Annotated Appendix: The Colosseum

Here's some actual inside dope about the making of this episode: It went wildly out of control right after I picked up the Shield Rod. Let's talk about that first.

See, the Colosseum is a relatively circuitous area of the game, not necessarily a straight line. This is good from a design perspective, actually; the player will find themselves wandering around in similar, though not redundant (it's not that big of a level) locations sussing out the best ways to get the Form of Mist relic, which is on display behind an obstacle from the second they walk in. Do they stumble into the boss fight right away? Certainly possible since it's pretty close to the entrance. But for the sake of a video series like this, boss fights are good places to end episodes since you can easily put a period on things that way. That meant showing the majority of the location before jumping into the final showdown, which takes a little cartographic forethought.

Totally blew that. What you don't see is that I save the game after grabbing and explaining the Shield Rod --a holy object to most players that destroys the game-- and lose track of where I was and what direction I was going. Not that big of a deal since I can just edit stuff together, but I had to reset the game and start from that save room, losing video footage of actual item drops that I could point out. Lame. Worse, I went through the second run at a faster clip, which meant that I had to re-record some of the dialog to reflect that I had already passed some rooms by the time I could actually talk about them. From the standpoint of you, the viewer, I wonder if you're ok with that. Sure, some places mean that I have to just sit tight and blabber for a while, but in terms of less significant spots like the torture chamber where the Blood Cloak is found, it probably isn't that big a deal. Hmm.

What you can also probably glean from my voice in this one is that I'm sick, and have been for weeks. This may be something you care about very little because you have cold, black heart and don't really give a poo for my well-being. That's fine. For me, and the fact that I'm doing this whole thing for some perverse sense of posterity, I want to get these out the door in the best possible state they can be in, which means that I was trying to get better first. Since I have the cold that wouldn't die, though, I made the executive decision to just get it out the door. So there.

Anyway, enjoy episode 7. I'll map the rest of the library and probably move on to either Orlox's Quarters or the Underground Waterway next (probably the former).

Sorrow No More

We can talk about Aria of Sorrow now.

I can't sit here and tell you that "I don't know how I got to this point," because that's both a stupid writer-y thing to say, and obviously false. The last 8 months or so of my life has been living Castlevania like one might live Buddhism, so the idea of playing some of the latter IGA-produced games was a logical next step. It is fair to say, though, that I didn't really think I would be doing it so soon into this whole odyssey. I guess after playing Harmony of Dissonance last month that I would try to hold out until the ASOTN series was much further along before going ahead with the later stuff. But, you know, there's a new Final Fantasy coming out tomorrow and I had some time to kill beforehand, so...

I mentioned before that I can recall buying Aria of Sorrow very clearly, and I wasn't making that up. What I didn't get into was how weird of a time in my life that was. Released in May of 2003 worldwide, I was six months removed from college at that point, and about to finish my first year of teaching at a middle school in northern Ohio; a job that terrified and delighted me. I was good at it, (I mean, I think I was), but was never sure if it was the right career path. Also, since I knew that I wasn't going to stay at this school next year --unilateral budget cuts meant a lot of teachers weren't returning that fall-- and deciding that I would move to Cleveland sometime in the summer after the school year ended, I was in a peculiar emotional place. Do I keep teaching after I move? Is it a good plan to leave the place where I grew up to be closer to my then-girlfriend? Am I doing the right thing at all, here?

In hindsight, all of that matters very little and a whole hell of a lot with equal weight. What immediately mattered in May of 2003, though, was that I had a lot of disposable income. Going from a perpetually broke college student to a person with even the meager salary of a first year school teacher was a dramatic lifestyle change. So, yes, when new video games came out that I wanted to buy, no longer was I forced to pine over them for weeks or months to eventually save the dough to purchase them or wait for a far off birthday or holiday gift. I could just walk into, say, a Target at 9pm, dig through a store, and drive home with a new Game Boy Advance cartridge. And that's what I did. It was great.

[Aside: You might also remember the last time I brought this up that my girlfriend, whom was happy to reap the benefits of this newfound infusion of 23 year-old semi-wealth, felt the need to heckle and judge me for this purchase. No, we didn't last.]

The battery memory on this Aria of Sorrow cart, then, tells me that I had completed the game in its entirety twice, with a middle file indicating that I had started the bonus Julius Mode and got bored with it at roughly 4 minutes and change. That makes sense. After playing Richter mode to hell and back in Symphony as a teenager and found that there really wasn't that much to it, I never put much stock into these extra modes, so I just sort of picked at them in subsequent games (though, this would change eventually. We'll get to that some other time). Maxim mode in Harmony of Dissonance was similarly messed with for a requisite 15 minutes or so, and this was no different. Yet this Julius mode file will remain on the Aria cartridge for some sentimental reason I can't really fathom now. I don't get it either. Let's just talk about the game.

The first thing that struck me all of these years later (aside from the cooler color palette as opposed to Harmony's more warm red and purple tones) was just how confident the whole game feels as compared to its predecessor. While still produced by Igarashi, Aria's director was Junichi Murakami, whom replaced Harmony's Takeshi Takeda, and the games fell noticeably different in scope from the opening cut scene. The graphics are clearer, the system mechanics are more intricately designed, and it feels as though IGA had either taken more of an active hand in development, or that he and whatever overlapping members of both games' teams learned plenty from their first experience with GBA hardware that they had a handle on things.

It really boils down to castle design. Gone were most of the empty rooms full of platforms in favor of level designs that were more Symphony-like, meaning open spaces for flight and plenty of breakable walls that lent to a sense of mystery that the previous game lacked. But it's not completely in-line with Symphony's best designs, though. As I play through Symphony for the Annotated series, the subtle ways the game directs you to the next destination are very meticulously placed. Some, like the Library Card in the Colosseum, are more overt, while others, like the Stopwatch subweapon in the Long Library right next the Form of Bat relic, take a bit more inference on the player's part to connect the dots, which is awesome. Aria only really does this once that I could tell, and that was right at the beginning of the game when Soma kills his first Peeping Eye enemy. If you're stupidly lucky, you might score the soul of this monster on your first time killing it, and if you find yourself equipping the soul right away, you'll quickly deduce that there's a hidden room behind a breakable wall in that same spot. This enemy placement was obviously purposeful, then. Very neat, but not enough as I didn't detect anything else in the game that gave me this same sense of direction, just the normal innate encouragement that I better map everything and just take mental notes of where to go after finding X ability.

I'm venturing to guess that this was done very intentionally. Aria, honestly, is a pretty short game, and now that the concept of two somewhat different castles from both Symphony and Harmony was becoming old hat, the conceit was wisely dropped in favor of a singular, more interesting area to conquer. How do you keep people from bulldozing the game, then, and give the player bang for their buck? Grinding. Tons of grinding. And worse (or, depending on your perspective, better, I guess), it's required grinding for 100% completion. If you're reading this, you probably already know full well about Aria's enemy skill collecting system. What you probably haven't really cared to put together is that it's not completely necessary to finish the game by mindlessly running in and out of rooms to respawn enemies to farm abilities. If you just want to run the game and get an ending, you can probably do it in 3-5 hours. Not a lot of time for a game back then (I can do Symphony in 3ish hours at 200+% completion, but that's because I know it backwards). If you really want to dig through every nook and cranny, you need to collect a few specific enemy powers to do so. Screw clever clues to guide you to the next destination, then. IGA and the team wanted you to spend hours killing mooks and experimenting with their powers. Roadmaps weren't necessary.

The trade-offs between Aria and it's predecessor, then make a whole lot more sense now that I'm writing them down. For one, Harmony is a much faster-moving game. Even though I feel that Aria can be shorter from an hour count perspective, actual castle-mapping crawls in comparison. There's no easy dash ability baked into the protagonist, and enemy soul abilities to speed things along are few and far between. This also feels intentional because with all of that grinding to be done, the game needs to set a certain sense of pace. It's honestly kind of a pain, but not nearly as much as Aria's less-favorable hit boxes on weapons. In the last several games (and this includes my recollection of Circle of the Moon, but I could be wrong), the point of animation that actually damage enemies is far more generous, so even though Alucard may be swinging a sword horizontally it will cut a monster directly above or below him. That's not the case for Soma in Aria of Sorrow. Weapons and the way they're wielded are now specific to where the attack lands in this game, and that takes a lot of getting used to. At least it did for me after such a steady diet of easy striking in other games.

What Aria has over the last several franchise entries, though (and this includes Symphony), is a satisfying sequence of endgame boss fights. The duel with Julius Belmont is tense and challenging, but completely fair. The final showdown to get the real ending is way more fun than I recall. Having ditched the usual last encounter with Dracula for plot reasons turned into a blessing in disguise.

But maybe Aria's biggest failing and smartest design choice is the soul collecting mechanic, and that's something that we can debate until we're blue in the face, but it doesn't really matter. Aria of Sorrow is a good GBA game insomuch is that it ditches things from Harmony that didn't work and replaced them with a better designed castle to explore with consequences to movement and combat. That's fine, and a fair enough evolution to what had become the formula for the series by this point. I've begun playing Dawn of Sorrow, but this hasn't happened in earnest yet. My guess is that it will be more of the same, and my memory of it is that it's exactly that. But compared to Harmony, a pretty good but by no means spectacular stepping stone, I'll take that any day of the weak.

Annotated Appendix: The Royal Chapel

This one was a pain, and I think it shows.

Not only were there delays on its completion (and more delays that personally hurt, which I don't want to get into), for some reason, this whole episode just feels... off to me. The muffled audio is probably a really good sign of that, and maybe I'm just being my own worst critic, but I just get this feeling that the seems are really showing in this ep. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I'd appreciate the feedback.

If there's an epicenter from which that paranoia spawns, though, it must be from the fact that this is the first section of the game where I have no direct developer commentary to pull from. The Entrance had tons of info online about it straight from the producer's mouth, and other locations had their own share of tidbits from people involved with the game here and there. The RC, though? Nope. I had to strip mine any shred of knowledge that I could via the Castlevania wiki and other internet sources. It's still good stuff, and all accurate to the best of my knowledge. Sadly, though, I couldn't just fly to Japan to get the game's directors to play the whole thing with me (the closest thing is the Double Fine Dev's Play video, which is referenced constantly anyway), so cool, in-depth dev history on specific locations is going to start becoming a little scarce.

I worry that I also shot my wad a little bit with the backtracking filler about magic use, but since people have complained --rightfully, I might add-- that I should be using it more often to get through the game, it was worth addressing because it will absolutely come up in the Colosseum video.

What all of this angst is getting at, I suppose, is that there's always going to be something interesting to say or point out about the game. I'm just worried that I've gone through the really fascinating deep knowledge because it all seemed front loaded. Maybe that should be your incentive to keep watching the videos, though. YOU NEVER KNOW, or whatever.

I'm also starting to kick around the idea of starting a Patreon for the channel for a few reasons. The first is to help me replace anything that might go south during this whole endeavor, like another disc if a meteor strikes or something and ruins my original, an OEM PlayStation 2 pad because all of this backdashing is certainly destroying a few buttons, or (God forbid) my laptop because it's already doing more than I should be asking of it. The second is that I was thinking of doing a video of some of the differences in the Saturn version to coincide the quieter moments in the inverted castle. I know I could just emulate that stuff, but again, I don't want to put any more undue stress on the PC than I have to. Part of me feels as though I should probably just buy a copy of the Saturn version to have around anyway, too. I don't know. Still tossing the idea around, so any opinions on that would be welcome, too.

Anyhoo, thanks again for watching.

Annotated Update

The newest episode is coming along a bit slower than previous videos, so I just wanted to drop a line and say that I haven't given up or anything and that The Royal Chapel will show up sometime next week.

Here's why: My normal routine sort of fell out of whack the last few weeks and that didn't offer a lot of time to get the voice recording finished. It didn't help that the script for the Royal Chapel is the longest one so far. In my last pass of edits to it, I just inserted another multi-paragraph section that's going to require even more voice work, and that's what's really slowed things down.

Outside of that, two large, unforeseen factors have eaten up my evening free time. One of them had to do with perennial losers the Cleveland Indians blowing a 3-1 series lead to give other perennial losers the Chicago Cubs a World Series victory. I have not had a lot of sleep, so I'll concede defeat here and say congratulations, Cubs fans. You really do deserve the win after such an absurd drought, but fuck you all the same.

The second thing was some nice, light freelance work, which was a nice change of pace. You can read here (my first published thing for Paste!).

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a buttload of Iron & Wine to listen to while I sulk the day away.

Annotated Appendix: The Long Library

Hey, really quick...

(takes you by the hand)

(leads you down a flight of stairs)

(opens the door to a dark, grimy alley)

(whispers in your ear)

...Super Castlevania IV isn't very good.

Yes, this is my opinion, but yes, it is counter to the cultural narrative that surrounds such a long-running and well-loved series of games. Am I saying this just to be adversarial to popular opinion? Mmmmno; the entire world seems to love it, but it's not like some classic piece of art that's stood the test of time to become a bonafide masterpiece like, I don't know, For Whom the Bell Tolls or something. If that were the case, me saying that I don't like it is just being contrarian for it's own sake. I'll admit that it has such a pervasive feeling of fond remembrance, though, that it's coming close, but when it comes down to brass tacks and you feel the need to play through every Castlevania game prior to 1997, I'm going to get you good and drunk so you have no choice but to tell the truth, and I'll put 100/1 odds that you'll find it about as mid-tier in this series as most of the handheld entries (at best). This whole paragraph isn't meant to hold a finger in front of your nose and repeat that I'm not touching you, but if I get through to even one of you that Castlevania IV is overrated, I feel as though this holy mission has been worthwhile. I also think that the second Bloc Party record is every bit as good as the first (though, for totally different reasons). Fight me.

WAIT. That isn't to say that it's godawful by any stretch, and there has been a frustratingly large minefield of lousy Castlevania games in the past (The Adventure, I'm looking right at you). As most know, it was a launch title for the Super Nintendo in 1991 and did its best to shoehorn in eveything that what was under the SNES' hood as far as Mode7 programming tricks were concerned, but to the game's detriment. I've always found the pace to be strange and haphazard, and aesthetically gross to look at with its sort of marionette-style sprites. The difficulty is also all over the goddamn map, making some of the later levels downright impenetrable compared to what Simon runs into even five minutes earlier. However, and this is where I'll give its proponents their druthers, it's just experimental enough as a piece of the series to be interesting with the multi-angled whipping and slightly altered jumping physics. If anything, I absolutely love that Konami had decided to do a remake of the first Castlevania from the NES, while also (at least from my perspective) tossing in some of the quirks from the lesser known entries of the series like Haunted Castle and Vampire Killer, and is still better than both of those by a country mile. I've heard people say that it's something of an evolutionary dead end of a franchise that continued to grow, and that's a fair assessment. I don't think it's an unequivocal piece of shit, but I do not think it's all that great. But I'm glad it exists, I suppose.

Alas, this was what I needed to put myself through for the second time in six months last weekend when I realized --because I'm stupid-- that I didn't get nearly enough footage from C4 as I originally thought, which is why Episode 5: The Long Library went up on Monday this week as opposed to last Friday. The whole thing was done, but after extensive checking and copious swearing, I found that I had zero footage of the enemies that originated in the Super Nintendo mediocrity. Lucky for me and my sense of good taste that I could easily look up where the Une, Ectoplasm, and Spellbooks where and just use codes to start at those levels (also so I could get footage of the guy and his dog, which will make sense later). Anyway, Episode 5 is now a thing that can be consumed like the insatiably filthy savages that you are, you beautiful internet goofs. Go watch it.

As far as actual stuff going on in the video, this one was hard to make because of the Librarian alone. Since I'm probably never going back to this guy in future videos, I had to recount all of what he sells as the game goes forward and give enough time to say something interesting about them, but close to none of the stuff I mention is on his list of goods at such an early point in the game. It was a pain, but that's how it goes. Luckily, this episode was super straightforward, though, because there really isn't a lot of ground to cover without the form of bat. There was some dead air on the mic as I backtracked a bit, but like I said in an earlier Appendix, sometimes, there just isn't a way around that, unfortunately. Hopefully, the Royal Chapel will be better in that regard.

PS-I'm finally getting shit for my mispronunciations of certain words. I guess only one linguistics class from my undergrad just wasn't enough. One more step to Making It!

Do You Know What Dissonance Means?

Last week, after taking stock of having four videos in the can and recording the voice for a fifth (which should be up sometime later this week), I decided to take a quick break from making Castlevania videos to... play another Castlevania game. Yes, this seems both redundant and a little dumb, and I think I actually heard your eyes rolling as you read this. That's ok! I also played a little bit of The Order 1886, but come on, you really don't to hear about that, right?

I think my reasoning is sound, though, because the game I played was Harmony of Dissonance for the GameBoy Advance. Now, if you're a longtime fan of the Castlevania franchise --and I assume you are since you're reading this and following the video series-- you'll recognize this game as one of the lesser siblings to some of the other handheld games in the series like Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow. That's an assessment that's not really unfair, which I suppose I'll get to in a second. What makes it worth talking about, though, is its placement in the timeline of the franchise's releases. I'll get to that, too.

My own history with HoD is pretty mundane. It was released on the GameBoy Advance in 2002. I was 22 at the time, and since I bought a GBA specifically for 2001's Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (a game I contend is unfairly maligned), the purchase of the next game in a franchise I really, really like was a foregone conclusion. Funny enough, though, that's really all I can remember. I can tell you with resolute clarity when I got Circle of the Moon because I was flat broke, waiting tables at a fucking Chili's, and had made a conscious decision to spend money on entertainment rather than food and rent for the next several weeks. I can also clearly recall being in a Target in Bowling Green, OH just as I was transitioning out of the bubbling stream of college life into the hell bog of post-undergrad with my then-girlfriend hunting all over for a copy of HoD's followup, Aria of Sorrow. She was heckling me the whole time. It was not very charming of her. So, now that I'm reflecting on it, I can't tell you why, for the life of me, I don't remember playing this game.

What I can tell you, though, is that it's the portable Castlevania I've played the most, and again, I'm really not sure why. I mean, sure, I've got 100% saves on both of my Circle of the Moon and Aria of Sorry carts and have picked at them again over the years here and there, but I have three, count 'em, three 100% saves on HoD, and I had to actually delete one to start a new game. I don't remember loving this, or any other handheld Castlevania game that much to completely run the table on it three (now four) times, so what gives? I think I just used this as my long flight video game for a long stretch, maybe because it felt easier than the other games at the time. I can conjure up some ephemeral knee-jerk feelings of disappointment with it over the years, but that's about as far is it goes. Judging by recent events, that seems accurate right now.

But even though the game made almost zero impression on me, it's been on my mind a lot lately. Since making the Annotated Symphony of the Night videos and digging into the minutia of both the series and its creators, I made sort of a point to basically cease all thought regarding the further Castlevania games post-Symphony like I was partitioning off a room in my house or something. However, unless your name is Tyler Durden, people don't really do that, and as I was going through some of the cut content from Symphony and re-reading interviews with Toru Hagihara and Koji Igarashi (the game's co-directors), I couldn't help but ponder what direction they (mostly Igarashi) took the series after what they had learned making Symphony.

I wonder about the development of Symphony often, and any other game that's such a resounding critical success, really. Do they know that they're making a masterpiece? Honestly, I don't think most developers do; judging by how often the team says that some things "barely made the game" and how others "barely worked until just before the end," it seems logical that, like all video game development, that it was spectacular that the whole thing got finished and was working in a fair state. The fact that it was good, if not great was basically a small miracle. After all, this was a point in game development before copious focus testing and extensive Q/A, so it was a race against time to get the thing out the door (and they even convinced Konami to delay it for them while they continued to work on it, which doesn't sound like common practice at the time --probably because the publisher didn't give a shit about it compared to the other Castlevania game also in development). Obviously, some things work in development while others don't, and it's ok to assume that one learns quite a bit about game design and production --even if you've already shipped games in the past-- while working on a project. Bearing all of this in mind, you would infer that Harmony of Dissonance would have been not only a superb video game, but superior to Symphony of the Night.

But it wasn't. Even if we were judging the game on it's own merits, it's certainly not something awful (for a video game, for a game on the GBA, or even a game in the Castlevania catalog), but the added weight of both it's immediate and deep past doubles down its status as a disappointment. Harmony is a mediocre game. Worse; there's no reason for that whatsoever.

For context, let's talk about the GameBoy Advance and Circle of the Moon. Plenty of smarter people than me have spoken about the GBA's history, so in sum, it was a console that Nintendo developed years before they actually released it because, well, they didn't have any competition for a GameBoy that was already stomping every other handheld on the market. The thing was inexpensive to manufacture and housed juggernaut franchises like Pokemon. By the time the GBA actually did get set free in 2001, the parts were practically off-the-shelf and it was running on a processor that most seasoned developers knew how to tease in their sleep. Castlevania: Circle of the Moon was a launch title. Wait, no; CotM was a hell of a launch title. While of course lacking a bit of the depth of its predecessor, it was, in practical terms, Symphony of the Night on the go. But its problems were emblematic of the GBA in one fell swoop: it was extremely dimly lit, so it was almost impossible to see without a proper light source, and the sound chip was just this side of terrible. It was also a Castlevania game made by guys that weren't stewarding the franchise. Apparently, this was a huge problem.

So the task for the followup was twofold: First, it would be controlled by Iga, and would bring the artistic know how of the man that already gave us one of the best video games ever. Second, it would attempt to solve some of the first game's technical failings while still operating within the confines of what the GBA could actually do. One of those things worked, and even then, it comes with an asterisk.

But what works was an easy fix. CotM had a dark, morose color palette of hunter greens and burnt browns alongside the dark gray corridors. Harmony went all the way to the other side of the color wheel for bright reds and blues to brighten the visuals and alleviate the strained eyes that fought with the GBA's lack of a back-lit screen. As an artistic choice, it's fine, but boring. Whole chunks of the castle are lifeless and empty. Backgrounds have very little quality outside of the spots with obvious graphical gimmicks to make everything easier to see, but it makes the game feel underpopulated and sparse. The redundancy of the colors actually gets old pretty quickly, too.

This just picks at the scab of the bigger problem --the overall design. Too much is borrowed from Symphony, and not enough of it was thought through. Wisely, Harmony drops the pretense of a "secret" second castle to explore and makes it a plot point early on, which is a no-bullshit attitude I appreciate (especially in a game meant to be mobile). The problem is that actually navigating through both castles is an absolute nightmare. Rooms that warp you from one castle to the next mostly take you to the opposite side of the map from wherever you started, and since you're covering the exact same area (just with different enemies and a changed color palette), you're constantly checking your map to see where you are and where you're going, which ruins any kind of intuitive flow that the game may have. I can see that the design philosophy was to basically have you cover one side of one castle, then warp to the other side of a second castle, and then to figure out how the two meet in the middle was a fine choice on paper, I really do. But there's an over-reliance on backtracking here that's a conceit of the second castle, which is a rut that Iga's team fell into too quickly after it worked the first time in Symphony.

Actual traversal works even worse. While I can give it credit for re-implementing the dashes and slides that were taken out of the admittedly stump-footed Circle of the Moon, the need to explore old areas again and again for clues to the next location to uncover or hidden item to collect to finish the game is really hurt by the lack of actual warping for speedy travel throughout the castle. Again, I'm calling this a problem because there's double the amount of ground to cover. Once you have enough abilities to move more freely about the castles, it's a total slog to go from one to the next to double check if you missed something or maybe map that one room you couldn't reach before. Yes, metroidvania games by and large have this problem, but at least Symphony had ways around it, and I can't fathom how an Iga-produced game in this series would drop those mechanics with so much area to explore.

What's weird is that the actual construction of the castle exacerbates the problem, because most of the rooms are redundantly sized, and the few more open areas are only that way insomuch as that platforms and corridors bottleneck you back to a more comfortable size. I know that sounds weird, but since they ditched the ability from the previous game to fly wherever you feel like, the vast majority of the castle is replete with platforms to jump on and ceilings that cramp the area. It always feels like you are confined and not set free in a living, breathing location. Many of the more "open" areas actually seem claustrophobic, and it robs some of the exploration of the joy of discovery. Boss encounters are just as bad as they all take place in rooms of exactly the same size as each other, and practically all of them are of similar physical makeup, making most easily routed and steamrolled with the appropriate weapon load out. Really, as long as you can read an attack coming, you can keep your distance in these tight locations and pound them from afar.

Its place in the scope of Castlevania history also seems odd and wrongheaded on further recent reflection. Now, I'm not a timeline or cannon psycho. I (mostly) don't give a crap about how this fits into that and who birthed who and what time-traveling head of cabbage repaired which dude's fridge or whatever. But since Symphony was a game that was originally supposed to put a period on the previous games of the franchise, the fact that it was a success put the other games in the series in a peculiar state. I mean, sure, we're dealing with fiction here, and campy fiction at that, so it's not like Iga couldn't shoehorn something new into the loosely defined state of Castlevania up to that point, but part of the design of Symphony was a protagonist that was different than in previous games to help redefine what those games could be. Rolling back to a whip-cracking Belmont was both reductive and ill-fitting.

Let me clarify: I'm paraphrasing here, but the older, level-by-level linearity of classic Castlevania games was defined by the Belmont family's movement ability; specifically, their lack thereof. Symphony, then, gave us a protagonist that was outside of that mold, and holy shit, was this guy agile! He could alter the trajectory of his jump and could equip various weapons with different attack lengths and speeds. Minor though it sounds, this stuff was a drastic tonal shift for these games. In circling back to a Belmont main character, Iga's team decided to try the best of both worlds, and there's something lost in the translation: Juste Belmont attacks in a methodical fashion like his predecessors, but has the otherworldly ability to float along in mid air like Alucard. This means that there's no commitment to any movement outside of a jumping attack, so other than just tanking enemies with attack after attack, there's no threat to zipping around foes and doing your worst to them. He feels almost too mobile, even though the whipping can feel at times slow, and the exploration-heavy design of these kinds of games works against combining what worked in previous games to how it shakes out here. It seems that this was something that Iga and his team figured out quickly, because most other franchise games spun back to the more Alucard side of things, or was rejiggered just enough to fit correctly for 2006's Portrait of Ruin for the DS.

Callbacks to previous games for Harmony also feel like dipping back in the well a bit too much here, too, but that might just be a matter of taste. After all, Iga and Hagihara crammed basically everything from previous franchise games into Symphony as a way to say farewell, but it feels particularly redundant here to revisit plot points of the first two Castlevanias when they were dealt with almost 20 years prior to this.

Harmony of Dissonance was not directed by Koji Igarashi, so there's a natural feeling that it's the fault of lesser creators (like Takeshi Takedo, whom actually did direct it). This is misplaced, I feel. Really, this is the Dark Souls II problem in reverse. In that game, series director Hidetaka Miyazaki took a back seat while other From Software employees guided the game to completion. When it was release, Dark Souls II was given the misguided resentment of fans because it wasn't helmed by the original creator. I'm not the first person to say this, but there's a fallacy here that one guy carries the weight of everybody on a game's development team, kind of like the extreme, zealous end of auteurism philosophy. Tons of people make video games. Yes, it might be the guidance of a singular vision to get them there, but that's a fluid thing, especially during active development. The point of Harmony of Dissonance, though, was to wipe the slate clean of Circle of the Moon; a non-canonical side project not blessed by the Castlevania team's newfound creative direction after Symphony of the Night. In fact, Konami did their best to get the old band back together from Symphony to right a ship that wasn't even that far adrift. The fact that this game was so sub par from this kind of talent, led by Iga, is downright strange.

As a footnote to a series so beloved, it's an odd artifact. As a video game, though, really, it's fine. I didn't even get to other failings like the ponderously terrible music (it sounds like an ICOM RPG at some points, which is weird and kind of cute but really just badbadbadbad), but heaping more blame on it takes away from the fact that it's a perfectly fair game. There are redundancies and bad design choices just dripping from this game, but you could do a lot worse in portable Dracula-killing than Harmony of Dissonance in the grand scheme of things (though, if you're going to pick one, you should probably just skip the baloney and play Aria of Sorrow). Maybe in another ten years or so I'll come back around to it to see if my views have changed. Since that's exactly what I did for a game I evidently barely remember, though, probably not.

Annotated Appendix 3

Finally, Episode 4. Be thrilled and amazed (please).



This one was actually pretty easy to make, all things considered, because there wasn't as many strange and outlandish things to reference like last episode's Bela Lugosi clip. I say that with a caveat, though; it turns out that I have copious footage from PC Engine's Rondo of Blood, but only the normal route through the game. It turns out that I'm an idiot, and didn't record the alternate levels, which certain enemies are exclusive to. I guess this one would have been up a lot sooner than it is because I had to grab some more video last night, but hey, if that's what it takes to show you what a vintage Armor Lord looks like, so be it.



I went digging around the vast internets to see if there were any shreds of evidence to the Alucard Bedroom that would have been at the top of the castle, but no dice. There's some nice stuff on The Cutting Room Floor, though, which will definitely show up in future videos about our next stop, the Long Library. It's a great site for that and piles of other fun stuff, but the problem is a lot of those things don't really fit into this video series that well, like their whole separate page for unused audio recordings. I mean, I have to bring some of that stuff up, but things like alternate Richter grunts and such are really minor in comparison. Check it out anyway because whomever runs that site is a goddamn internet hero.



I guess the only other beef I might have with this one is the choreography problems. I'm really trying to get that stuff locked down. I really am.



Thanks again for watching, cats and kittens.

Annotated Appendix 2

Mmmmmk, so here we have Episode 3...

It doesn't look like it, but this one kind of took forever to make, even though it's not quite like the information dump that the first episode wound up being.

For one, the info here was a little challenging to parse out when it came to Maria and the Clock Room. It's kind of a lot of info to get through, so I tried to write a script that was as succinct as possible while also covering a lot of ground. Now that it's out in the wild, I hate it, really. This is one of those instances where I recall all of the times I dreamed about doing something like this and what I would say about any given topic. I'm absolutely sure that in my head I had way more interesting things to say (or at least more fun ways of saying them). It's done and it's out, though, so fine. Let's all move on with our lives.

This video was also chock full of little tidbits that weren't in the original script that had to be added with some re-recording later. I'm pretty sure the differences in the dialog levels make that abundantly clear. Truth is, I had to do those extra audio recordings at something like 11:30 at night when everybody's asleep in the house (including my year-old baby), so I couldn't have these saucy tones booming into my little Snowball mic.

More on that end, and really the point I'm slowly getting to, is that this has been a very complicated couple of weeks for me professionally. My work life is changing pretty drastically --and not really for the better-- and this is by far the busiest time of the year for me, so other things like video editing and script writing didn't get the attention they probably could have used. I'm glad I caught some of the glaring flaws before completing the video rendering and putting on the internet, but even though this is much lower on the priority list for me than how I feed my family and pay my mortgage*, I need to be a more careful of the script writing to make sure all of the facts are in there. This is going to be especially true for a few of the upcoming videos like the Outer Wall and the Long Library where there's lot to talk about.

Whew. Ok. Another difficult part of this video is plugging in the background filler to the backtracking moments, like when I opened up the section previously blocked in the Entrance and went back through the Cthulu/Devil fight and back up the chimney with the Marionettes. Not a super long section, but definitely a lot of silence to fill, so it was a matter of finding the best piece of trivia to inject there that's both appropriate in length and situationally useful. I tried a few different chunks of dialog to use, and they were either too long, or it made more sense to use them in a future video when there's an example that's found in the same place (like, say, explaining elemental damage).

Alright. On to the Outer Wall.

*Really, not that much lower.

Annotated Appendix 1

Well, hi there.

That thing at the top? Yeah, that's Episode 2 of the series, which was just posted early this morning. I haven't had a chance to dig into the episodes here since posting them, but the response to the first was very promising, and the comments were more than supportive. If you're reading this and you've commented, then thanks again for the views and the kind words.

Let's get into the process a bit regarding this first two videos. These both wound up being kind of awkward with the way it seems that I'm forced to do these for one reason: choreography. See, there's just too much to say about a given topic that by playing a normal game and not stopping to smell the roses once in a while that it's certain that my commentary won't be able to cover everything. A good example of this is in the first episode where I hit three big facts about the Death encounter. Without stopping there for a certain length of time, I wouldn't have enough room to talk about the Bone Scimitar enemies (both of which are unique, it turns out) and the Red Rust sword that the red one drops. It turns into real logistical problem when actually playing the game.

The solution, then, is to write tight scripts, record them in Audacity, annotate them so I know what's coming and when, and then listen to them through headphones as I'm playing the game. As you can imagine, it's kind of a painstaking process, but I'm trying to cut down on the amount of time that Alucard is either bum rushing through commentary or just standing around in silence, so I'm trying to get it down to more of an exact science.

The other problem with this (which is something I re-learned the hard way the other night) is that SotN isn't a game with multiple save files. If I complete a section and think, you know what, I should re-record that, I have to do it with a separate run of the game, which is something I'm trying to actively avoid. I think people would eventually catch on, and my schadenfreude would be lost. We don't want that, do we? Honestly, I want some semblance of consistency with the videos, and to me, that means one unified playthrough. I'm not saying that this won't happen down the line, though, so please keep your pitchforks and torches in the shed now that you know the reasoning.

The good news is that the actual recording and editing is getting a lot easier now. I've decided to put the kibosh on the PS3's smoothing option when playing PSX games. This doesn't completely translate into crystal clear pixels on a YouTube video, but it makes me feel better, I guess. I'm still using the copy of Symphony that my parents gave me for Christmas when I was 17, though, so I'm at least getting a sense of authenticity with it, even though it's not on original hardware.

The second episode was much more dry of interesting things to say, though, sadly. One thing I probably should have mentioned is that most of the enemies in Alchemy Laboratory are all old timey monsters from the very first game, other than the Spittle Bone, Bloody Zombie, Bone Scimitars and the bosses. In fact, they all come from the second to last level where you fight Death, which may have something to do with the Grim Reaper's appearance at the entrance and Slogra/ Gaibon being the first boss, but that's a bit of a stretch. Anyway, the Marble Gallery is a larger area, and I should still have more fun things to talk about more often.

Part of those fun things is something I'm going to playfully call "backtrack filler." Mapping the entirety of the game (not counting outside of the castle, which I'll only briefly mention) can take a fair amount of time, and there's definitely going to be some episodes that are a little on the quiet side as I blast through old areas to find previously inaccessible chambers and locations. I'll be using these moments to talk about as much of the background development history of the game as I've dug up. I worry that I don't have enough to fill the entirety of the game, but I suppose I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

So yeah. Part 2. It's a scene, man. Lucky for me, I have a week off of work soon, so I'll try to blast through another video within that time, because life is about to get pretty nutty for me over the next month or so.

Thanks again for watching.

Annotated Update: I Swear This is Going to Happen

Aaaaaaand hello.

Just a few updates while things are moving along. Last week, I posted the intro video on YouTube. It's still a little rough and could probably use some polishing, but I needed the thing to see see some daylight for my own sake. It's been a few months since I started this whole thing in earnest, and it's discouraging not to have much to show for it after a long stretch. I mean, I'm certainly fine playing Castlevania games whenever I get a free moment, but after a while, it was starting to feel like I made this whole thing up as an excuse to sit around and play a bunch of Castlevania games (again, not the worst thing).

Now, I get that having this crudely edited video on the internet without context seems kind of dumb, so I've been working as quickly as I can to get an actual first video up by (hopefully) this weekend.

Of course, there have been snags:

First, I decided I was going to hook up that magically little Elgato to my PlayStation 2 to get Symphony footage from that. Nope. I'm running the PS2 off of component cables, which isn't normally a bad thing if we're trying to grab footage from, say Vice City, Stella Deus, or any other rando PS2 game. The problem is that the console downsizes the resolution automatically when you plug in a PSOne disk, which the component cables can't (or won't) properly send through the Elgato. Normal composite cables would do the trick, but A: I don't have them anymore, B: I want my PS2 games look as saucy as they can on the beautiful mountain of a TV it's hooked into, and C: there isn't a chance in hell that I would go looking for some at this point, especially if money is involved.

No problem! I have a PlayStation 3, which is spectacular in that all PS3s natively play PSOne games, and they naturally upscales them to wondrous effect. But this Elgato, though, was given to me second hand (read: bestowed upon me not unlike from on high. I can't complain) and without the appropriate PS3 cable. I tried just hooking in the PS2's component cables, but couldn't get them to properly work. I didn't want to do it, but I wound up nagging the guy that gave it to me to dig around his parents' house for the PS3 chord, because it would have cost close to another $20 with shipping to get a new one. Nuts to that.

This minor setback has been solved, thank goodness. The dude found the cable and dropped it off the other night, and the PS2 components would have worked fine if I would have just been smart enough to properly configure them, so the only real "problem" here was my own idiocy.

But let's keep that trend going for snag #2 --the voice recording. Over the weekend, I decided to record the VO for the first script, which covers the moment you turn the game on through the entrance to the Alchemy Laboratory (which is still pushing 15 minutes!). Now, I solved all of my dialog recording problems about two weeks ago, so I sat down, freewheeled an intro speech that will run like a teaser before each episode, and the pulled up the first script. There were a few stumbles, sure, but that could be easily edited out. But no, this whole thing needs to get recorded again after some extensive audio surgery last night. I suppose you could blame the vodka for this, but again the real problem here was me. (Lesson: only record your voice drunk for podcasts).

Snag #3 has to do with making a better title card and an appropriate background for the videos so you're not staring into the fringes of a black abyss while they're playing. I'll get to that later today on my way through snag #4...B roll...

...Which is the worst.

I knew it was going to be tedious, but that's part of what will hopefully make the whole thing special. I want to source video from other people as little as possible for this project, which means that I need to do a lot of side stuff in Symphony (and a few other games). And, by a lot, I mean a lot. Busting out of the castle. Showing off all of the weapons with special moves. Glitching into the grate right underneath the castle entrance (ok, that one might get pulled from someone else's YouTube). It's a big job.

But that's the point.

I swear to whatever god you may or may not believe in, I'm going to get a fucking video up this weekend.

Annotated Update

So, I made this big statement about this big plan and it's turned into a big, big job. But I saw that coming, so it's ok. Really, though, it's turned into just a little more work than I anticipated, but for the amount of work I thought it would be in the first place, a "little more" really just pushes this from a massive undertaking to a super massive undertaking.

You know what the problem is? Castlevania games, that's what. I thought I'd replay the ones that I know just to get a refresher and capture good footage from them. Then I figured that I'd play some of the ones I skipped to make sure I didn't miss anything that may have been referenced in Symphony. Then I realized that if that's going to be the case, I need to play everything from every platform that came out before 1997 just in case. The point of this whole exercise is to be thorough, so I, you know, need to be thorough.

On the plus side, a very generous friend of mine set me up with legit a copy of Sony Vegas, which is a very easy editing program to use, though it's a fairly old version of the software. After a little tinkering, I'm a lot more confident in my original vision for the videos with as little compromising as possible. But there have still been some hurdles. I'm struggling to use my rudimentary pixel art skill to make a title card for the whole thing based on the actual Symphony title screen (meaning GIMPed into the actual Symphony title screen). I took a good swing at it a week ago and it needs a whole lot more work than I've been able to put in so far, so if anything holds the whole endeavor back, it could be that.

Second, I'm doing all of this --all of the video capture, all of the editing, all of the sound recording, etc.-- on my laptop. It's only about a year old and has a nice amount of muscle to it, but this thing was not built for the task I'm asking it to perform. Do me a quick favor and silently pray for it's endurance over the next few months.

Update's over. Time to finally play Kid Dracula.

The Annotated Symphony of the Night

Hi there.

If you've been following my Twitter feed over the last few days (and you should...?) you may have seen my little advertisement for something of a passion project I've been wanting to do over the last few years: annotating Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I've wimped out of doing it for a thousand different reasons in the past, but now that consumer video recording and editing have become cheap and easy-ish, I've pretty much run out of excuses. So, whenever it gets done, a series of videos going through chunks of the game will hit the internet, and you're going to love it. Promise.

But what does "annotate" mean, anyway? In simple terms, annotations are notes on a given topic, and an annotated guide to, say, a book or a film details and explains small, individual pieces that make the larger whole. Very few games, if any, receive this kind of treatment.

Symphony of the Night, released in NA in 1997, was meant to be something of a swan song for the series to that point as Konami was developing a new 3D game for the Nintendo 64 that would wipe the slate clean and reboot the franchise. Koji Igarashi, the co-director of the game and co-scenario writer, was an unabashed fan of Castlevania from the beginning, and used the limited resources his team had to not only nod at the past entries that came before it, but also cram in as many references to religion, mythology, literature, and folklore as they could. On top of that, Symphony is so loaded down with secrets that, when looking at it in terms of scope, makes it both a masterpiece of design and something of a miracle that it all worked.

I'll be pointing all of these out during a concise playthrough of the game, with a small window embed next to it for additional video. I will be narrating the run of the game, and will add text underneath when necessary. Here is a crude mock-up of what you'll be seeing:

As I've never A: recorded gameplay footage before, and B: never edited video, the first challenges have been finding adequate programs that work on my own limited resources, and learning how to bend them to my will. For now, I'll be recording with a low-rent, but workmanlike program called FRAPS that's fairly common in gaming YouTube circles. It has its downsides --mostly because the files it creates are monstrously huge-- but is very inexpensive to use for the moment, at least for testing and training purposes.

Hurdle #2 is far more of an issue, as you can imagine. Both of the most common free editing options out there for PC, YouTube's onboard program and Windows Movie Maker, don't seem to have the capability of doing exactly what I want (at least, not that I have found so far). Simple as they seem to be for actual editing, I'll probably have to look elsewhere for the multi-windowed approach that I'm gunning for. I'm not super excited to do research for something like this, but that's part of why I'm doing it, so there you go. To the internet!

So here's the actual plan:

1. Record a test run through the game. Even though I've played SotN about 50 times or something, I need to make sure that I can competently play it without too many screw ups, and plan the most efficient path while mapping as much as I can in any given castle location. I'm most of the way through this now, and have already found some problems that I need to address in regard to how I'm recording the video and how I can compensate for it (the worst problem so far is the occasional dropped frame of animation and input lag from the controller. I know, it's not like I'm playing a fighting game, but in regard to how I traditionally fight things like Galamoth in the second castle, a laggy button press is the difference between a steady stream of invincible attacks and the business end of a foot to the face).
2. Start writing scripts. Based on how the test run went, I can start to accurately compile information and map out the text. This includes placing all of the enemies, the weapons found and dropped in each location, any visual cues from past games that come up, and planning on where to place the supplemental video. This is probably going to be the longest part, if not the hardest.
3. Record the master playthrough. This run will be based on the scripts with as little improvisation as possible. We'll see how that goes
4. Finalize scripts, start combing for supplemental video. This is where I lock down the scripts and either look around the internet for usable video from past games and other resources, or start recording them myself.
5. Play through a Luck run, farm everything. If stage 2 was the longest and maybe the hardest part, then this will be the most tedious. I need to find all of the weapons that have special moves in them and the other stuff that make references to outside works (like Tolkien. There's a lot of Tolkien going on in this game). Good thing is that you can play the game with a code that spikes your luck stat, essentially making this a little easier. Regardless, I'm kinda sorta not looking forward to this part, so I might try to dig up a 100% save file on the internet that's got all of this stuff already. Remember, I'm not only farming this junk, I'm recording it, too (but not the actual farming of it, lucky for you). 
6. Lay down the narration. Depending on the editing software I use, I could either do it right on top of the video, which is optimal, or record something via Audacity and embed it into the video, which is not. I've actually done some voice recording before, so I'm confident in my ability to pull this off and the little ticks and quirks of my diction that I need to watch out for. But it's not something I do all the time, so it will take some work. Please keep me in your prayers during this phase.
7. Clean up. Extra video. Extra audio. Figuring out how to put in the audio of that never-produced extra ending. Stuff like that. At this point, I should probably Photoshop some sort of cover image for this thing. I just remembered that I should probably also make a short intro video to explain the thought processes to this whole adventure. Shit.

At this point, I still don't have any idea how I'm going to split the videos and where those will take place. While I'd like to just make this one giant 5 hour affair, that would be a big, stuffed video, and I think getting them out in small chunks is probably more palatable for you the viewer and me that producer. Plus, this is a learn-as-you-go thing for me, so we should expect the quality of them to get better over time (right?). I'd like to have at least one of these out in the next month or two, so we'll see.

I hope you like Symphony of the Night, but that's a dumb thing to say because of course you like Symphony of the Night. That's all I'm going to be thinking about over the next few months, so I guess I hope I like Symphony of the Night. Which I do, or else I would never tackle something like this. Send me your tips on recording and editing, if you have them, and if you know a guy named Jeremy Blaustein, let him know I'm looking for him. I have to ask him about the Silmarillion.

See you soon.

Right Where It Should Be

As you might expect, I've been playing as much Street Fighter V as I possibly can lately. This means that, in reality, I'm playing as much Street Fighter V as I possibly can between the hours of 9:30pm and whenever I go to bed, M-F, when the kid is asleep enough that loud button presses won't wake her and my wife has had enough of television for the night and wanders off to read. Lucky for me, this tends to be prime time for the online fighting game crowd, so I can be soundly shown the business end of a fireball to the face like The Jesus intended.

But my League Point woes aren't what I'm getting at today, nor is this going to be some sort of poor man's review of the new game (but I like it!). Think of this more as an apology for an insult I never actually made.

See, Street Fighter V has come under a lot of flack over the past two weeks since its release for being shoved out the door in something of an "unfinished" state. For God's sake, reviewers have found, there's no Arcade mode in it, and the main reason for one to play it is to willingly subject yourself into the online meat grinder of Ranked matches which, for many of us, is like throwing your 9 year old sister into an NFL training camp. As the betas have gone on over the past few months, I was getting the sinking feeling that it was going to be a pretty bare bones package myself, and when it finally came out, it was hard not to felt a little let down on how thin the content was from a single-player perspective.

After two weeks of it, though, I'm switching my stance on this, and feel that the internet has been looking at this incorrectly. Not wrongheadedly, though, because there are definitely niceties that one could say should have been included in a retail release of a brand new Street Fighter game. But really, everything you need is right there, in as unobtrusive and unpretentious a manner as possible. It's, actually, straight to the point with almost zero filler, which most big budget games can't claim themselves.

Mode by mode, it's actually very easy to break this down. First, the main complaint is that there isn't a robust Story mode in the game yet, and that the included Story mode is laughable shallow. Now, in 2004, I played Guilty Gear XX and was downright flabbergasted at how complex and compelling it's dopey anime Story mode was, and wished that every fighting game from then on would have something so compelling. But this was still a side interest to me playing against other people and getting better at the game. Sure, I found myself as into Guilty's mythology at the time as I was any given Final Fantasy, but not so deep down, I wanted to learn the game and learn how to play it well, not learn how to cheese the computer so I could get the next phase of text boxes. There's a really big difference there. I get that there are people interested in playing a Street Fighter game so they can finally learn how Nash came back from the dead or to vindicate their Ryu/ Ken slash fiction dreams, but as Street Fighter IV was such a tournament success over the last few years has shown, this crowd seems more of a niche of a niche when it comes to this genre.

The Story mode that we're given, then, cuts through the bullshit. People that are into this stuff don't want to have complex nail-biting bouts with smart AI opponents, they want to beat the next guy to see the next story beat, and SFV gives them just that: idiotic computer opposition that a new player can pound on and an old hat to practice combos with. They don't need to be hard, they just need to be there, and they need to match up with the still art and dialog that bookends the fight. Though this isn't much a consolation to someone used to current Mortal Kombats or the Persona fighting games' Story modes, but the amount of art/ dialog that SFV is giving is at least that much or more than any and all versions of Street Fighter II and Street Fighter III. If anything, it should act as the appetizer that it is for the Story mode update that's coming in June, giving people incentive to return to the game later, as their revenue model for the game clearly shows they want them to.

If the loose "plot" of the game is made to get through as quickly as possible, then, it's clear as day that SFV was developed for people to play competitively (and probably, as the speculation has gone, to make it more of an eSport draw), which means that it's going to have to send you online. But what does someone do between matches? Well, for now, it's a fair assumption that players will be sitting in the Training mode practicing combos and testing situations to be ready for the inevitable fight request, and if you've been playing like I have, you'll know that these can happen anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes apart, making the Training mode the ideal spot. Soon enough, though, and I have already felt this, the average player is going to get sick of hitting a punching bag, and will want something with some stakes involved, even if they're fairly low.

I ask you, would an Arcade mode really suffice? If you've already seen your character's story, which is mostly what Arcade modes are for in these games, then be honest with yourself and say no. Arcade mode is just there to pass the time between matches, and will loose their teeth the second you see the credits roll once. A Survival mode, though, with various levels of difficulty, is a better answer. Most nights so far, I'll fire up the game, head into Survival on Hard difficulty (which I still haven't completed, by the way), and see how far I get in the two or so hours that I'll play the game. Hard Survival mode has 50 opponents to get through, which means that I'll plow through a dumb AI opponent, cater to a fight request with an actual online player, and then go back to another AI opponent or two. Either the whole few hours have gone by and I'm too tired to keep it up, or Hard mode finally wins this war of attrition and my Ryu poops out around fight 30. Either way, I'm covering both bases: waiting for and then playing online competitors --why I'm playing to begin with-- and ultimately working toward a long term endgame in a 50-man kumite. 10-12 fights in Third Strike's Arcade mode doesn't fill that same void, and when I was playing SFIV, I would just spam focus attacks in the Arcade mode until someone pulled me out of the monotony with a fight request. Survival mode is much more fulfilling.

But yes, there are problems with all of this, and problems that are squarely on Capcom. For the first week, the servers were an overloaded shit show, which really hampers all of my enjoyment under this kind of mindset. This makes things especially lousy since you can't earn any in-game currency if the servers are down, making playing Survival and finishing it on any difficulty setting feel anticlimactic. I wish there were better combo training modes, too, like the ones found in Street Fighter IV. I have a feeling that stuff is going to come eventually.

The tools are there, though. If the servers are running well, everything is right where it should be. I'm not going to call anyone out online or talk shit about a review outlet for dogging on the game as a complete package; their opinions are their own. But as a Guy The Plays Fighting Games, this enough for me, because what's there is everything that I would be doing with any other game. Man, if only the entire universe just knew that I was so right about this and everything else, knowaddamsayin'?

[For All] The Good It's Done

If you're going to read this, you need to be ready to excuse the frothing temper tantrum of an old man...

So, the last time we talked, we got into some of the main reasons Street Fighter IV was not only good for fighting games, but good for the games business as a whole.

Today will be different. Today, we get some things off our chest.

I am not a Street Fighter IV hater, but over the course of the last seven years, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that I never want to play it again. In fact, at my normal weekly Street Fighter gathering, a guy convinced me to jump off of Third Strike to play him in SF4. Fair enough, I thought; you took your beatings from me, so I'll give you that same courtesy. The second the menu screens faded into memory, I knew that this was not the experience that I wanted to re-live. Going through them piecemeal will help to explain things a bit more clearly.

First, get a load of this:

What you're seeing is a roster of 44 characters, many of whom share a distinctly similar method of playing the game at its core level. This is a bloated mess. I give Capcom its due credit in that it balanced a roster of such preposterous size well enough so that more than only a fourth of the cast is viable (like in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2), but for a one-on-one game like a mainline Street Fighter, this is straight up too much. A glut like this will scare off new players, while more the more seasoned are only apt to find one or two main characters and stick with them over time. Sure, that policy isn't exactly new or bad for pro-level competitors, but smaller rosters give more incentive to become skilled with a larger section of the cast, making tournaments more enjoyable for spectators to both watch and participate in for the hope of a counterpick overcoming impossible odds. The best we really got with SF4 was this, which is honestly pretty great, but this is about as rare as finding a turtle that shits out solid gold ingots on your front porch.

On a more fundamental level, SF4 had a real problem with movement. Dashing was slow and didn't cover very much ground, and matches tended to feel like a crawl going from previous Street Fighters to this. I personally cannot stand it, but I give SF4 a pass here. The reason here is purely speculative, but after reading an interview with the Soul Caliber people a few years ago about how they slowed down SCV's gameplay to accommodate for the advent of network play, I got the feeling that Ono and the teams at Capcom and Dimps did the same for SF4. Since arcades weren't exactly common around the world at that point and online play did much to rebuild the FGC, I call that a hell of a net positive. Still, as a Third Strike player, I can't help but feel as though SF4 moves like two people throwing rocks at each other in a fish tank, which is certainly not for me.

Here is the great offender, though:

At around 2:30 in this video, legendary Street Fighter player Daigo Umehara demonstrates the absolute gulf between those of casual, and even competitive interest, and the very, very small population that will play this game at the top level. Go to any Street Fighter IV tournament video on the internet, and you'll find something roughly similar: a string for normal and special moves broken up by the occasional dash cancel. To the layman, it's just a guy hitting buttons. To the trained eye, it's ridiculous in its timing and stupid in execution. It is the 1-frame link.

1F link combos aren't exclusive to Street Fighter IV by any means, but they are as common in upper-tiered play as a low forward to a fireball in every fighting game in two dimensions. It's the process of attacking an opponent, and then quickly throwing out another attack that will connect before the opponent's animation resets from its hit stun. It's 1000% more difficult in execution than it is in explanation. Being so rife with them, SF4 players studied less of the fundamentals of spacing and gameplay to rifling through spread sheets of frame data to see what move connected to what.

Worse, this practice of overworking led to diminished returns in use. SF4 has insane damage scaling, which is the the game's way of making each subsequent move in a combo do less damage than it normally would outside of a combo. Basically, it means that if I hit you with three hard moves in a row, you won't be down to 50% of your health. SF4 took this to something of a hilarious extreme in the wake of this 1F link nonsense. That Daigo combo up there? Check out how much damage it actually does. In most Street Fighter games --including the newly released Street Fighter V-- one could logically do the same amount of punishment in a jumping hard punch, a low hard punch, and then a dragon punch. A lot less work for the same result. In that respect, I never wanted to put in the work it takes to do these goofball string combos. I never felt the need to.

So, Street Fighter IV, you're a swell game, but you're a swell game that needs to take a break from the spotlight, and I'm glad we have a new Street Fighter to take your place. I realize that this is all just my personal beef with what amounts to a very good videogame, but that's why this is my blog and not yours. So there.

The Good It's Done

From the perspective of a good eight years, it looks like Street Fighter IV and its children were monumental successes from the jump, and this is mostly true. Though sales for each subsequent upgrade and physical re-release couldn't have stayed steady, it's ubiquity in the fighting game space has lasted almost as long as as Street Fighter II --though without coming close to matching its monetary glory.

But that's ok, really. Success isn't always measured in dollars and cents, even in the rapidly changing development landscape and risk-averse console generation that Street Fighter IV found itself in. Yes, it did pretty well at the market --one source says roughly 8 million units by the end of it's string of releases-- but it wasn't one of the mega hits of the last ten years like singular released such as Halo 3 or Super Mario Galaxy.

I believe that this kind of monetary thinking is defeatist compared to the good that Street Fighter IV has done. Now that we're on the threshold of Street Fighter V's release, I think it's a fair time to assess IV's importance, because "important" is exactly what it is.

As I said last week, Street Fighter IV was designed specifically to appeal to an older, returning audience, so I don't really see the point in reiterating that here. What is worth mentioning was it's development and the embryonic period of its growth. It's now a well-publicized story that producer Yoshinori Ono had been working for Capcom since Third Strike (he was a sound designer) and wanted to make a new numbered game in the series for quite a while, which had been shut down by his superiors time and again. Capcom, a company known for taking a concept and drilling into the ground like a Seth McFarlane gag, had seemed to have bled as much money as it possibly could from the Street Fighter franchise. The PlayStation 2 era was basically keeping it in hospice as the publisher was content to release Anniversary compilations and quick cash-ins like Capcom Fighting Jam. The former did ok, trading more on nostalgia than innovation. The latter did lousy. Nobody wanted to play it, and now it's a laughing stock.

When taken collectively, though, there was a lesson here in these two releases in what the market could bear and who was buying. By the time the Xbox 360 was released, online play and an ephemeral downloadeable marketplace had become a viable concern, and one that the old guard like Capcom took notice of relatively early. 2006, then, is the year that Street Fighter punk broke. Whether it was a way of testing the waters with online infrastructure or to just cash in and bankroll another game in the newly-super expensive HD era, a port of Street Fighter II Turbo Hyper Fighting had made its way to XBLA. It's release, in hindsight, has become almost hilariously important to the landscape of fighting games.

The reason why, in short, is that it caused a seismic chain reaction of events outside of the scope of this particular writing, and this is something that I'll cover some day. What's ultimately worth mentioning are twofold: A) it had online match support, although this wasn't brand new for fighting games or even Capcom (the Anniversary's Third Strike port for the original Xbox could connect to the internet, as could a few Japan-only Dreamcast games) and B) it sold better than the company's expectations; much better, apparently. But, because this is the video game industry, there was a certain level of uproar. The online component of the game was its biggest criticism, and any review that you might look up from the time straddles the line between "hey, this is still a good game with bad connectivity," to "they should have never released it in this state." Still, in a single, inexpensive release of an old game, it reiterated to Capcom what Street Fighter Anniversary Collection and Capcom Fighting Jam had already told them: people are willing to pay for old, well-made games, and almost as importantly, they wanted these old games online.

Two games were quickly placed into development around this time. The first was Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, lead by longtime fighting game tournament player David Sirlin and his team at Backbone Entertainment, and the Ono-produced Street Fighter IV for Japanese arcades and home consoles. Both were released in 2008, though the console versions of SFIV didn't arrive until early 2009.

As companion pieces for each other, it was clear that those hard-earned lessons learned in the PS2 era were becoming axiom. HD Remix broke records for day-one downloads, and acted as the perfect appetizer for SFIV's eventual home release a few months later where it quickly became a million-seller. Again, like the releases of the PS2 era, both traded on nostalgia mixed with refinement. But for any number of reasons --new systems, a larger cast, nicer graphics, whatever-- Street Fighter IV had longer legs, its release igniting the real renaissance in for the genre. Licensed products featuring the game and its cast were finding their way back to the shelves, and gaming sites were featuring match videos and interviews with creators with increased frequency. A new numbered Street Fighter was a big deal again, something it hadn't been since the late 90s.

I don't know how long Street Fighter IV was in development, but we can assume at least two years, getting the game past the proposal stage around the latter end of 2006 (close enough after SFII Turbo XBLA launched). That's about a year after the launch of YouTube, and roughly close to the launch of GGPO, two mutual monumental steps for both fighting games and videogames as a whole. With the latter, stable online fighting games were now possible with some clever latency masking. Though it wasn't as widely adopted by companies like Capcom, it was a clear step in the right direction to build a fighting game's netcode, and had to be noticed. The former, well, you know. SFIV's release a few years later was the absolute perfect timing for an ultra-competitive throwback genre to re-enter the mainstream. Online tournaments matches for training and glory were now a nightly ritual for even casual fans. Tournaments large and small were now being archived on the internet for people to study like playback tape at a high school football practice. Tournaments themselves went from tiny grassroots gatherings set up on forums to big, consistent business in terms of attendance and prize money.

The sum of these parts is that Street Fighter was doing what it did best in its 90s heyday: people were coming together again. Whether it was for competition or camaraderie, players could meet, play, argue, and learn from each other, and had further tools to do so on their own. This is Street Fighter IV's greatest legacy. Now that we're on the precipice of a new numbered Street Fighter in a few days --again, a big deal-- it was worth pointing it out, if only briefly.

A Thing of Beauty

On Saturdays, I like to do what's become known in my house as "long cardio day." This means that I go to the gym and run on the treadmill like the boring 30-something that I am and then, and then, do another 30 minutes on the elliptical machine. 60 minutes of cardio! That's long, man!

But life, as it does, is starting to wag its finger in my face about that. Minor and subtle aches creep into my legs more often than they used to these days, which is something I once thought was major problem and is now just one of those normal things you accept. I used to think that I was an 80 year-old guy trapped in 28 year-old's body. Now, I'm just some dude.

Whenever I actually stop to give these little pains some real thought --which, kind of never happens, I guess-- I'm always reminded of my time in college training in Kyokushin karate. Mostly, I'm reminded of how often I would come home from practice with my bell rung because I never kept my hands up during fights with one of the Japanese students (whom were goddamn Kyokushin wizards). "Minor aches and pains" were often sore shins and bruised chest muscles from taking a few training beatings. We're talking 2000-2002 here, which means that MMA was still very much a niche thing, and it wasn't as easy to find a gym that taught hard-contact fighting as it might be today. Dumb-lucking into it on my own college campus at such a time was kind of spectacular. I stopped training in martial arts after I graduated from college because I was broke and couldn't find a suitable Kyokushin replacement in the Cleveland area (though it was the broke thing, mostly), but these are times I remember fondly; ass beatings notwithstanding.

Ok, then. Look at this. I mean, really, skip to the 54 second mark of this video and gaze upon this poetic thing of beauty:

Really quick, I'm not a violent guy. I'm very even-tempered, and my full time job requires that I maintain that kind of disposition. But, man, this combo. This is a pre-programmed chain (the Street Fighter games call them "target combos" now) that originated in Tekken 4. No, I don't mean the dumb uppercut/ sidekick thing at the end, I mean the four kicks and punches that came in such a succinct and brutal manner beforehand. Tekken 4, in all honesty, is a piece of shit in Tekken terms, but this combo is not. From a fighter's perspective, it looks like it was made in a laboratory full of mad Kyokushin geniuses. In a stand-up fight in a ring, these four hits, aligned in such an economical symphony of body movement, is at once startlingly efficient in its systemic ways of butchering an opponent as it is fluid in its seemingly simple mechanics. I can't not talk about this combo.

Piece-of-Shit-Tekken 4 came out at a time in my Kyokushin training when we were taking a break from learning the often useless perfunctory of katas so we could focus on why most of us were in the class: to train for and compete in tournaments. What makes it unique compared to its far superior predecessor, if only to two or three males in Bowling Green, OH at the turn of the millennium, was its copious inclusion of Kyokushin tidbits. From an attract mode kata to story mode implications to combos like this one, the ghost of Oyama's style looms heavily over the game, and it was impossible for someone training in the form to miss it. Naturally, we even tried to replicate what we were playing while sparring, at least as best we could. In the game, the combo in question isn't entirely useful compared to other ways of closing the distance and finishing someone off. IRL, though. if I can get off that first kick to your head, even blocked, then you would remember it. It is as gorgeous and perfect as the Spring sun upon a flowered meadow. I swear to God I'm not joking about this.

So let's break it down, movement by movement. It certainly looks simple enough to perform, and it's relatively short length is deceptive in the damage that it would deal to a human body, but that's part of the beauty. The reality, here, is that these are all pinpointed movements to shorten the space between you and the target before quickly attacking individual locations on the body to cripple them and end the fight.

It starts before the high round kick with the left leg to the head. In the video, right-handed Kazuya deftly switches his stance to the left while inching forward (or "kosa," and if he were rounding the side of the opponent subtly to do it --which would have only made to make this combo that much fucking crazier-- it would have been a "sabaki" movement). This looks like he's just taking a step forward with his right leg (and, in a way, it is), but this takes planning and forethought in a real fight to dope an opponent into letting their guard down to pull it off. From here, the kick comes to the side of the head, as roundhouse kicks are meant to do, but isn't intent on going through the target as roundhouse kicks normally should. While certainly designed to hurt, the kosa movement and then kick scoots Kazuya forward for one of two mutually useful effects: either it hits the guy in the head to daze them, or gets their hands up to block the kick. The payoff of the latter will come soon.

It's here that we need to take a quick second and swoon like the child I am at Kazuya's form with this kick, because that leads us into the next movement. Like most Japanese fighters, the mechanics of his round kick form a motion that resembles a person running: left foot forward/ left hand back/ right foot back/ right hand forward. This is intentionally taught, because to get this seemingly easy concept down in execution takes a substantial amount of practice. And for good reason, too, because if you're doing it right, you'll obtain the maximum amount of force for the kick. But we just discussed that force wasn't the point of this particular attack, though it would certainly be handy here.

Now the left hand comes as the left leg returns to the floor. However, Kazuya didn't wheel his hip backward after his left kick like most people would after the connection. Instead, he drops his foot to the ground after the strike snaps to use it as his final movement forward so as to ease into the range of the left punch, which was already in the chamber. Though it's just a guy kicking and then punching, doing both from one side of the body in succession is something of a counter-intuitive movement without having practiced it extensively. But carefully looking at how Kazuya pulls it off makes it deceptively seamless. The reality of it is simple body mechanics, like the rest of the combo: as his hips are turned for the kick, placing the foot down and forward after the strike readies the already-cocked left arm for quick release.

Most novice or intermediate opponents probably know that this isn't a common movement, this punch off of the kicking leg's side, and indeed it subverts the typical left/right/left/right techniques that are common to a student's early training. It's actually hard to notice without slowing down the video or pausing at the right moment, but the eventual punch goes slightly downward into the collarbone or top of the chest, implying that this wasn't meant to be the real breadwinner of these four movements, either (although the dummy in the video is just bending backward for effect). But imagine this combo like a four syllable word or phrase, and where the emphasis is placed is a decision for the speaker. One could really get some force out of that punch, but judging by what you see from next two moves that follow, it doesn't feel totally necessary.

For that, we're going back to basic body mechanics. With clever movement, Kazuya is now re-positioned back to his original right-handed stance. This happened concurrent with the punch, which readies his hips with ample amounts of torque for the back right leg to throw a devastating low round kick. This is a somewhat short ranged move that the first two attacks placed Kazuya in perfect range for. In the gym, the kick would strike on the side (or top) of the opponent's thigh, with the point of impact being the bottom of Kazuya's shin --something harder than the fragile arch of his foot-- into the meat of the leg. But that's the nice guy way of doing things. In a combat situation where Kazuya's life might depend on it, he would nail the other schmuck on the side of the knee to try to blow out the joint which, if it connects, is about as cruel as it sounds. Even if that's not the case, a full-speed kick like this to the quad is a real bruiser, even if it's not the most common way of turning someone's lights out like a roundhouse to the back of the head might be. The low kick snaps back to ready Kazuya's hips for the final blow.

Now, if you grew up watching martial arts movies as a kid, you easily condition yourself into thinking that real hand-to-hand fighting has a secret vocabulary of enchanted movements. When it comes to actual training, though, this gets demystified for you pretty quickly once you get passed learning specific techniques and logistical movement. From there, it's just practice, practice, practice until you get your body able to do things that opponents flat out don't see coming or can't react to. Basically, once you move out of the newbie stage, there aren't any secrets anymore.

Except one.

I'm writing this on a Monday. Before I had my kid, Mondays were often the day of the week that meant an apology note should be sent to my liver. Maybe even a large, though tasteful, bouquet of flowers. I would do terrible things to my liver on the weekends, and if I were still training in Kyokushin, Mondays are the days that I would pay for them the worst. The liver, you see, is located on the front right side of the body just outside of the abdominal region, but not quite to your profile. It is soft, and easy to target. It will also make a grown man crumple to his knees when given the right kind of shot, and it's a shot that takes even less effort depending on how much this grown man drinks. The liver is the great, mythic hot spot in a martial art that doesn't typically allow punches to the face during open tournaments; it can do the most amount of real punishment with comparatively minimal effort in terms of energy consumption (round kicks to the face, unsurprisingly, take a lot out of you). At the risk of sounding even more meatheaded than the rest of this blog already has, one good smack to the liver hurts like a motherfucker. It's the best.

A good left hook would do it, and our buddy Kazuya had built the previous three movements to carefully worm his way there. Though painful, the first two attacks set up a perfect sleight-of-hand misdirection to take the opponent's defense away from the tender right side of their body: a blocked high round kick gets the arm up, which will try to defend the left straight punch, which wouldn't even see the fast low round kick coming at that range (which is gravy here), opening up to a perfect drill to the chops. Conversely, if the first kick really lands, the subsequent techniques would render a body limp enough that no kind of arm flailing would sufficiently block that last hit. The opponent crumples in a heap before him, and this fight's over. After taking my share of liver punches, I can tell you with perfect confidence that this is the natural conclusion.

I cannot stress enough how difficult it can be to make your body do these things with this kind of fluidity. But after a certain amount of practice and a little bit of forethought, it's an amazingly economical way of beating the snot out of someone. It's a stone cold beating with absolutely zero wasted movement. Each technique is at the ready even during the first step, and it simply needs the correct speed and follow-through to put someone on the floor. I could never get all four shots off at the speed in which video game Kazuya pulls it off, but it was good enough for me to try, and strangely spectacular to have video game Kazuya show me the way. The Japanese guys in class eventually sniffed it out and nailed me for it. But like I said, those guys were Kyokushin maestros anyway.

Curiously, further Tekken games would alter this perfect sonnet of human movement to make it less realistic; the final blow blasting an opponent backward like they were being pushed out of a helicopter. Judging by how this combo video follows up the movement with the (dumb) uppercut/ sidekick connection, it seem like that was probably the most balanced way of handling things with the total amount of damage that it can incur. But that's just video games. This is a perfect combo.