Annotated Appendix: Underground Caverns

First, a warning: Don't Google search "succubus" or "Lilith" in a public place. Trust me on this.

Now, for the video; it's kind of trivial, but the long drop into the more cavernous sections of the Underground Caverns is maybe my favorite callback to an older game in the series. I think it was just one of those things that I remember noticing the first time I played it (the other getting the meat out of the staircase in the Entrance while I was killing time at a Babbages when the game was new and having an employee impressed by its old-timey-ness) and wondering if other people would pick up on it, too. I played the game several times back-to-back-to-back when it was first released, and part of the fun for me was to mine any kind of references that I could. But in 1997, this was all from memory since I no longer had an NES to play and older games to go back to. That's maybe where this whole odyssey started, now that I think about it. So you have this section of the game to thank, or something.

More into the specifics, I was really concerned with the amount of silence on my end when putting this one together. It was the easiest one to compile so far, which is probably why it came out only a week or so after the last, but the small amount of new foes to fight and interesting stuff to say about the development of this zone left me a bit nervous that people would call me out for being mute. Thankfully, that hasn't happened, and I think I had enough ground to cover that the quiet places don't stick out as much as in others. Big shoutout to Icebrand and the Nunchaku for that, maybe.

I actually recorded myself going through this section of the castle twice. See, SOTN is a pretty easy game, all things considered, but you wouldn't know it by my playing because I've been getting my ass kicked up and down the street in almost every video. Granted, showing everything that I can in the game means that I have to put myself into some ugly situations, but I just about got killed fighting Orlox in the last video. That shit can't stand. Worse, my Gravity Boots traversal was downright terrible during my first crack at recording. For whatever reason, it took at least two minutes to get back up the waterfall, and I knew right away that it would translate to film the same way Jordan did in Space Jam. Lucky for me that playing this game zone-by-zone is pretty short, but this turns out to be one of the larger places in the game by area (strangely enough), so I wound up with a solid hour of video by the end. And I still beefed it a few times on the Gravity jumps. Man...

One thing that a commentor on this week's video pointed out that I probably should have brought up was how Maria is locked in a cell in an area that's practically the same as the Underground Cavern in Rondo of Blood. Sure, the castle is a "creature of chaos," which is a convenient way of having it be a different layout in every game, but I could probably have made a case for her cell being where the Holy Symbol is found since it's at the end of a long stretch of water in a locked room. Thanks to Billy Greggory for reminding me (and no, I'm not remaking this video to include it) (for now).

This was the first episode that I had a discussion question in the comments, and I'm glad that people chimed in. I always took the toad and frog enemies for being replacements for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because they were reptiles that dropped "NY style" pizza. One of the commentors shares my thoughts that turtles were probably just dumb enemies to put into the game, and since frog sprites already existed from Rondo, I had always guessed that they stretched the reference a bit to make it work. I can't confirm it, though, so in the comments is where it stays. I guess if someone that worked on the game in some official capacity wants to reach out to me and say yes or no, maybe I actually will redo this one to include it. BUT THAT'S ON THEM.

Lastly, this is probably the only video that should have been labeled "NSFW" with the Succubus art attached to it, but I didn't do it. Maybe it was a mistake, but I'm open to hearing opinions on this. If folks want me to, I'm happy to update the episode title to put the distinction in there.

The next video might be one that stretches two sections of the castle: the Abandoned Mine and the Catacombs. The Mine is relatively short and there isn't a ton to say about it, so maybe combining the two might be the way to go. Then again, I have a fair amount of freelance work in the pipeline over the next month, so maybe a shorter video could be in the cards to keep things moving along. We'll see, I guess.

Thanks again for watching, everybody.

Annotated Appendix: Library and Orlox Revisited

Let's talk about silence for a second.

When I originally envisioned these videos, I wanted to both tell as much of the story around the building of the game and its references to other media as possible and also show as much of Symphony's weird subtleties as was I could. Yes, there's a lot to say about this game, but it's still a complete playthrough with unique enemy behavior to uncover. The problem is, these can sometimes be at odds with each other.

Take, for example, the fight with Orlox in this week's video. Normally, I would have farmed or bought an iron shield to tear through him with the Shield Rod spell, or just continued to shower him with Holy Water subweapon attacks, making the battle a total shit show in my favor. But that's not showing the game; notice how Orlox has a variety of special attacks in his first form from summoning ghosts and bats to shooting blasts of energy from his hands and the floor. It's cool stuff, actually, but it's easily missed. With the way my Alucard would run into this fight equipped with the Holy Water, a constant dousing on Orlox pushes him into the second phase without breaking a sweat, but that means not showing these special attacks in the video. Then there's the second part which, while not exactly a cake walk, isn't super challenging with the Faerie familiar floating around, but it's a time-consuming throwdown with Orlox's boosted defense. Notice how his behavior becomes more aggressive as I whittled down his HP. That's not something that can discerned by bum rushing the battle.

But without specifically pointing these things out over the mic, this is a quiet moment for me because, well, there just isn't that much to say about this fight that wasn't already covered on the way up there (itself a silent slog if I let it be). Balancing the voice over minutia with actual gameplay has always been a problem of these videos that I've worked hard to address, but sometimes there just isn't a way around it. I could tear through this game --it's really easy to do-- but that's not what this video series is made for. With that, some silence must be understood by the audience.

HOWEVER, there's a big difference between watching me quietly mow down Bloody Zombies and standing around like a jackass, which is this episode's biggest (and most recurring) flaw. Part of that had to do with improper math on my part. I think I've mentioned this before, but the way I make these things is to write a script, record the voice, annotate the script for timing, and then play through the scripted section with a list in front of me and a stopwatch by my side. Usually, it works out fine. In videos like these where there's not clear end point, though, makes it really, really hard. That doesn't change the fact that I could have probably cut at least 15 seconds of inert waiting like a dummy, though.

The latter fact I just mentioned, though, was what made this particular episode so hard. Sine I have to show a run of the game as efficiently as possible --meaning, the least amount of backtracking that I can get away with-- there was a lot of script revision, map study, and video-watching. At one point, my wife walked by me while I stared face-in-hands at the map wondering if I was getting sick or something. No, honey, I'm deciding the best course of action to pick up a floating sword that talks. Olrox's Quarters is a fairly contained area, which is nice, but one that branches back into a previously-covered area, so the question for me was which exit do I take to get to the next location. When sussing out the next part of the map to cover in the next video, the obvious answer is to leave the way we came, but that can be boring for the viewer.

And now, I hope you see the struggle, here. Yes, a little silence is golden, but no, you don't want to be bored with seeing things we've already covered. It's a tightrope.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this video. We're going into the waterway next, which might be a slightly NSFW.

Ok, We Can Get to Dawn of Sorrow Some More

Yesterday was hectic and weird, as I'm sure it was for a lot of people just coming back from a holiday break, so let me expand a little bit on Dawn of Sorrow.

First, let me say that, honestly, there isn't that much to say about the game as a whole. It does everything that its predecessor, Aria of Sorrow, had done, just a little more of it. In fact, you could say that it's classic sequelitis: the second game looks better, plays similarly, and shoehorns in unnecessary added story and play mechanics. Perhaps playing the first right after the second did this game fewer favors than it probably should have, and that's fine. There were enough years in between one game and the next that it didn't feel like a redundancy ten years ago when I first played it. But in the here and now, Dawn of Sorrow took a great game and stuffed it so full of junk food that it came out covered with pimples. There. That's a weird analogy for you.

In the continuum so far, we have Circle of the Moon, which I haven't played in a few years and have been purposely avoiding for this exercise, but I still think is a pretty good game. Harmony of Dissonance came after, and it felt too much like Iga's team shuffled in and said, "let's do that last game, but better," and it sort of wasn't. Then they hunkered down, came up with a nifty system to keep people playing during their commutes, and made Aria of Sorrow, which turned out to be a light, fun tear through the formula with a hefty grind involved. In scope of that, Dawn of Sorrow almost feels like the Harmony of Dissonance to Aria's Circle of the Moon. The team went back in, found that they wanted to do the same game over again but better, and made something that wound up feeling bland in the end.

Here's where I defend it a little, though: Dawn of Sorrow through a certain lens is kind of a cynical game. From what I've read on Wikipedia, Aria of Sorrow didn't sell up to expectations, which is a shame. A lot of work went into the design of that game, and I think it shows by the sheer craftsmanship of the characters and backgrounds and how much time and effort must have went into designing the Tactical Soul system. I get that the team --and maybe Iga specifically-- probably took a good long look at the systems specifically and said, "no, guys. This was too much to just give up on," and went to work finding ways to expand on what they had instead of tossing out the baby with the bathwater (as most of the other games had done successively). By this time, the Castlevania franchise was starting to fall into some shaky times. The 3D console games didn't set the world on fire, and the handheld releases were starting to feel more esoteric with further complex entries. The DS, only a year old when Dawn of Sorrow was released, was finding an audience with both younger crowds and a wider demographic than both its predecessors and its console competitors, so they knew that adjustments had to have been made. In that respect, what DoS does make a lot of sense.

So the character art changed. It kind of bounced off of me at the time, but it's fine now that we're ten years removed. And, again, I get it; the moody, ethereal style of the Ayami Kojima key art and box covers don't really appeal to a much younger set, and might scare off parents stumbling through a GameStop. The Tactical Soul system, even though we had already seen it before, fed into the "catch 'em all" mechanic du jour that handheld games had adopted in a post-Pokemon world. Maybe, they thought, the second time was the charm. It's possible, even, that Iga and his teams knew that producing console Castlevania games was too resource intensive, and they went back to the well with the castle and system design from Aria to keep things fast and cheap. He's even said himself over the years that he had a rep for getting his games done on time and under budget, and anyone that's followed the games industry over the past decade or so knows that reusing assets and design plans is the number one method of saving a buck.

What this all comes back around to, like every Castlevania game I've been looking at in granular detail lately, is context. Iga only produced two more games for handhelds after this, and a multiplayer cash-in game that was nothing but reused art made on the budget of whatever you probably have in your pocket right now. The series was not only falling into a rut, but its chief architect was slowly being shuffled along away from a franchise he had a hand in saving. The DS entries had the good fortune of being released on one of the most successful dedicated video game machines ever produced, but it looks like even Igarashi was starting to see the writing on the wall. I'm starting to think that the next game, Portrait of Ruin, was something of a response to all of this, but that's getting ahead of ourselves. I have to go through that with a finer-toothed comb.

Ok, We Can Get to Dawn of Sorrow, Now

I was in a mall in Blue Ash, OH, a suburb of Cincinnati, in the fall of 2006. That's what you do when you're in your mid-20s and away from home for work; you wrap yourself in the blanket of commerce when you exhaust all other options to fill the time. I wasn't quite up to going to bars by myself very often at that point as post-college life tended to still maintain the semblance of "bars are for getting totally shitty drunk on weekends and nothing else," so after getting bored with hotel television and having suffered enough filthy looks for reading most of the comics in a Barnes & Noble (but I still payed for my coffee, dammit), the mall filled the time. The mall in Blue Ash. The mall in a suburb. The mall where I dug deep and convinced myself to fall further into credit card debt for a used Nintendo DS and Dawn of Sorrow.

Suddenly, I was totally fine sitting in my hotel room for hours on end, because I bled every possible second of playtime I could get out of DoS. By that point, I certainly knew it existed having followed the previous handheld Castlevanias and the 3D console games that had been developed in the preceding years. But though I was finally living in my own apartment with a job that I kind of liked, I still didn't have the dough to throw around on video game consoles that weren't my ancient PlayStation 2 and its vast library of RPGs. But that shit was still in Cleveland and I was four hours away. I justified my GBA purchase years prior to wanting it specifically for Castlevania games, and it seemed like an equally good idea in 2006 (and it turned out be true).

I just wish it was as good a game now as I thought it was back then.

Ok, be with me here, because it's still a very good game. Time, though, hasn't been so nice to DoS as it has some of the other franchise games. Is it in the sewer level with other games like Castlevania Adventure? No, it's built way better than that. But after what has to be close to 1000 hours of Symphony and the two previous IGA-produced handheld games within the last few months, it's a distant horse in the race for the top.

First, the good stuff. It was years between playing Aria of Sorrow on a Game Boy Advance and Dawn on the DS, so it never quite hit me back then how much of a visual leap the series had taken. Now, after playing them back-to-back, it's a dramatic switch. Backgrounds looks really spectacular and ooze character, specifically the chilly small town in the first section of the game where snow falls off of parked cars when lept upon. The character animation is routinely beautiful, too, but much clearer with the DS's added resolution. And, really, there's not enough great things to be said for a second screen with this franchise; having to halt the action to bring up a map has always been a minor nuisance, but having one right in your face the entire time makes it downright irritating to go back to older games after this.

But the flaws of Aria's design instruct too many of Dawn's, which is harder to swallow now that we're 10 years past its release. If you remember what I said a little while ago about Aria giving up on clever clues to point you in the next direction in favor of enemy soul farming and tedious grinding, you'll find that Dawn makes this blatant with locked off doors that require specific enemy souls to open. It's not bad enough that the player has has to stumble around to find the required powers to pass these walls, its that they have to recall where the specific enemies are located to obtain them, and then kill them ad nauseum. It's not totally terrible, I guess, but I wouldn't really call it fun. Worse, these games were built on the foundation of nearly 10 years of post-Symphony of the Night expertise, so you would expect a better level of level design. Aria of Sorrow, in this case, takes the taco by suggesting a certain level of redundancy to finish the game. Dawn or Sorrow requires it, and it's a drag.

If you know anything about this game, then you will know its chief criticism lies in the idiotic touch screen controls. If you don't, then let me set the stage for you: you spend mounting wasted moments of your precious life, which you often feel fragmenting away from you in greater and heavier chunks, by learning the patterns and reactive measures to final complete a challenging boss fight. Weapon loadouts have been altered. Statistics have been adjusted. Every possible advantage you have has been employed. And then, upon delivering the final blow to that giant evil whatever that you've been matching skills with, a convoluted game of connect-the-dots flashes on the screen, and you need to drop everything to fumble around with the DS's stylus to complete it. You will not get these the first time, and the boss fight extends. Then you lose, because your nerves are mangled. This was profoundly stupid to write, and is that much dumber in practice.

These are two very damning pieces of evidence against an otherwise very good game. Even as far as the Metroidvania end of this series goes, the castle is still fun to explore and looks great, but constantly reliance to grind and (what I am assuming is) a misguided stipulation on Konami to use the touch screen on Nintendo's fancy pants new handheld makes this game lesser than its pedigree would suggest. From where my memories rest, I'm as surprised as you.