Doesn't age. Absolutely perfect. I played this for the first time during COVID. I got bored and picked up one of those PS1 minis everyone hated and modded it to add more games. Really a great box! I played through a bunch of classics, just sampling in a demo disk kind of way and approached SotN with some trepetation. It has a big reputation and I have heard it doesn't really hold up.

Turns out that was a fool speaking. This completely holds up. The only thing that doesn't is the weird abilities that use the fighting game style button combos to execute. That was such a 90s mechanic. No one liked that. Hence, it never reappearing in later games.

Beautiful design, great music, stunning sprites, bad story. This has it all. But most crucially, the power fantasy is strong here. There is nothing more satisfying than struggling through various insanely bullshit areas that you then always try to avoid only to eventually return and just turn these screens of enemies into swiss cheese. This game infamously has some bonkers broken weapons from a balance standpoint but thank you, SotN. Thank you. More games need god-tier end game weapons, because at that point you are a god and you should feel like one. I rotated between my arsenal to scale the difficulty to my liking. It's a winning feeling to turn a challenging game into something that challenges you on your terms, not its. A sense of true mastery. Very few games understand that.

A pretty brilliant game. It is the first attempt to boil down Symphony of the Night's new direction for the series into handheld, but the limitations that come with that mean they still kept one foot in the old Castlevania design direction. It's very much a compromised work, a bastard child of both veins of Castlevania, but to me it's the best of both worlds.

Of course, Iga would take later GBA games and make them look and feel exactly like SotN did on PS1, but the simplistic design of CotM makes it stand out as its own thing entirely (not to mention it helps visual clarity). Movement of different and takes some getting used to, like the old games you hop vertically more than leap horizontally. There are fewer secrets to discover and the game uses a basic "card" system for upgrades and builds. It's all very much in the experimentation mode.

But there are some really cool bosses that we will see reused later (giant ball of corpses, anyone?) and the card system is ripe for exploiting. And what is a Castlevania game if not to cheese to the maximum extent of your ability? This game is prime cheese, in every interpretation of that statement.