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.