A game covered from head to foot in rough edges. This isn't necessarily entirely a bad thing; playing Demon's Souls earlier this year did a lot for me in terms of demonstrating how rough edges sometimes simply act as enduring evidence of quite how daring and experimental a game actually was (the fact that I learnt this from Demon's Souls is amusing considering quite how much both it and Dark Souls seem to owe the Castlevania franchise just generally). Sure later metroidvania-style Castlevania entries would polish this formula substantially, but even over two decades after its initial release you can still feel the mad creative energy and wild ambition at play here and a big part of the reason that feeling endures is precisely because Symphony of the Night isn't polished by contrast with its descendants.

The game is awfully balanced such that whilst the first couple hours are minorly challenging, your stats quickly out-scale the enemies to the point that much of what follows becomes a cakewalk; there were even multiple late-game bosses that were only dealing one damage per hit to me. Some squares of your map stubbornly refuse being filled in until you've traversed every pixel of them thrice over. Between spells, fighting-game combo moves, weapon special abilities, weapon synergies, transformations, the game has a pile of systems much of which you'll likely hardly interact with, especially considering the aforementioned difficulty issues provide little reason to when everything just dies to you spamming your basic attack. Your weapons all feel broadly very similar to use, each just lashing out directly in front of you a short distance, whilst your side-weapons get horribly out-scaled such that by the second half of the game they (and all the heart pick-ups you'll keep receiving for them) might as well not exist. Meanwhile that second half of the game just feels like busywork, much of the excitement of discovery replaced with painstakingly re-combing every corner of the map.

Symphony of the Night is wildly imperfect, to an extent that might make even this four-star review seem overeager. The thing is, though, that it's also a deeply ambitious game; the scale of the castle, each area drenched in its own compelling vibe, and how the game then re-contextualises all of it in the bold mid-game twist, how the game tries to allow you a great sense of freedom in your traversal of the castle never leaving you with the sense of being railroaded down one particular path and always leaving you wondering whether you're actually even doing things in the intended order, the interweaving of countless different rpg mechanics into action-platformer gameplay, the sense of mystery to the whole thing, strange secrets hidden in increasingly bizarre, arcane ways that should really annoy me but instead just serve to make the game feel so much more sprawling and enigmatic. There's this feeling to the whole affair of constantly throwing new ideas at you whenever it possibly can, refusing to let itself be boxed in by audience expectations, and whilst the rough edges here can certainly be frustrating, confounding, or even just an outright drag, they also serve to keep Symphony of the Night's relentless creative energy feeling fresh even after all the imitation and iteration that has come in its wake.