Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

It's hard not to have fun when you're playing as the ass-kicking and name-taking Alucard. The castle has a ton of special abilities and equippable items to find, including transmogrification forms (wolf/bat/mist), familiars to tag along and help out, and plenty of expendable offensive items like magic missiles and bombs. One thing SotN is lacking that its followers have in spades is standard weapon types: there are short swords, long swords, and some maces (which are pretty much longer swords), but that's about it.

The Metroidvania formula, even in its earliest incarnation, is pretty solid. But, there are some detrimental elements in Symphony. Most of them are technical - between the two-dimensional particle effects and background parallax, this sidescroller really taxes the Playstation's resources, resulting in some situations of intense slowdown. There's also the bothersome load times when entering an area with new music (and the music itself doesn't loop quite properly either).

There's also the midway point, at which you may think you're beating the game - and in fact you can get a bad ending here - but no, there is an entire other castle in the sky! It brings the game to a more respectable length (I'm currently projecting about 10 hours, where it would formerly have been closer to 6), but doubling the map's size out of nowhere is a little sketchy.

It is quite fun, and I can't wait to wrap the final boss up and try the extra modes, but it's hard to ignore the performance limitations of a sidescrolling game.

Progress: Level 38, 139.0%