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.
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