3.5/5 ★ – philip_acquaro's review of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

Started: April 26th 2025 Beaten: May 25th 2025 I realize this is revered as one of the greatest games of all time and massively contributed to pioneering the “Metroidvania” genre, but I unfortunately didn’t have the most perfect experience with this. Don’t get me wrong I still liked it a lot and I can completely understand why so many love it. I agree that it’s a phenomenally designed game especially considering the time of its release, I just want to emphasize that it was my faulted personal experience with this that made me go lower on it not the game itself. To start I suppose I’ll go over those factors. But first, I should clarify that with more than half of this game I was doing just fine and my experience was pretty good! In that first half I didn’t really have trouble with enemies aside from a couple rooms but I still needed a lot of guidance with YouTube walkthroughs as even though it’s considered one of the easier games of the series and genre, it could be hard for me to remember where I need to backtrack to with how massive the castle is, leading me with need of direction. That’s not really an issue though, everything was still cool in the first half like I said. It wasn’t until the Reversed Castle portion of the game where things started getting a little iffy for me. The first problem I encountered upon that area was how annoying the enemies became. Each of them required like 20 hits to die and dealt crazy damage against me when I was using the Alucard sword I had been using for the whole game up to that point. Now mind you since I had been using this sword this whole time with no issues prior, I didn’t think the sword was the problem but instead that the enemies just became a lot tougher which led me to constantly die and lose my patience. When looking up a walkthrough I realized that you were supposed to keep farming kills on the Schmoo enemy until it would eventually drop a super OP weapon called the Crissaegrim sword which is way faster, does splash damage, and kills all those enemies in one hit as opposed to like 20 hits. So after getting this sword it was smooth sailing from there but I just felt like the game should tell you this instead of expecting the player to rely on RNG for them to eventually receive a sword they may not know even exists to progress. I don’t know maybe this was my fault for not realizing that I needed to find another weapon. I suppose It’s both a issue on my part and weird game design in my opinion. But that was definitely a major issue for a good bit as I was just dying constantly without knowledge of that weapon. From there I had navigated the Reversed Castle just fine and explored nearly all of it until I was unsure of where to go next near the very end so I watched this Walkthrough but this video I was watching was just so bad man. The guy was just going back and forth, navigating aimlessly and confused while I was just following his directing for a long time. This definitely worsened the latter half of the experience and I realize now that I should’ve just found another walkthrough. Not the game’s fault, which is why i’m emphasizing that my experience was the problem. Even though I did just fine with the genre before with Metroid Zero Mission and Animal Well, I do think that if I was better in direction and skill, my experience would most likely be a 5/5 because man this game is just SUPER good on all fronts. This could quite possibly be in my top 5 video game soundtracks of all time, it’s that damn good. Every area is accompanied by a banger that just fits the gothic, mysterious, and fantastical mood and atmosphere of the game! I think that just might be my favorite part of it. And the sprites mixed with the 3-Dimensional modeling in the skies, buildings, enemies, and many other effects makes for some visually beautiful animations and an overall really great art style that holds up so well! Also the boss fights were really creative and so much fun!! There was this one big lizard fight that was both challenging but satisfying to defeat, a boss where you fight Richter (the protagonist of a prior Castlevania) who is mind controlled, this super big armored being named Galamoth who is like a space God that shoots electricity and has a huge staff which was cool, and of course the final Dracula boss in his true form which was just insane. The acting is silly but charming and the story is very interesting! Aside from those things that really negated from my personal experience, the game is VERY good. Like I said before i’m mainly rating my experience I had rather than the game itself as It’s a very quality title that will rightfully and for sure continue to stand the test of time.