Spudd 64’s Top Ten Favorite Video Games of All Time: 9

Talented artist and incredible friend, Spudd 64 will be counting down his top ten favorite video games in the next ten weeks. Enjoy!

- Kyle

You have to understand something here. I played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night very near the time it was first released. It was probably some time in the summer or fall of 1998. But prior to this, the last videogame I had played was either Vectorman or Earthworm Jim, both on the Sega Genesis way back in 1995. Yep, you’re reading that correctly. For almost 3 full years I did not touch the controls of one single videogame. Not in an arcade. Not on a home console. Not on a PC. Nothing. I was videogame free.

That’s a crucial thing to understand since it goes a long way in explaining just how playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was such a hand grenade to my brain.

My wife (girlfriend at the time) has a brother who has been obsessed with videogames ever since he was old enough to play them. He had been hounding us to buy this awesome brand new home console called a PlayStation (!) for months, but it wasn’t until he told us about this amazing new “Castlevania” game that we finally decided maybe it was worth the investment. See, both my wife and I had played some of those early NES and SNES “Castlevania” games and enjoyed them quite a bit. Her experience was more thorough than mine since I had only ever played the original game and never even got past the Mummy boss. She had played a few more than me though, and thought this new game sounded interesting.

We saved our pennies, picked up a PlayStation, a memory card, and the game and headed home. She had to work the next day so I remember I was the first to put that disc in the console and turn it on. Now remember, at that moment in my life, my most recent gaming experiences had been on the Sega Genesis 3 years before, and my only “Castlevania” experience had been the very first game on the venerable Nintendo Entertainment System. I was expecting to be in control of some lumbering, hairy, hulking, fur-vested Belmont with a clumsy whip who fought blocky, shuffling monsters. You can now imagine the hand grenade exploding in my brain when the majesty that is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night roared out of my television set.

After a brief introductory throwdown with Dracula, which I hardly understood, I was thrown right into the action with Alucard. Alucard! Has there ever been a cooler 2D character? After so many hulking, hunchbacked, filthy, whip-cracking Belmonts, here was a truly dashing heroic and just plain badass character. A man with dignity, class, and refined tastes. Even the Alucard sprite looked amazing with that flowing cape and those cool blue lines that followed him every time he dashed. It was strange, but I truly enjoyed playing as Alucard, something that rarely happens in videogames and especially in non-RPG videogames.

One of the great strengths of Konami’s “Castlevania” games is their sense of history. Even I, who had only played the first NES game, felt a sense of familiarity when, immediately upon entering the castle, I was faced with a long high-windowed room full of zombies and ghouls spawning endlessly from the rotting floor. I waded into them slashing my sword…a sword! Not a whip!…with glee. Only very soon, something happened. Something I was not expecting, but which only added to the richness of the game. I leveled up! Yes, I leveled up! My hit points rose a bit, my heart meter went up slightly…I realized I could actually become a stronger and better fighter by killing more and more monsters. After the rigid structure of that first “Castlevania” game and similar mechanics in every game from Sonic the Hedgehog to Earthworm Jim this concept of leveling up was incredible to me. Suddenly, I was that much more invested in spending time with the game. There were multiple tangible rewards beyond simply killing monsters or solving the game. There was a reason to play often and to play longer.

I was really hooked!

And the monsters? Dear lord, the bestiary in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was quite simply the most richly varied I had ever seen, and even today few non-RPG games can rival it for sheer imaginative ferocity. The spectral sword had my jaw hitting the floor…

…and the first bosses, Slogra and Gaibon, appeared in a room that was some weird synthesis of H.R. Giger and occult horror….

These were followed by…something…that looked like a lumbering green dinosaur with a half nude woman growing out of the end of its tail…

…corpses impaled on huge wooden poles that bounced madly through the galleries of Dracula’s castle…

…and demonic flying monstrosities torn from my nightmares…

…and the bosses! My God, to this day some of these creatures still haunt my sleepless nights! I remember fighting…and fighting and fighting and dying and fighting again and dying again…that bastard Galamoth for what seemed like hours. So colossal that he towered off the screen (unless he was stooping down to crush you with his electrical mace) that fight was fast, furious, maddening, and desperately fun.

I actually began hating, and I mean really hating, Galamoth so that when I finally defeated him, with something like 3 or 4 hit points remaining, I was screaming my head off. But the most disturbing, the most horrifying boss by far was Beezelbub…

A massive, rotting corpse impaled on grotesque iron hooks hanging suspended in the air of huge chamber. The fight is at first deceptively simple…jumping and swinging your sword at the different pieces of Beezelbub’s decaying bulk until they disintegrate in a shower of blood and flesh. But as the lower pieces are hacked away, you must jump higher and higher all the while contending with enormous blood-sucking monster flies. The entire battle becomes more and more tense, more and more revolting, and more and more horrific. When you’re finally finished, you truly feel as if you have cleansed the world of a disgusting and unholy evil.

And that’s what finally sealed the deal for me. Every single aspect of this apparently simple 2D side scrolling adventure game was a riot of visual dazzle. Quite simply, there was always something wondrous or amazing or horrific or terrifying to just sit and look at, let alone interact with. And yet the game play never suffered at all. The learning curve, especially for a novice gamer like myself, was challenging yet manageable. The rewards of the game were well-earned but numerous, from leveling up to gaining familiars to finding different foods and weapons. This game had it all-multiple endings, NPCs, a second hidden quest that might or might not be unlocked depending on the choices the player had made. To this day, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night stands out as not only the best “Castlevania” game, and not only one of the very best 2D side scrollers, but as one of the best games of all time. It is the only PlayStation 1 game that I have played more than twice, and I find myself playing it at least once a year simply to relive that sense of awe and horror that I had the first time I ran through it. A true and enduring classic.

- Spudd 64