For this video, I did something a little bit different. Knowing that there's going to be a bit more dead space for the lack of new enemies and items, I altered the usual flow of the videos to basically get through it as quickly as possible. This changes the timing of the recordings, though. Basically, this is how the sausage was made until today:
Take location notes. Copious location notes
Write the script and then edit
Record the voice over dialog and edit
Notate the dialog timing (ie- it takes x amount of minutes for me to talk about y)
Practice run through the section I want to record
Capture game footage with the dialog timing list and a stopwatch
Edit the video together
Record pickup VO and handle minor fixes
Render and rejoice
It's a pretty good system, if a little time intensive. But things are different in the inverted castle, though, so while I'm still following the same steps that I normally would, it's less likely that I'll talk about each notable thing in the order in which they appear, like the Azaghal in this week's episode. I think it makes the flow a little better since there's going to be less standing around, but it means more pickup VO recording to say things like "that thing we saw a second ago," or "earlier, we did this or that." I hope you all find this to be a better fit for future videos.
Other than that, I'm trying really, really hard to keep to a two week schedule from now on. This is obviously not a full-time job for me, and I don't have a ton of time to throw at side projects, so I hope you understand if I slip here and there. But I would like to have the final episode up in time for the game's 20th anniversary of the NA release, which means I need to get moving. I've already laid out a pretty good pace and mapped my next stops, so it's just a matter of getting back to the notes now. Since I'm doubling (and in one instance, tripling) up on locations for the inverted castle, I think I can pull it off.
We need to talk about design intention, and pretty badly.
The point of making the Annotated Symphony of the Night was not to give you a history lesson. It was to find a place to curate everything that we could possibly know about the game from what was on-screen to what we can glean from supplemental material. While the meat of what's in there is a catalog of where names and locations come from, very little of it is speculating about what X design decision might mean or what Y location could infer. Just about everything is cited. When it's not, I try to be clear that mine are either calm observations or ancillary thoughts.
The reason behind this is pretty simple, really: unless Koji Igarashi or Toru Hagihara is sitting down with you and telling you what exactly was on their mind when they made this game, we have no clear idea of what their intentions really were. Sure, we know from interviews that IGA is a big fan of Dracula's Curse, so we can infer that it was a good reason to use Alucard as a protagonist and shoehorn the other guys in as bosses, but we don't really know (or need to know) any more than that. I make a point of surmising that there's a rough optimal path that the designers left bread crumbs to find several times in the videos, but without any actual evidence of that we can refer back to for proof, then who knows?
It's fine that you think that I did this because I'm not using a graduate degree in late Renaissance history or something (which I hope nobody actually has, no offense). There's a lot of that in the game if that's all you're looking for. But that's not what's happening here. We actually get design intention and a shiltoad more, but work that's cited and searchable. We're annotating the game, not just a Tolkien reference book, after all.
Having said that, the inverted castle is going to be a logistical nightmare of planning, which I didn't think that far ahead about, honestly. In this video, I say that I'm going to take care of each area in its entirety for the sake of making them easily digestible, but the more I stare at the map and plan the route, the less likely that's actually going to happen. When this is all over, I should probably scan or photograph my notes for you to get a sense of the mess that this was to structure. I think I have a good plan in place, but since there are no discrete doors to gate our progress in the second phase, it's actually harder than you think to get through it all with as little backtracking as possible (and that's one of the golden rules from day 1). I think I sort of painted myself in a corner with where I left off with this week's video. Grrr.
Last thing to note is that, yes, I need to start picking up the pace. I sort of dumb luck-ed into being able to finish this project in time for the 20th anniversary of Symphony's release, and that was where I was hoping to end. But we're talking October, here, which means I only have about three months to go. By my early reckoning, that would be six more videos (SIX!) between now and then.
Guess I gotta get crackin'.
Thanks again for watching. Here's this week's episode.
