Let us all take a moment and appreciate the greatness of this videogame.
Let us all take a moment and appreciate the greatness of this videogame.
Community-driven video game blog & discussion
Community-driven video game blog & discussion
Let us all take a moment and appreciate the greatness of this videogame.
It's gay.
Thanks Netflix!
>Alucard is gay
Fixed
It's fun. Shame there's no New Game + or something and once you get your full set of items and equipment there's nowhere as such to try it out save Drac himself.
Richter mode is fun
Richter Mode (and either of the Marias for that matter) never really "clicked" with me. What am I doing wrong?
Nothing, they kinda suck
You are failing to enjoy what amounts to a more traditional Castlevania but without interesting platforming and combat-relevant geography, having stripped the collecting and skill-unlocking aspects that make the Alucard mode at least a fun and worthwhile experience from levels designed with that particular concept in mind.
Try to find all of the button combinations for their special moves. Also, while the HP bars don't show it, picking up the health upgrades really does give Richter and Maria a lot of health.
This thread has gotten me to realize that I have in fact done more Alucard playthroughs than Richter playthroughs, which is the opposite for me when it comes to PoR.
The only things I really knew about SoTN before finally getting to play it in 2013 was Richter and the Inverted Castle, not having a clue about the actual details. I knew it was going to be easy and was willing to not give a damn, I didn't realize it was also going to be boring. I played HoD before that and at least that game made figuring out where to go a challenge. Almost ruined listening to the soundtrack for me with how bad it was.
In fairness, though, second playthrough got me to appreciate the game more when I discovered Alucard can do the hellfire teleport thing. Seeing that after playing so many other CV games was honestly pretty lit.
The public at large might appreciate the N64 games more, but the fandom itself will still the same usual warzone.
Fave song? Fave song. Personally I dig it the most when SoTN gets all classy and atmospheric or frightening like Door to The Abyss, but Tower of Mist perhaps does it for me the most.
>flap-flap-flap
I fucking hate SoTN's bat form more than any other in this franchise. Aria's was quick and could do Hellfire with a Drac soul setup, Dawn was lesser but didn't make you use it much at least, even CV3 at least wasn't that sluggish despite the semi-poor handling and let you transform whenever even when hit, but SoTN's is just such a waste. Slow, dumb restrictions to what you could and drops you when you turn back, a useless fireball move that couldn't be aimed down and did shit damage, really the only decent stuff about it was sonar and wingsmash. Fucking bullshit.
You are an aggressively stupid person.
You are super mad.
>Shame there's no New Game + or something
Same here: when i beaten the videogame for the first time, i expected a new game + so i could start a new game with alucard with most of his items that he collected in the previous game(like the dark shield, the crissaegrim, the duplicator, etc.) but no, there are not any new game +, so if you start a new game, you will start without any rare item or money collected.
The only "prizes" were:
- Ritcher mode(boring, because if i wanted to play as Ritcher i would have instead played castlevania dracula x).
- a "luck" mode(wich by the way, gives very mediocre luck, because most rare items like the crissaegrim or the mourneblade still took me like 30 minutes to get).
Randomizer is the best NG+
Pretty ballsy of Dracula to take over a religious edifice not even located in transylvania
Wait they just photoshopped that random photograph? LOOL
Actually if you look at this
closely you can actually tell they literally cut the castle off a different piece of paper and you can see the edges. It's not Photoshop, it's a physical collage.
S O V L
It was most likely not a stylistic choice as such kek. The most baffling aspect is that the background image IS clearly a literal cut-and-paste collage of stock images, but the logo is an also obvious digital job by somebody capable of fucking around with simple style presets in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or whatever the design department intern who handled it had access to. So something as trivial as combining the images digitally could have been done that way as well with slightly less grade school-tier results.
>but the logo is an also obvious digital job by somebody capable of fucking around with simple style presets in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or whatever the design department intern who handled it had access to
you're making the mistake of judging late 90s image editing software by the capabilities of modern ones
not to say you're wrong about how cheap it looks, but shit which is a matter of a couple of clicks now wasn't the case then
That sort of novelty effects like drop-shadows and bevel effects were already as trivial to use back then as they are now (can't remember exactly but at that point they were probably permanent "filters" rather than adjustable non-destructive effects)
Lel, and they complain about AI.
>Actually if you look at this
Let us all take a moment and appreciate the greatness of this videogame. (OP) closely you can actually tell they literally cut the castle off a different piece of paper and you can see the edges. It's not Photoshop, it's a physical collage.
as an expert of old videogame covers i can confirm this was a stylistic choice.
I'm 100% sure it was some artistic dude that was experimenting with stuff and wanted to do something unique. It was popular in the 90s.
How the hell is literally cutting one literal photograph and pasting it on another "experimenting"
>How the hell is literally cutting one literal photograph and pasting it on another "experimenting"
holy zoomer.
Like...what the fuck.
>durr hurr i CAN'T UNDERSTAND THE CONCEPT OF CREATIVITY
fuck off
not gonna spoonfeed you
Are you an idiot? It's just your typical crappy US cover made on the cheap.
Do you really think there is any artisticcal merit in cutting-and-pasting a famous world monument to make it look like Dracula's castle? I mean, beyond the obvious comedic result.
you've just described 99% of graphic design, welcome to behind the curtain
It looks cool tho
I still need to play it as well as Chronicles, already tried the 16-bit vanias (Rondo, Bloodlines, SCIV, Dracula X) but this one looks miles better in pretty much every regard.
It is not better than SCIV
SOTN looks very pretty yeah but it reuses some sprites from Rondo/Dracula X and Castlevania IV.
I'll also say certain effects look better on IV than on SOTN (like the giant floating skull, the transparency effect is better on IV, on SOTN they have this weird outline and the transparency is less emphasized.
why did you skip the 8-bit games?
>Why did you skip a bunch of crap games
The ignorant ape showing his lack of culture and bottomless stupidity.
Whine harder nostalgia tard.
You're an idiot for dimissing games without even playing them.
I did play them. I'm not that guy but I think he made the right choice.
be edgier and zoomier plz
You're the only one shitting yourself, anon. Get over the fact that everyone who lacks nostalgia thinks your favorite games ever are rightfully trash
please explain what is crappy about Castlevania 1 and 3
They kicked his ass.
I played it years ago and just started it again yesterday. In the manual or any legit mainline source is the button inputs for alucard's spells ever mentioned? if not i can imagine many players like my self being confused about what the hell the magic meter is for.
nvm I found it. i don't remember learning the spells through just playing the game though. But that was like 10 years ago
Basically every single practical thing stated in that page is wrong. I assume it was either a catastrophic string of translation errors or the manual was actually written from scratch by somebody who played the game for a couple hours and discovered a couple spell commands by mistake as it tends to happen.
haven't played it in about 10 years too but from memory I think you can buy spells from the librarian, but you don't need to buy them if you already know the moves
No, you can use them as soon as you get enough MP to do them, because later spells consume a lot.
Just wish it had an iota of challenge, even doing 'naked' no equipment runs is easy
Isn't no challenge better than impossible difficulty though?
>Just wish it had an iota of challenge, even doing 'naked' no equipment runs is easy
People always say this, then you ask them how many times they've beaten the game and it's like 20 times.
these people are the equivalent of guys who can't get themselves off unless they're death gripping it
Name another game this easy even after 20 playthroughs then. It doesn't change the game's difficulty, a challenging game will always be challenging.
>a challenging game will always be challenging
Truly.
Also agreeing with this, or at least sort of. Getting better at a difficult/challenging game doesn't mean it isn't such anymore.
Further, I don't know about any of you people, but even if I out and out hate a game, I'll still possibly play it over and over so I can maybe finally click with it, or just because I think maybe I didn't give it a fair chance and I'm being forgiving as fuck. Used to hate AoS until I accepted that people probably really do love it for the soul system regardless of its design and found a compromise that lead to a nigh complete reversal of my sour opinion on it.
You should watch some blind playthroughs of SoTN on youtube to see what it's like for a normal player.
You're basically like a speedrunner complaining that you know everything about the game and that it's too easy after you've put 1000 hours into it.
The fact that the game even made you play it that much by definition means you found it compelling and it was a good game.
I'm not denying that the difficulty curve levels off but that's a design choice. At that point it's just fun to see what a badass Alucard is and there is almost a sandbox element to the castle with trying out all your different moves and equipment.
Anyways, my point remains, complaining that the game is too easy after you've beaten it dozens of times is retard-tier levels of mentally handicap.
i played this shit blind in 98 and it was easy then, i dont give a fuck what retards do on youtube
the friends i have irl and online all agree the game is a pushover
lol fucking using youtube as a measurement
Igavanias didn't get actually good as games until Aria of Sorrow, though obviously this one looks way better.
The movement options in symphony are miles ahead of any other igavania. GBA and DS games are so incredibly sluggish compared to sotn.
You can zoom around at the speed of sound in HoD from the start of the game
>GBA and DS games are so incredibly sluggish compared to sotn
Only HoD is sluggish next to SotN.
braindead cotm contrarian
CotM is very nervous, much more than SotN. It's not because Nathan has less animation frames than Alucard that the game is more sluggish. SotN fans cannot see past surface level and pretty graphics.
Aria is a solid igavania, great even, but you know everybody else can see how purely contrarian you're being, right? Literally nobody is impressed that you don't want to be seen liking the thing liked by the majority.
I guess the phrasing was a bit aggressive, but it's certainly my sincere opinion after having played each game in the context they were released.
SotN is a fun experience that looks and sounds great, but the gameplay appeal is mostly in fucking around collecting items and finding every little detail the developers crammed in it. Otherwise, it barely operates as a real game in terms of challenge and difficulty design. Even if you don't linger around exploring or consciously grind levels, the game breaks by itself difficulty-wise barely 1/3 through a typical run.
CotM and HoD felt like different attempts at streamlining the successful aspects of it while adding some more traditional meat to the gameplay (i.e. difficulty). Both are actually very equivalent but opposite efforts polarized to opposite intents: Circle ends up being a bit too spartan and cuts too much in terms of personality and secondary appeal such as collecting, while HoD is WAY too focused on strange quirky secondary stuff like that.
Aria is variably competent or rough at the edges on a visual and aural level but still more confident than its two predecessors, and most importantly it finally manages to pull off the expansive collecting/exploration aspects that made Symphony a hit, while building on them with interesting new mechanics (Soul collecting mostly) and tying everything together in a properly realized framework of progression and challenge. After playing it, it's difficult not to realize what SotN was lacking even if you hadn't been able to put your finger on it until then. Also: hard mode and New Game + for
to play with all the new toys to your heart's content once you finish collecting everything.
Alright, I take it back. Respect for elaborating, anon.
it's too easy, but 'barely operates as a game' is hyperbole. It felt hard enough when I played it as a retarded kid, and there's stuff that can hit you pretty damn hard if you mess up
the difficulty progression is definitely busted though, and most bosses a complete pushover
Good post. SotN is a fun experience but I beg anons also try the other igavanias.
What the fuck
Castlevania 1 and 3 (JP) hold up to today's standards, I played them for the first time in 2018 and they were great. Stop being a moron
The DS trilogy are the peak of the series.
Alas, Bloodstained lacks coherence, although the 180 degree inversion is groundbreaking.
>and finding every little detail the developers crammed in it.
That's my favourite part of SOTN, you can tell that the developers were really having fun with how much more space they had with a 2D PS1 game.
The only great thing about this game is Richter mode
t. Richter
Richter mode makes it even more apparent how shallow the game is, you just constantly keep bumping into dead ends after walking long corridors
Kinda, though "shallow" is a bit extreme and misguided as a description; it certainly proves that the true appeal was in collecting things and trying different equipment and that otherwise the game amounts to just a bunch of boxes filled with random enemies without environments playing much of a part in combat difficulty or fun-factor.
The atmosphere, music, and enemy variety make up for the mundane level design of boxes.
wild how memorable games are the result of all their separate elements working together
The enemy variety could have amounted to something worthwhile gameplay wise, but the variety is mostly superficial too. With Alucard (and with Richter through most of the run) fighting enemies doesn't require learning their attack patterns and finding vulnerabilities like in early Castlevanias since casual damage is mostly meaningless save for in a handful of situations. It's just about unleashing your current best workhorse attacks and powering through; and with Richter, those workhorse attacks are the SAME during the whole game.
The point has been made over and over in this thread already but: it's a fun experience, just not a very stimulating one in terms of traditional challenge.
>you just constantly keep bumping into dead ends after walking long corridors
The two spike rooms are the only areas in the game Richter can’t access. Literally git gud.
Richter is boring because it just becomes
Special move movement: the game.
Correct, it's Air Dash simulator 1997 and everything threatening dies in one item crash
If anything, Richter mode exposes how little thought went into designing the game.
you idiot
richter mode exposes nothing but how the game wasn't designed to be played as richter, which isn't at all the same thing as being poorly designed overall
>the game wasn't designed to be played as richter
Richter mode exposes how fucking worthless going though the game is, you just backtrack to pick up trinkets that will force you to backtrack some more while the enemies and their placement barely matter, then you get to the inverted castle which is just a pain to navigate because it obviously wasnt made for that.
you idiot
Do you know what happens when you remove the fancy coating of the game and are left with the actual contents? You get Harmony of Dissonance. SotN fucking sucks at being a castlevania game and a metroidvania. It's nothing more than a collection of funny things each dev and artist did in their own corner the mindlessly dumped into the same box.
>this other game is bad so that means this one is!
Brainlet take
Both are bad, SotN is merely hiding the same stench behind pretty clothes.
HoD's map design is genuinely fucking awful and incompetent, the game can't be compared to SotN in any way. You're going through endless spaghetti hallways and hitting dead ends behind dead ends while the worst soundtrack in Castlevania history is droning in the background 24/7.
>HoD's map design is genuinely fucking awful and incompetent
Sounds like SotN.
>the game can't be compared to SotN in any way
HoD is SotN without the glitter.
>the worst soundtrack in Castlevania history
To be fair, the issue comes from the sound quality rather than the compositions themselves, which are great.
>Sounds like SotN.
Anyone who's played both games can tell you the map design in HoD is unimaginable levels of garbage.
>HoD is SotN without the glitter.
Completely nonsensical and non-defined argument. You might as well say every videogame in existance is a quarter bit tiger electronics wrist game with a lot of glitter.
>the issue comes from the sound quality
Yes I'm sure that's the problem, when castlevania games on the same hardware and considerably less powerful hardware had music that sounds 100x better
>Anyone who's played both games can tell you the map design in HoD is unimaginable levels of garbage.
Anyone who's played SotN can tell you how shit the backtracking is in the original castle and how garbage the inverted one is despite the actual lack of backtracking.
>Completely nonsensical and non-defined argument
No more crisp pixel art.
No more detailed animation.
No more CD music.
No more Alucard.
>HoD map design is garbage
I'm a repeat playthroughs kind of guy and as frustrating as the initial runs of HoD can be I at least appreciate that you can eventually find an efficient route through the castle. In SotN you have to flap-flap-flap through the Reverse Castle every single time.
This. SOTN is a game that gets worse every playthrough but first time playing its a 10/10 game
>SOTN is a game that gets worse every playthrough but first time playing its a 10/10 game
Huh, it was no good the first time around.
If anything it's worth playing for the art, music, and fun movement options. You'll also have fun feeling like you're "breaking the game" when you still don't know that everything breaks the game
>If anything it's worth playing for the art, music, and fun movement options
I absolutely agree with the quality of those, far from me the idea of dimissing those, but you don't play graphics or music, you don't even need a game to enjoy those things. The point here is that SotN is a game that's either poorly designed or missing any design altogether depending on which part you're playing. It's nowhere near the masterpiece some pretend it is, actually stripped from the superficial layer, it's barely better than the waste of time Simon's Quest is.
Nah, game is great. You're just bitter it outshone whatever shit game you prefer.
I agree with both of you. On the one hand, I don't think SoTN was designed with Richter in mind, or for that matter, Richter wasn't really designed for SoTN and it shows. On the other hand, I absolutely get what is meant by that trinket & backtracking spiel, because it's true. SoTN is a game you enjoy for fucking about with those trinkets, if you can get behind it. Take that out of the picture, and you're not left with much besides the aesthetics, even if you enjoy playing as Richter.
I was just in another thread talking about Curse of Darkness, actually, and I think I talked about this same thing there. Enjoyed the game at the start but was getting tired by the end, and it hit me immediately that I was more in it for the whole crafting cool shit than anything else, and once I got my favorite shit, I just didn't care for fully 100%ing the game in any capacity. The enemies are numerous but pretty dumb, bosses varied from big behemoths making sweeps and more zippy humans but I feel like I was basically fighting them the same way. Ironically, despite technically being a step up from Lament of Innocence in terms of mechanics, CoD feels like a step down in overall design, and not for a lack of trying, I would say. Still got enjoyment from it, but I don't know if I'd say I enjoyed it, if that makes sense.
Ironically, I actually really enjoy HoD. I guess for me it's because, unlike SoTN and even AoS, I really enjoy the movement and love the quick switch mechanics for toggling spell fusion. Exploration actually feels interesting because I'm doing it to figure out what to do and, story-wise, figure out what's going on, like it's actually a part of the challenge instead of just a vehicle to collect stuff if not straight up the end in and of itself, which made for an really enjoyable first playthrough. Subsequent playthroughs have been more looking to see a new way to do it again.
What I like doing for repeat playthroughs of HoD is using different subweapons to try out their magic arsenal. I never would have learned how good Wind/Fist is if I'd never forced myself to use the terrible punching subweapon the whole time.
It is one of those games that is so great, exceptions had to be made for it. Despite discouragement from the platform holder against pixel art, such a franchise was given the exception on the original Playstation and when all XBLA games had to be under 50MBs, they reduced it to around 100MBs and it was still allowed opening the door to larger filesizes. It is pretty good, but made really easy with Chrissagrim, but it is so fun to use.
>Despite discouragement from the platform holder against pixel art, such a franchise was given the exception on the original Playstation
I'm not so sure it was that nice, didn't Capcom have to blackmail Sony (of America?) into letting them publish X4 by threatening to not release Resident Evil 2?
If this is true, Sony are morons. I get why they wanted to focus on 3D, but outright wanting against the release of some of Capcom and Konami's most impressive 2D games ever is just stupid.
I've done a playthrough of this game every Halloween since 2005, and haven't missed a year yet!
I’m proud of you, anon!
I started playing it and it seemed fun but then I got to what I think was the second boss and kept dying and I gave up. It was like two guys at the same time, like a devil and a werewolf or something.
I prefer easy games.
Skill issue
Yeah sure but I'm unwilling to play anything where I die more than five times in a row. Only way I'd try again would be with savestates.
I prefer games where I can just coast through and I'll only die if I'm not paying attention.
bro that is easy as fuck, just grind for 5 minutes
Unironically skill issue
Use shield to block projectiles and use axes to throw at the flying bitch
>average jrpg player
Great pixel art, animation and music, shit tier balacing and game design. Begging to be fixed and improved.
It's an excellent game by Metroidvania standards, but best with the original voice actors (Robert Belgrade voicing Alucard, etc.)... Later recastings lose points for lack of cheesiness.
There's versions with a completely different dub? And retards actually play it?
i like it but it gets ridiculosuly easy by the time you get to the castle keep
>Metroid with thwordth
I liked it, cool game.
2 EZ
The church (it's not a castle) looks more like it was it poorly cut with the lasso in a Paint like program to me, hence the edges
ugly fucking american cover fart
Fixed.
I find the original Alucard-solo illustration (JP and PAL PS1 releases) is an excellent middle point between the dumbed down USA cover and the Saturn release one. It still fully sells the classy gothic atmosphere but lacks the overcrowded quality of the group piece, a good thing given the rococo visual style is already kind of overcrowded by default. I get the idea was to sell the enhanced protagonism of Richter and Maria in the SS version but still.
The n64 vanias, legacy of darkness in particular, were better and I am glad the gaming community is finally realising it
pathetically contrarian take
Good game but bad Castlevania
such soulful kino, Im surprised I never knew about this
SCIV and SOTN are the only good games of this series.
more like
>I like easy games with jarpig mechanics because skill-based games filter me
seethe, your series is shit
Becomes trivially easy once you know what you're doing. Half the fun is the music and art style, the other half is breaking it as much as possible.
I was to old to care about the advancements in graphics the gaystation provided, but this is 1 of 4 games I loved from that shit system. Fuck off moot
keep seething tendie
Thanks I will.
I love it, I always wish someone made a mod that just made it a bit harder, like multiplying the needed xp or level up or something along those lines
Would playing without armor do it? Imo the reason SotN is so easy is because Alucard is so tanky.
I could eviscerate every boss in the game in 3.2 milliseconds by spamming holy water, by the end you level up so much you take no damage anyway
The game would need a complete redesign.
What a terrible thread...
What a terrible game to have a thread.