Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PlayStation Review)

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Platform: PlayStation
Released March 20, 1997
Directed by Toru Hagihara
Developed by Konami
Sold Separately on Xbox platforms
Included with Castlevania Requiem: Symphony of the Night & Rondo of Blood for $19.99 on PlayStation 4 & 5
Sorry Switch fans. For now, at least. Steam fans, you’re just hosed, ain’t you?

Dracula: Edgelord of Darkness.

When I announced that I was going to finally knock out the review for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, I was a little surprised by some of the feedback. Nobody argues it’s a bad game. Its status as a hall of famer is beyond dispute. But, there’s certainly some resentment towards it for fundamentally changing what it means to be a Castlevania game. Before Symphony, Castlevania was the cheesy but tough as nails series of games where you knocked out a grab bag of gothic horror and mythological monsters in linear fashion. After Symphony, Castlevania was “Vania” in “Metroidvania.” Some people really don’t like that.

Thank God the combat is so satisfying. Grinding has never been less of a…..some word…. that escapes me at the moment.

A few others felt the game was overrated all along, maybe because the designers were still getting their sea legs with the XP system or the nonlinear, interconnected map. I’m kind of with them on the XP system but the map one I firmly disagree with. I think Symphony’s map is MUCH stronger than the first direct sequel to it, Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. Maybe the settings themselves aren’t always as interesting, but the pacing is god-tier. Well, at least until the whole upside-down castle thing happens, and I’ll get to that. Otherwise, I really have no major complaints. Sh*t, I might have to get to the upside-down castle sooner than I expected in this review. (checks notes) Crap.

I haven’t played this in at least twenty years (probably closer to twenty-five years) and honestly I don’t think I ever got the “real ending” to SOTN. I’m pretty sure I just killed Richter. To my credit, he’s an asshole. Hell, I still wanted to kill him even knowing it would cost me the good ending. I wanted a best ending where I got the satisfaction of killing Dracula AND him.

Okay, so Symphony of the Night is famous for having the entire map be doubled, only the second half of it features a full copy of the entire first map turned upside-down. It sounds like a post-game bonus feature, right? A tongue-in-cheek gag thrown in by the developers to add replay value after the credits roll. Except, no, the post game content is getting to slog through the game with Richter Belmont. The upside-down castle is part of the first playthrough and what you have to do to earn the “true ending” of the game. And when I say “upside-down” I don’t mean the map layout is the same. I mean literally the furniture is on the ceiling.

I really hated this. One area of the game like this would be fine. Silly, but fine. An entire goddamned Metroidvania’s map worth of it was overindulgent. The problem is once the shock value wears off and the gag stops being cute or clever, you still have 99% of the map to fill out and nothing new to see except bosses. The map was clearly optimized for the first time you play it, and the second, topsy-turvy time feels like it barely works at all. It’s a pretty big map to have the same joke play out room after room. See this:

THAT is the nearly-completed upside-down castle map. It’s literally half the real estate of the game (though in terms of raw playtime it should take you much less than half since there’s nothing to trap you and you should have the ability to fully navigate it). The only part that I haven’t filled out yet in that particular map is the section where you fight Dracula. THAT’S INSANE! Again, I have no objection to this idea as a bonus feature. Now, you could argue that getting the “true ending” is a bonus, but I wouldn’t. This is clearly part of the main quest, and it didn’t work for me at all. I thought it was something that should have been killed on the drawing board. I would have preferred a slightly bigger main game map with more set pieces than just the same set-pieces, only flipped.

When I realized that I was fighting all the original Castlevania 1 bosses to collect the Castlevania 2 relics of Dracula, I had a good laugh. Now THAT is a gag that works. “What about Castlevania 3?” Oh, you just straight up kill Dracula’s Curse in a boss fight. Seriously, if they could have gotten away with having you do battle with an NES cart, they would have done that too. By the way, that’s the damn silliest model of “the Creature” in the franchise and I love it.

I don’t know why they overdid the upside-down stuff. Honestly, by the time I reached the point where the second map was unlocked, I was kind of ready for the game to be over anyway. The only highlights in the upside-down castle were the bosses, which could easily be transferred to various spots of the original map. If not for them, the highlights would have stopped entirely and Symphony of the Night might have cratered. I might disagree with the people who think it’s overrated, but I can also see their point with that entire second map. It’s too much. Thankfully, the combat is typical Castlevania satisfying perfection, so it never became outright boring to navigate. If you ever wanted to know how much Castlevania’s combat does the heavy lifting, the second half of Symphony of the Night lets you know.

I actually f*cking died against this boss. Why wasn’t THIS the last boss? It kicked my ass.

My unofficial motto for 2026 has been “set your expectations accordingly” though admittedly that’s pretty f*cking hard to do when you’re talking about one of the most famous and important video games ever. While it does mostly live up to its reputation, Symphony of the Night was never supposed to be THAT game, so it’s nothing short of bonkers that it has the reputation of being one of the best games ever. Released at a time when 2D games were considered quaint, it didn’t get a particularly strong amount of marketing muscle thrown behind it. It wasn’t the “evolution” that Final Fantasy VII or Super Mario 64 were. In a world where 3-D gaming hadn’t happened by 1997, SOTN probably would have been a multi-million seller. Alas.

Much like the game structure, the bosses MOSTLY land. When they do, they’re kind of unforgettable. The Granfaloon (sometimes called Legion) is a giant mass of flesh made up of soulless bodies. It’s disgusting and awesome.

Now, I don’t think the game is perfect even if you ignore that 50% of the game world is kind of redundant. There’s a massive variety of throwing weapons, but I was pretty stingy with them. Except, I wasn’t saving them for later. I just couldn’t be bothered to use them. I finished the game with two iron balls, a boomerang, a flaming boomerang, a javelin, a few throwing stars, and about a thousand other things, including food items and temporary boosts. Why didn’t I use them? Let’s say I wanted to use that high-damage shuriken I picked up. They are fun to use, after all.

“OH COME ON! WE’RE SKELETONS AND HE’S HALF VAMPIRE AND YOU’RE GIVING HIM NINJA STARS NOW TOO? DO YOU JUST HATE BONES, KONAMI?”

Except, I’d have to pause the game, equip it to one of my hands, unpause the game, then throw it once, because that’s all you get. One throw. Enemy dead. Item used. Hand now empty. Did you have fun with it? Good, because now you have to pause the game to equip something else. That’s a hell of a lot of effort and a hell of a lot of downtime for a one-use item, and who can be bothered? And let’s not forget, all that happens in a game that is still using the traditional Castlevania sub-weapon system with all the classics here except the boomerang. In the time I do all the above, I could throw three or four axes and maybe close to the same amount of holy water. They could have fixed this by having you pick up, oh, twenty javelins or ten ninja stars. Something that makes the actual time investment of equipping them worth it.

Actually I spent nearly the entire upside down castle holding onto this cross, which costs 100 hearts to use but was so overpowered that it was basically an instant-win item for (most) bosses. The Grim Reaper has two forms. I one-shotted both with this. Normally I would feel guilty about this, but Patrick Stewart died this week and, seriously, f*ck Death this week. You deserve being one-shotted. I thought we all agreed that Patrick Stewart got to live forever. Not that symbolic live forever sh*t, either. You already pulled that crap with David Bowie.

But seriously, that and the upside-down stuff are my only complaints. I can’t complain about the action. Symphony of the Night has probably the best roster of enemies, well, maybe ever. There’s distinct personalities with even the basic baddies all over the game. Like, yeah, there’s skeletons that shamble back and forth and they’re nice and crunchy and damn satisfying to kill. But then, later in the game, a skeleton shows up and you think it’s more cannon fodder. It looks like cannon fodder. And then you discover it has the ability to do the Care Bear Stare from Hell.

“Nova Skeleton” presumably named as such because it’s a fan of PBS.

Or how about the knight with a trained owl, and if you kill the owl, the knight f*cking mourns the owl and makes you feel like the most cold-hearted sh*t heel who ever went into a centuries-long sleep in order to murder his father. Seriously Dracula, if you want to take over the world, populating your army with guilt trippers might be the way to go. It was so awkward that I was THIS CLOSE to saying “is that knight crying over its pet owl? You know what? F*ck it. If you want to take over the world THAT badly, have at it. Yeesh.”

To my credit, owls are just the abstract concept of murder given corporeal form and anyone in their right mind who saw an owl in Castlevania of all places would kill it on the spot. I didn’t realize that the servants of the embodiment of all evil had, you know, feelings. By the way, if you do it the other way, the owls mourn the knights. Keep it up, Symphony of the Night! You’re only strengthening my resolve!

Symphony of the Night does hold-up better than most all-time legends, too. Short of completely dropping the upside-down stuff in favor of more one-off set pieces, I don’t know what else the game could have possibly done. Maybe more environmental hazards? Maybe more set-pieces? A boss rush mode? The ability to use health refills or stat boosters from the menu? Oh, that’s not realistic? I thought we gave up on realism when we agreed it makes perfect sense for the corporeal form of death to work for Dracula?

The game does a pretty good job of not overly relying on straight-line corridors where you kill one type of enemy, walk forward twenty paces and then kill the same enemy. That’s why, when it happens (and it does a few times) it’s so jarring. EVEN THEN, I’ll give them credit for populating this straight-line corridor with these enemies that ONLY appear in that corridor. If you’re going to have a lazy straight line level design, make the things in that straight line unforgettable.

Originally, I was going to not touch the post-game content. But since I went so hard on the upside-down castle and how it feels like a gag bonus mode, I did go through with playing some of the actual post-game bonus content. After beating the game, you can replay the game with Richter Belmont, and when I did, I played exactly this far:

That’s all I could take.

I normally love Castlevania and think the traditional Castlevania whip is one of the greatest weapons in gaming history, but THIS game was not made for it. It takes maybe a minute to realize that. When you play SOTN this way, there’s no upgrades. Heart-upgrades just fill your hearts. Life upgrades just fill up your life but don’t make your life bar bigger. The only items are the subweapons (though you can do the Rondo of Blood-like item crashes), but there is no armor or equipment to be found. It’s the same nonlinear game, only with traditional linear gameplay mechanics. SOTN is clearly not made to be played this way. It’s not fun. Like, at all.

You can do special moves, including a dragon punch (done with the same inputs as Street Fighter), though I’m not sure it counts as a “special move” since I think you might actually need it to navigate. I found the pacing to be horrible and the progress to be unrewarding. It’s a stiffer, jankier game with Richter. The combat is fine, I guess, but the game is clearly meant to be played with Alucard and all this Richter stuff (and probably Maria in the Saturn build) were afterthoughts. That’s fine, by the way, because the Alucard game is, you know, one of the best games ever.

I *briefly* threw on the Sega Saturn build to test out Maria’s quest but, again, it’s just so obviously a side-dish and not the main course. (shrug) It’s nothing personal, Saturn fans. It’s Alucard’s game that I completed and walked away satisfied.

And yeah, certain aspects were going to age badly. The XP system isn’t particularly well-balanced. The game starts with a self-evident grinding area with the fishmen, then ends with a self-evident grinding area in the final hallway before the Dracula fight. It’s populated with these things called Guardians that are just re-colored axe knights, only these ones are insanely tough to kill. Well, at least until you’re ready to win the Dracula fight, at which point they’re total pushovers who pay off so much XP that I went from level 40-something to Level 60 in about twenty minutes.

They were tedious to fight thanks to their shields, but I was gaining life from their attacks so it was just a matter of waiting them out and getting thousands of XP points, gaining a new level for every two or three that I killed.

And then the final battle with Shaft (why the f*ck did they call him that?! It’s a terrible name for a villain!) and Dracula were kind of letdowns. Seriously, when the dullest bosses in the game are the final two bosses, something has gone seriously wrong. Dracula especially, who cuts straight to his final form, which is an incomprehensible half-man, half-bat that I spent far too much time wondering if this “true form” could possibly have impregnated a human woman. I mean, if it’s his true form then surely this would be the form that would be required for the procreation, right? Except, Dracula’s true form doesn’t even appear to have a crotch!

Does have three testicles though. At least I think those are testicles. That or the xenomorph invaded Transylvania.

Did Dracula use a surrogate? Is that why his handler is called Shaft? Oh, don’t roll your eyes. YOU try to review one of the greatest video games of all-time. One where the only thing it does wrong is flip the map for half the f*cking game because the producer thinks EVERY idea is brilliant. It’s kinda hard to review, you know? Small miracle Castlevania: Symphony of the Night turned out as good as it did.
Verdict: YES!

Indie Gamer Chick’s Castlevania Reviews
Castlevania (NES) Vampire Killer (MSX2) Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (NES)
Haunted Castle (Arcade) Castlevania: The Adventure (Game Boy) Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse (NES)
Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge (GB) Super Castlevania IV (SNES)
Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (Super CD-ROM²) Castlevania: Bloodlines (Genesis)
Castlevania: Dracula X (SNES) Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PSX) Castlevania Legends (GB)
Castlevania Chronicles (PSX) Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (GBA) Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth (Wii)
Kid Dracula (Famicom) Kid Dracula (Game Boy) ROM Hacks (NES)
Konami Wai Wai World (Famicom) Wai Wai World 2 (Famicom)
Master of Darkness (Master System) Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (Modern Platforms)