dawn after castlevania: symphony of the night

the much-lauded castlevania: symphony of the night has long been on my list of games to finish partly because it’s so iconic and partly because i want to check out the rest of the series which has been a major presence on nintendo platforms. it’s kind of hard to believe that the last castlevania game i finished was the first N64 release (which i enjoyed) more than five years ago, but somehow the gothic theme of the series just doesn’t really appeal to me that much. i had gotten a fair amount of the way through SOTN years ago but had gotten stuck at the part with the wooden bridge in the caves, but this time with a little help from gamefaqs after a long hiatus i finally barreled my way through to the end.

i can see why the game has been well regarded. there’s a lot of polish (great enemy design; the overall aesthetic reminded me of classic sega games), and the coupling of the traditional action-oriented castlevania gameplay with the exploration of the metroid series is fairly successful (although as a long-time metroid fan the gameplay can’t help but pale in comparison). the RPG elements definitely help with the pacing. the upgrades include some pretty standard ones (e.g. one opens all the blue doors), but there are also some more-unique ones involving alucard’s three transformations. the other unique addition was the introduction of “familiars” who follow you around and generally help fight enemies and who also level up and gain new powers (although their development is much slower than yours). although there’s a lot of content overall, much of it falls into the “so useless you’ll never even bother with them”, such as the bevy of single-use items, spells that you can execute with complicated button sequences, and a bestiary that tracks the enemies’ item drops that you’ve encountered that could be a major time suck if you tried to complete it. i appreciated the little details that were put into the game, such as your bat familiar being confused when you change from a bat back into a human, and so i suppose you could think of all that “useless” content as extra details that help flesh out the game’s world.

the thing that made the game really worthwhile to me, though, was the huge surprise halfway through that by now probably everyone knows about but must have been mind-blowing at the time. like final fantasy 6 it comes just when you think you’re finishing up the game, and also like that game it still feels fresh today. the second half, again as with FF6, doesn’t completely fulfill the potential of the initial reveal, but it still made the game a unique and memorable experience for me.

in terms of putting the game into its historical context, jeremy parish’s write-up on gamespite was the most informative. he presents it as a game intended to be a swan song to the series, a 2-D game during a time when 2-D was shunned in favor of the new chunky, polygonal 3-D games. he writes that the creators “were crafting a game for love, not churning out an assembly-line product” and says:

That’s where historians get it wrong. These days, Symphony is seen as the first modern Castlevania, the moment where the franchise broke loose of its legacy tethers. … No, Symphony simply embraces some of Castlevania’s less familiar traditions, highlighting the series’ underlying concepts — and it does so strictly for the sake of creating the ultimate Castlevania game, the culmination of everything the games to that point had embodied.

In short, Symphony of the Night is a tour-de-force: the summation of a classic franchise, crammed with self-referential fan service yet bursting with new ideas. It strikes a perfect balance between old and new, faithful to the series’ essence while unafraid to forge ahead.

i definitely wouldn’t rank this among my favorite games of all time since the core gameplay is so familiar, but the game is significant as it marked a new direction for the castlevania series. the only problem there, though, is that it seems all the subsequent games of the series have strayed minimally from the formula of SOTN. i’ll have to see for myself if that’s the case since you could say that about pretty much all series, but i’m not too optimistic since parish says, “the series has limped along for more than a decade since Symphony’s arrival. … Igarashi managed to wrangle Symphony into a template, a formula, but the original game’s greatest success was that it so boldy defied expectation, that it so elegantly exceeded preconception.” stay tuned …

the sun rises over these castlevania: symphony of the night links:
- there’s certainly no shortage of links to info on SOTN. the section at vgmuseum.com and the entry at castlevania.wikia.com are a good starting point
- FAQ at gamefaqs and walkthrough at shrines.rpgclassics.com
- PDF of instruction manual at replacementdocs.com
- wallpapers at castlevaniacrypt.com

a feeling of doom

i’m not a big fan of FPS games, but i thought i’d go back and play a classic of the genre, doom. i still haven’t gotten much into PC gaming since i stare at a computer screen all day at work, so instead i opted for the playstation version (the first of two actually) entitled ultimate doom which contains versions of the original doom as well as doom II.

i was surprised at how smoothly the game ran on the PSX, and i enjoyed zipping through the corridors. the graphics are serviceable, and although the gameplay is pretty basic by today’s standards (although not having to fiddle with aiming up and down is kind of nice actually), multiple weapons and having limited ammunition, some more-non-linear maps, and stats shown of kills, items found, and “secrets” found after each level kept me interested for a decent amount. but the game quickly got repetitive for me due to the lack of variety in the gameplay and enemies. the levels themselves had a decent amount of cosmetic differences, but the repetitive core gameplay overrode those slight variations. the game also walks a fine line between “try and die” gameplay versus actual skill, and the strobe-lighted and unlighted areas were more annoying than not. the “secrets” are somewhat pointless (the retrospective at 101 videogames puts it well: “I remember spending most of the game rubbing up against walls while fumbling with the ‘open’ button”, haha), but overall this was an enjoyable trip to the past, although i was happy to keep my visit short.

i feel … an impending sense of … doom links:
- entry at wikipedia, which includes a section on versions and ports. turns out there’s a GBA version. that might be fun to try out, although i suppose i should try out the SNES and N64 versions as well.
- page at doom.wikia.com
- classicdoom.com is a great site that includes images of all the maps and locations of all the secrets, as well as a comparison of all the different versions (not a small feat)
- endings of part 1 and part 2 on youtube

checking out soul blade‘s caliber

completist that i am, instead of starting in on soul calibur i went back to the very first release of the series, called soul blade for the original playstation. the game was highly praised when it came out, although the series’ first success has since been eclipsed by its hugely popular sequels.

i’ve dipped into some of the soulcalibur games a bit, but for the most part i came into this game without too many preconceptions. i hadn’t played any of the tekken (also by namco) games either, and apparently the two series are similar. both series were part of the time period when fighters ramped up the difficulties of the street fighter games and also when it became customary to include practice modes and command lists in games. i’ve grown to rather enjoy fighters, and so i didn’t have any problems getting into this one. one thing i found annoying is that you have to use separate blocks for low attacks vs high/mid attacks. also, another thing that was somewhat annoying is that this was the first fighter where i felt that the button combinations require you to either hold the controller in an unnatural way or get an arcade-type controller. i’m sure many people find it absolutely normal to use an arcade-type controller for a console fighting game, but i’m not into them enough to actually go out and get one anytime soon.

anyway, i played through the normal level with all the characters and for the most part found the experience to be enjoyable. the graphics are quite good for the time and have actually aged fairly well, and the character design is also notable. i found that in general the actual movesets ended up not feeling like they had that much variety, although there are some definite exceptions, including voldo and cervantes. i was also surprised there were so many korean characters, which i think is the first for a video game that i’ve played.

the game has a weapon gauge where your weapon can break, leaving you to fight with your bare fists, but that mechanic is underused. and i don’t really see the point in the extra weapons you can accrue which for the most part have only minor differences in stats (strength, durability, etc.). the story mode’s challenges added some nice variety, even though the stories themselves weren’t particularly memorable. the only other main complaint i had about the game is that the game puts too much emphasis on knocking down your opponent and then following through with an attack. not being able to immediately recover when you’re knocked down and knowing your opponent is always going to get another hit in just feels like some sort of pointless combo and it slows the game down and makes the pacing of the matches feel jerky. after i played through this game for awhile i tried out soul calibur again and that game has eliminated this long delay after a character gets knocked down, and as a result feels much more responsive and natural. i’ll definitely be exploring that game more in the future, although i enjoyed this one enough to come back to it as well. oh, and if anyone wants to know, i focused on mitsurugi this time around, although i just chose him randomly. he’s pretty cool, but i’m probably not going to continue with him in soul calibur even though it would be interesting to compare the movesets.

soul blade links for the fighting soul:
- good FAQ on unlockables, endings, etc. at gamefaqs.com
- here’s a very thorough movelist including the type of each attack (high, middle, low) and the amount of damage
- review at videogamecritic.net
- entry at wikipedia

the legends of gauntlet

i’ve been really slow about playing N64 games, but i finished gauntlet legends a couple of days ago. i was actually surprised at how much i enjoyed this game. it seems one of the main complaints about the game is that it’s so easy, but after having played some more effortful games recently it was actually nice to have something completely mindless. it was also one of the few games i could not only coerce the bf to play with me once but that he enjoyed enough to play with me a second time.

i haven’t played a whole lot of hack ‘n slash games and no doubt the genre has evolved a lot since the 8-bit gauntlet days, but there was a lot i liked about this, the series’ first 3D iteration. first off, a lot of the elements of the original 8-bit gauntlet (and its sequels) that you know and love are intact, including the 4 characters (warrior, valkyrie, wizard, and archer) who are all still distinct, and the great voice samples (“i like food!” being one of the clear favorites, although we don’t get to hear my favorite line from the 8-bit days which was “wizard has shot the food!” since, thankfully, you’re not able to shoot food in this game).

in terms of additions, unlike the original game and the arcade version of legends the console versions don’t have your life ticking away every second. this of course makes the game much easier, as does the addition of turbo moves (your “turbo” meter continually recharges), a whole slew of powerups, and, most importantly, the ability to level up and buy stat upgrades (i.e. strength, speed, magic, and armor). so although the four character classes have varied starting stats and growths, over time the differences become much less apparent. the game also lets you pick the color of your character, which changes its model, and also includes animal skins of the four classes (e.g. falconess for the valkyrie) which, while not really adding anything, are kind of a nice little addition.

the game includes a world hub where you can choose any level you’ve already unlocked, and so the game becomes trivially easy since you can level up as much as you want before tackling harder levels. but even with its two harder difficulty settings (which didn’t seem that different to me when i took a cursory look at them) the game would still be pretty easy. a lot of this seems to come from the fact you can take out most enemy generators from far away before they’ve had time to spawn many enemies; in this game generators don’t spawn enemies until you get near to them, but i believe in the original 8-bit games they spawned enemies as soon as you start the stage, thus building up oceans of enemies for you to tediously plow through. and if you save the powerups you get and sell them instead of use them, you won’t have to spend much time level-grinding, if at all. i didn’t start off being very methodical about traversing the stages, so i ended up repeating a fair number of the levels because there are hidden items you have to find to beat the game (i.e. “obelisks” which allow you to enter other worlds, and “runes” which allow you to tackle the final boss) as well as optional items (e.g. the secret characters, weapons for use against the bosses). and you’ll find yourself wanting to repeat easier levels just to collect more health. without those repeats the game would’ve been more of a challenge, but the fun of the game really isn’t about the difficulty anyway.

another thing that people complain about is the graphics, which despite being N64-level didn’t bother me at all (although apparently the dreamcast version is better). the game does make use of the N64 expansion pack though. given that the screen could be full of enemies and up to 4 players, all in 3D, the sprites aren’t incredibly detailed, but they work much better than most of the screenshots would suggest. i also found the progression of the levels to be well paced: the first world contains levels that are mostly linear; the second world contains levels that are more maze-like, like the original gauntlet; the third world contains more large open field-like areas where you’ll find yourself surrounded by enemies on multiple sides, along with a fun level climbing up and down the rigging of an airship; and the fourth and final worlds are twistier and generally much less linear with more back-tracking. in the latter levels there are some areas where you’ll be a bit lost, but that generally comes more from the confusion from the graphics and areas looking too similar to one another than anything else. the automatic camera in general also works pretty well, and the music is fine although not particularly memorable. the enemies aren’t quite varied enough, but they’re serviceable. my primary complaint, and one shared by others, is the inclusion of boss battles; they’re mostly pointless, mainly because the bosses all have attacks that are completely unavoidable and unblockable.

so overall this one was a pleasant surprise and has lead me to spending a lot more digital ink on it than many other games i’ve played this year. i actually found it to be more enjoyable than the x-men legends game i played a couple of years ago, i think largely due to it having more variety and level design. there’s a remake with more levels and characters called dark legacy that came out on the gamecube that i’ll def. have to pick up at some point. and if you’re wondering, in terms of the three console versions of gauntlet legends IGN rated them in this order: dreamcast: 8.4, N64: 7.7, and PS1: 7.2. it looks like the PS1 version, while taking the hardest hit in the graphics department, has the inclusion of 4 additional hard levels after you beat the game.

you are now entering the dungeon of links!
- gamespot featured an interesting series of interviews when the game came out described thus: “Not only do these cover the current consumer titles, they also look at the evolution of Gauntlet, from the original coin-op in 1985 through the latest coin-op version – Gauntlet Legends – and onto the N64 and the PlayStation.”
- some cheats and a nice set of videos at IGN
- entry at wikipedia.org
- entry at strategywiki.org
- youtube video of first level (as the yellow wizard)
- pretty good FAQ at IGN and one at gamefaqs
- instruction manual of the PS1 version

final fantasy tactics tackled

fiiiiinally finished the endless game i’ve been plodding my way through, final fantasy tactics for the original playstation. i’d been aware of the game ever since i began my obsession with the fire emblem series, and also b/c the follow-up on the GBA seems to regularly get mentioned in “top GBA games of all time” lists.

having been focused solely on fire emblem there were a lot of adjustments i had to make to playing FF tactics. there’s the isometric view, and the way the battle time advances took some getting used to since you have to constantly check the menus and time meters to see whose turn is coming up next and remind yourself of what commands the enemy has already entered in. one of the main differences between FE and FF tactics is that characters can die but aren’t permanently lost unless they miss three of their turns without being brought back to life. the other main difference is that the majority of your time is spent using “generic” characters who take no part in the story. (although you do get more unique, named characters with their own special abilities later, and eventually they can completely replace your original party if you choose.)

despite the learning curve in general i think my FE experience helped and i didn’t have much of a problem beating the game, although the game seemed to drag on and on. looking back it prob. didn’t take any more time than a FE game, but there were quite a few drawbacks that made the game a chore to finish. i agree with a lot of what the entry on wikipedia says:

Criticism is made on gameplay, plot and the localization effort. One of the reviews of RPGFan criticized the difficulty of the game as being inconsistent with each encounter against enemy units. The factors that influence the difficulty of the game include overpowered enemy units or party members, and time had to be taken to level up before any progress can be made. Though in-depth, IGN also noted that the game’s plot was confusing at times … The game’s localization effort was criticized by reviewers as poorly written, being rife with grammatical mistakes that almost stopped players from enjoying the storyline.

of those complaints, the main one for me was that the story is so lousy. half the time i didn’t really know who was doing what to whom, nor did i ever care. on top of that the localization is one of the absolute worst i’ve ever encountered with tons of awkward as well as flat-out incorrect writing, which is a major problem for a text-heavy RPG. as for the level grinding, this wasn’t too much of a problem and i sort of expected it since the game has a fair amount of emphasis on random battles (unlike almost all the FE games where there are no random battles). the main exception to my general feeling that the amount of level grinding is tolerable is that at one point about halfway through i inadvertently overlevelled the main character, ramza, and everyone else in my party was way underlevelled in comparison. i hadn’t realized that random encounters base the enemies’ stats on your most powerful character, so i was pretty much screwed fighting stupidly tough random battles until i was able to bring the rest of the party up to ramza’s level. one other thing that annoyed me was that unlike FE you don’t get to preview the map before you start it, so you can’t adjust your equipment or characters at all. even setting the start positions of your characters is a virtually completely blind process.

quite a number of complaints, but as for the good stuff the graphics, although more cartoon-y than i’m used to, are generally well done, with great character design, pretty good environments, and some great battle effects. the gameplay is pretty solid, although i was surprised that the central game mechanic isn’t the battle system so much as the game’s character class system, which is robust and well designed. basically every generic character starts off as either a squire or a chemist. after you reach a certain level you can then change class (a squire can become a knight or an archer and a chemist can become a priest or a wizard). after you reach a certain level in those classes you can change to even more advanced classes. this built-in progression of classes keeps the game feeling fresh, and it’s a lot of fun to experiment with the different classes and combine the abilities of the various classes, although some of the classes and their abilities def. seem like useless padding. there are also a ton of other extra game elements that i didn’t bother getting into b/c they just seemed useless, namely the “propositions” in which you send some of your party away for some time to fulfill missions that you don’t monitor at all and get only paltry rewards for completing; the monster recruitment where you can get monsters to join your party but who don’t change classes and generally don’t have many useful abilities; and the monster “poaching” where you can sell monsters you’ve killed for special items. there are also two lengthy sidequests (the deep dungeon and the quest to get cloud from FFVII) that i had absolutely no interest in embarking upon.

phew! even though i’m ecstatic that i can finally stop playing this game the game was actually pretty good overall; a better story would’ve been a major improvement. i’ll keep the GBA FF tactics on my list of games to play, although from what i’ve read it doesn’t sound like there’s much of a story there either so it’ll prob. be quite some time before i try it out. may try one of the tactics ogre games instead.

finally! some fantastically tactical links:
- battle mechanics guide: indispensible reference for the underlying equations for the game engine
- great fan site at squarehaven.com with tons of great stuff, inc. a great guide to all the jobs, the full script, and official jobs artwork and summons artwork.
- pretty good general FAQ: with class info, battle strategies, and more
- another good FAQ
- youtube video of the main parts of the cloud sidequest
- useful FAQ on what the brave and faith stats do

rappin’ with parappa

i’ve played playstation games off and on since college, but in general i’m fairly bored by them. i really don’t remember how i first heard about parappa the rapper for the PS1, but it’s no wonder it caught my eye, with its bright, offbeat, very nintendo-like quirkiness. if you haven’t heard of it, it’s a rhythm game in a “simon says” type of format in which the “teacher” raps out a lyric that you then repeat by pushing the same buttons in time. a source cited on wikipedia says parappa, released in japan in december 1996, is “generally considered to be the first modern rhythm game”. i found this surprising at first, but i guess i’d never really stopped to think about the origins of rhythm games, which seem so ubiqitous nowadays.

parappa is structured similarly to the fantastic elite beat agents which i played last year, in that each song is bookended by a part of the story (although in parappa there’s only one continuous story). the story and characters, including the eponymous rapping dog parappa, are wonderfully quirky. parappa apparently means “paper-thin” in japanese, and the colorful visuals feature a similar gimmick to the paper mario series (although the first paper mario came out a few years later, in 2000). the songs, which range from a driving lesson (“check and turn the signal to the right”) to waiting in line to use the bathroom (“i need to go just as bad as you / what i had this morning i don’t even want to say to you”) are uniformly excellent with some purposely nonsensical lyrics thrown in for the heck of it, such as “my style is rich, dope, phat in which / we’ll make a cake that looks rich” from the cake baking song.

as for the gameplay, from a modern perspective the interface seemed notably awkward to me at first. nowadays we’re used to being scored on each note and on how many notes are hit in a row, which parappa doesn’t highlight at all. instead parappa has a simple interface in which your performance on a phrase (usually four beats) determines if you move up or down on a 4-point scale, ranging from “COOL” to “AWFUL”. i’m guessing that dance dance revolution, which debuted in 1998, was the origin of what has become the standard rhythm gameplay.

after i settled down to play through parappa i couldn’t believe how short the game was, which includes only 6 stages. there are some cheap moments, such as when the game changes meter without any warning (e.g. in the first song there’s a sudden shift from 3 beats per measure to 4 without any way to know it would change unless you’re already familiar with the song), and in the last song there’s a sudden section near the end where there’s no call and response and no way to predict what the first notes of the next phrase are going to be. despite these setbacks the main part of the game can be beaten fairly easily and so quickly that afterwards i couldn’t believe there wasn’t a harder difficulty mode. after looking in vain in the settings for one i checked online, and it turned out there is an additional mode where you have to beat each stage a second time, this time with a COOL rating.

and therein lies the game’s truly unique twist; calling it a “challenge” wouldn’t be quite accurate, though. to explain: in the game you can only go from GOOD to COOL in a song by improvising around the required button presses, and finding an improvisation that is acceptable is a really strange case of fairly blind trial and error. i’m quite curious about what the instruction manual says, although this FAQ at gamefaqs includes a section on suggestions on how to improvise that may have been taken from the manual. once you do find a pattern that lifts you to COOL the game takes an even more surreal twist and your rapping teacher suddenly leaves you center stage to rap by yourself. freestyling is a sudden shift in modes, and you can freely experiment with mixing the various samples together and using the left or right directional buttons to repeat a sample. your freestyling also has to be varied enough to maintain your COOL rating, which can also take a certain amount of blind trial and error.

this radically different mode was a great surprise, and although it was often more frustrating than not since it relies so much on trial and error, achieving the COOL ratings and freestyling really made the game much more interesting to me. in freestyling mode the game suddenly becomes much more of a “toy” than a “game”, which is particularly interesting to me given a somewhat recent comment from miyamoto in which he says wii music is a toy instead of a game (leading to a backlash from hardcore gamers who were already feeling abandoned after nintendo’s casual-game-centric showing at this year’s E3) and the general response to will wright’s new game spore, typified by such reviews as schiesel’s review for the new york times. i actually would have enjoyed a separate mode in parappa in which you could just freestyle as much as you wanted without the pressure of having to maintain your COOL rating, which makes me think that video games as toys might not be quite as unsavory an idea as i first thought. in any case, i’ll def. be checking out um jammer lammy (although with its focus on guitar sounds i’m sure i’ll miss parappa’s rapping) and the PS2 sequel parappa the rapper 2.

phew! that was a long post. kick! punch! time for some parappin’ links. hatatatacha!
- entry at wikipedia
- soundtrack on youtube
- this guy has some nice videos of getting COOL mode on all the levels
- the complete lyrics
- review of the soundtrack
- random page with a few parappa 2 wallpapers
- review at IGN
- FAQ at gamefaqs with patterns that will get you a COOL rating
- RMC from gonintendo posted his disappointed impressions of nana on-sha’s upcoming wii game, major minor’s majestic march, a marching band game. ripten.com and IGN have also posted information about it (IGN’s includes a short video).

kirby avalanched

to change things up a bit i started playing through the SNES puzzle game kirby’s avalanche, which is apparently heading to the virtual console very soon. the game has an interesting history in that it was the 2nd version of puyo puyo (created in japan in 1991) that was released in the states. the first was dr. robotnik’s mean bean machine for the sega genesis and released in 1993. kirby’s avalanche followed two years later, and apparently both are modelled after the original version of puyo puyo instead of the updated version puyo puyo tsu (a.k.a. puyo puyo 2) released in japan in 1994. [isn't wikipedia helpful? what did we ever do w/out it?] this distinction is noteworthy, as i’ll get into below.

anyway, history lesson aside the game itself was probably one of the first tetris-like games to feature chain reactions, which i’d gotten to really enjoy through playing a similar game, super puzzle fighter 2 turbo, on the PSX. my sister and i used to play puzzle fighter head to head for hours, but after a while we found out that in most cases throwing blocks down quickly but fairly haphazardly yielded better results than playing carefully, and so the game became much less interesting.

avalanche proved to be a more challenging game overall, in part b/c a random approach usually won’t give many chains. with unlimited continues it’s not too hard to play through to the end, but i set myself the challenge of playing to the end with no continues. this turned out to be harder than one might think, mostly b/c the game is designed so that once you get a lot of enemy blocks on your screen, it’s fairly difficult to get rid of them. as the original version of puyo puyo, the game doesn’t have some of the more convenient features added to the second version, and in particular it doesn’t include the rule of sousai. this is a simple feature where the garbage blocks you’re about to send over to the other player are subtracted from the amount that s/he’s about to send over. this means that rounds last much longer b/c it’s common to have cases where both players are negating the others’ garbage blocks and bouncing small sets of garbage blocks back and forth. when you don’t have that feature, as in avalanche, once either side builds up a long chain the other side is pretty much bombarded and doesn’t have much chance to recover, so kirby’s avalanche forces you to play quickly and accurately. after spending way too many hours trying out various strategies, i decided the best thing to do is really just build as many chains as possible, and have chains working side by side so as they fall they chain with two colors instead of just one.

avalanche is one of those puzzle games that don’t really have much to do w/ the franchise except that the characters are featured, but the characters add color and some of the dialogue is pretty hilarious. all in all it was def. fun to play the relatively primitive version of the game, and i’m def. going to be playing through the subsequent iterations. i’ll prob. also track down the sega genesis version (which is available in the sonic mega collection disc which is on the gamecube and the other platforms) just to see if the gameplay’s exactly the same or not. yeah, i’m a geek.

linkies:
- the great kirby site at classicgaming.gamespy.com has the definitive guide to the game, with sprites, screenshots, music, instruction book text, game dialogue, and more.
- wikipedia’s page on the original version of puyo puyo describes the gameplay and shows examples of how to make chains
- and here’s wikipedia’s page on the game