100% of trophies earned (platinum trophy for the Requiem collection); 200.6% map exploration, complete bestiary, Richter mode completed. It's taken far too long for me to make time to play this defining game in the 'Metroidvania' genre but I'm pleased to find that it's just as good as its reputation suggests. While Super Metroid and Hollow Knight remain a step above, Symphony of the Night is otherwise right up amongst the best of the genre. With the core gameplay involving exploring a large interconnected castle, level design is clearly crucial and the game excels on that front, with a wide variety of interesting settings; the game's 'twist' then really highlights the care and attention put in here. Combat is fairly simple, but responsive and satisfying, with an impressive range of different weapons, alongside a handful of magic spells that help to bring some layers of complexity. Rounding out the package are detailed pixelart that holds up to this day and a deservedly classic musical score.

This game is a fabulous, beautiful, genre-defining mess.

I absolutely understand why it has the high reputation it has, and I'm glad I came back to it to finish it. The art is phenomenal, the music sets the mood perfectly, and there's so, so many secrets and details all over every inch of Draculas castle as you roam its halls and dungeons. The story is not a huge element, but it was actually a bit more cohesive and nuanced than I expected. Not a tall bar, but it hit it.

I was a little disappointed that the PS4 edition had to get new voicework since they couldn't relicense the original recordings, but I will say the rewrite is a bit easier to take seriously. Though the "miserable pile of secrets" line actually should have been kept, and not for the meme — that's just a better line than what Dracula says here now, imho.

From the gameplay side, what surprised and hooked me when I first tried playing back in 2011ish on the Xbox Arcade port was how the combat felt like a proper action RPG and the platforming controls were smoother to operate than its peers. Having just played through Ys III, the strengths of the controls here were even more pronounced as I started it up again recently. Hollow Knight has since surpassed it to being the most tight and responsive action platformer I've ever played, but this is still in that ballpark.

The loot and artifacts you can find are also quite exciting. Not everything is useful, but a good amount of what you find will make a significant difference in advantage and gameplay style. What's more, is that many weapons have fighting game style motion commmands to activate hidden abilities. The spell system works off motion inputs too, and in-fact, there's no limit on when you can cast a spell — if you can perform the input you can cast from the very start of the game.

However, most people are only going to be able to engage in that level if they look up a guide because there is no standard set of motions. There's a few common ones, like quarter circle forward, but literally everything is on the table: charge inputs, 3/4 circles, cross inputs, double backs... and so on.

There's a few of these inputs mentioned in the game itself but they can be pretty missable. In fact, a lot of things are very missable. This is strength of the game to me as I like meaningful secrets, they make exploration worth doing and exciting. However, some of the weaknesses of the game started to spoil my ability to appreciate the exploration aspects.

The way I see it, the same thing that makes this game such a masterpiece is also something that makes it a bit rough to play in this day and age. Which is that they made content first and asked questions later. Core mechanics are polished, for sure, but particularly level and enemy design are a series of high highs and low lows.

The medusa head is only the poster child of this game's frustrating parts, it is far from the only one. That whole clock tower section as a whole is... shudder. Other sections are nearly as bad though with enemies that can get you into juggle states that, even if they're so low damage they aren't a threat to your life, will still waste a good 15 seconds of your time and kill your momentum traversing the map — which you will have to do a lot because there are only five, fixed shortcut points in the castle and plenty of intricate pathways in-between that you will have to backtrack around whether you missed something or not.

Thankfully, this is still only a PSX-era "large" map, so it isn't that big of a hurdle to retread some of the more annoying bits, but it adds up. The leveling system also provides some needed relief by gradually reducing the threat of old enemies while still being difficult to out-level new ones in the course of normal play.

On a more mixed point is the boss design. Incredible visual designs aside, I have no idea what the intended experiences with these bosses were supposed to be, because even without guides my winning strategy for almost every. single. one. felt like a cheese. Usually involving the Soulstealer spell, and then I learned about the legitimately broken weapons at the end. Like straight up there's a weapon pair that you can just casually acquire without much additional effort that gives you a win button. Cheat level win button.

But I'm not going to complain because it's a secret input and the boss that made me look it up deserved it.

So... yeah. As a game, my experience was a mess: strong core mechanics and beautiful imagery, but unhinged content design. I can't say it wasn't worth it, though. Even when it was wacked out I always felt right on the verge of wacking back with twice as much cheese (sometimes literally).