand that pointed to the right of the screen, and Metal Gear Solid gave you mission objectives. Symphony of the Night doesn’t do any of these things; instead it is free form and leaves it up to you to figure out what is going on. This leaves you wandering the halls of the castle aimlessly wondering what you are doing to begin with.

7.) Medusa heads – Not only are they in places where they are completely out of place but usually they are in combination with another monster that is far worse. The medusa heads in this game almost always show up in places where there are mechanical gears that you have to ride to the top or the bottom of the room. The gold ones don’t do damage, instead they turn you to stone. The blue ones do a minimal amount of damage but knock you half way across the screen as if you were hit by a line backer. If this doesn’t frustrate you enough then just wait until you figure out that there are also other monsters in the room that fly. This combination=death a lot.

6.) Water – I know it sounds stupid but in most Vampire mythology they have a weakness to Holy Water. Not in Konami’s line of games. Instead Vampires are weak against any kind of water. Whether it’s the dirtiest stank water from the sewers of New York or the pristine water from an untapped river. All water knocks the crap out of your health bar and there’s lots of it in the game.

5.) Useless rooms – I once read an article about video game design and the use of items in rooms. The article focused on first person shooters (FPS) and the use of rooms to provide ammo, equipment, etc. It stated that every room in the game should provide some sort of use to keep things busy. One thing Castlevania has is a plethora of is rooms that don’t do any thing at all. In fact there are rooms that don’t have even one thing in them. Some of them at least have the balls to have a chair you can sit in but some of them have completely nothing. So what’s the point? Well I think I have an explanation to this: the designers programmed armor that works based on the percentage of rooms that are found. There’s also a stat in the game that keeps track of the percentage of the map that you’ve explored. Why they needed to do any of this, I have no clue.

4.) Annoying sound effects – Not only are some of the sound effects out of place but they are also downright ear numbing. Don’t get me wrong, this is actually one of the places this game excels in some parts but killing a flying hand should not sound like some little girl whining. Little girl whining=annoying.

3.) Any room with zombies in it – It’s okay to have zombies in a game, but seriously do they have to infinitely spawn from beneath a marble floor? Yes folks, that’s right, almost any room that has a zombie in it in this game will infinitely spawn them. This means that no matter how many of the undead you kill they will always come back. It’s not that they are very hard but the fact that while I’m running through a room I have to tap right or left instead of holding it down, just to make sure I’m not hit by a zombie. This means I have to watch Alucard repeatedly do that little slide animation over and over as if he’s having some sort of seizure.

2.) The inverted castle – As if creativity wasn’t in enough demand we get what can only be described as a half-ass attempt at making the game longer. I can imagine how the meeting went. Some ass probably said they need to make the game longer than 4 hours long, and ass number 2 said “I know, we’ll throw in an inverted version of the castle with different enemies”. It feels as though we were slighted out of what could have been a whole other castle. How awesome would it have been to discover a whole new area? Way awesome.

1.) The continue screen – I bet I know what you’re thinking (at least if you’ve played the game anyway) you’re thinking “But there wasn’t a continue screen was there?” Of course there wasn’t and that’s why this is the thing I hated most about Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Most developers realize that 95% of the time you are going to be annoyed that you died. That’s why they put in a continue screen so that you don’t have to go through an arduous process every time you die. Konami obviously did not realize this. Every time you die, you get to see a game over screen followed by an awful audio clip that I guess is Dracula saying “Game over” except the way he says it sounds so ghetto that’s it’s more like “Game Ova”. You can’t skip this screen. All you can do is press select so that you don’t have to hear the awful audio clip. After you’re done listening or skipping the audio clip you are returned to the title screen where it says “press start”. After you press start you select what you want to do. Either loading or starting a new game. Most times you’re going to want to continue so you have to do this every time you want to continue. Every single time you die you have to repeat this process. Number 1 thing I hated about Castlevania: Symphony of the night? No continue screen.

Please pay attention to the wording I’ve used here. This is a list of things I hate about this game, not a list of reasons why I hate the game. I don’t hate it; in fact I love the game. I played it for hours on end but there are a ton of things that could have been done way better.