Annotated Appendix: Finale, Pt. 2

How the Sausage is Made, Part 2

Annotated Appendix: Finale

So here we are.

For the final episode, I actually had much grander plans for how the last few minutes would play: a montage of Richter Mode with the "thank you!" voice over. But, oddly, I had tons of time between the endings playing out and I Am The Wind's interminable running length. In an effort to keep this episode to a respectable running time, I thought the montage would be overkill, so I scrapped it in favor of tightening things up. See? You guys told me that you didn't like silence, so I kept it to a minimum.

It tugs at me, though, that the finale of the video series winds up with I Am the Wind, but it just doesn't make sense to elongate the episode. Sorry if you may have found it slightly anticlimactic, but I hope you understand the reasoning now. If anything, this is the only episode where I wished I had more to talk about. Maybe it was just the grieving process for it ending starting to take hold or something, but I really wracked my brain (and my notes) to include anything else I possibly could, but everything left was stuff obviously read in-game (like how large the dev team was, which is clearly indicated in the credits that you would be watching).

And there we have it. One major project in the books. To answer some questions that I've gotten about this all happened, here's...

How Some of the Sausage Was Made, Part 1

The voice recording was done with a Blue Snowball microphone. I have a friend that freelances as a voice actor and some other pals that podcast, and they unanimously recommended it to me for the quality it delivers at the price it sells for. It really did a hell of a job for a USB mic, and I can't say enough good things about it. I'm sure I could have done more research and found something better, but I'm not an audio engineer, so it was perfect for me.

I recorded all of the voice overs using Audacity, which is a freeware program that anybody can download and use. At first, I found it kind of obtuse, but since I wasn't really doing anything super fancy with it other than recording, editing, and then exporting into .mp3 format, it did the job. I would generally write a script first and then edit it a bit (not a lot, which is a flaw of mine that other editors probably hate about me) before launching into the recording, and then I would edit the recording immediately after. The recording process probably took a little over an hour per episode based on how many mistakes I made that needed to be corrected. I'm not a professional narrator or anything, but I've taken a handful of acting classes when I was in college (English majors could do that as electives, you see), and recalled some of the golden rules when I needed them most. The best, in this case was "slow down," because, like everyone else, the faster you do things the more likely they are to turn out rough, and this includes reading a script that you wrote yourself.

Generally, after editing the sound, I would walk my laptop over to my PlayStation 3 and jump right into the game footage capture, which was done using an Elgato Game Capture HD and Elgato's capture software. This was generously loaned to me by a friend, and not a moment too soon. At first, as I was trying to do this whole thing on a budget and decided to simply emulate everything. The problem is that I'm using a laptop that's a little more than three years old now, and wasn't even close to top of the line when I bought it. Though I was still using a disk to play Symphony using ePSXe, the frame rate would drop at very inconvenient times, and after doing a test run of the game, I just knew in my guts that it would be compromised if I did the final videos this way. Thanks to the good will of a good pal, the Symphony footage in the series was taken off of a PS3.

Everything else you see is emulated, though. Even though I own all of these game in one form or another (except one of them. No, I won't tell you which) (ok, it's Kid Dracula) (Kid Dracula sucks), I didn't have the Elgato handy during the early research period, and found it best to just download roms off of the internet. At first, though, I still didn't have a clear idea how to capture the footage. After a little research, I settled on FRAPS, which is a free software specifically for game capture, but a small fee gives you a few extra bells and whistles, as well as the removal of a FRAPS watermark on every video. It may sound kind of snobby, but having a billboard for computer programs all over most of my videos was not something I was happy about, so I spent the $37 on the full version of the program.

This is where things get stupid, though. When the laptop was new, it was loaded with the horrendous Windows 8 with the promise of a free update to 10 sooner than later. Since I never wanted to deal with 8, I never did a lot of experimenting with it, and when 10 finally came, I had no idea that the on board Xbox software had native video capturing, so most of the older games and side bits of Symphony were captured using that when I finally realized it was there. FRAPS was still useful, though, as some things didn't play nicely with the Xbox software, so the money was still well spent.

Lucky for me, though, I never throw anything out, and boxes full of old-ish stuff really helped me save a bunch of cash on this. A few years ago, a friend of mine gave me his old PlayStation 2 (I had traded up for a backward compatible PS3 when they were new. When it died a noble death,  I was stuck with a mountain of unplayable PS2 games for years), but with a busted controller. I went ahead and hunted down an OEM PS2 controller, and just happened to have a USB adapter for it that I had bought on a work trip to Cincinnati when I wanted to play Final Fantasy VIII on my work laptop (maybe around 2008? I can't remember). As my wife and I are people with thousands of compact disks sitting digitized on a hard drive, we looked slightly ahead and bought a 1TB external drive to back everything up a few years ago, and this is where all of the captured video was stored.

All of the video editing was done using Sony Vegas Pro 11, which is now a pretty old version of the program. This was also gifted to me by the friend with the Elgato, and it took some work to get it to do what I envisioned with this series. The learning curve was steep, but not as bad as it would have been without YouTube and the ocean of tutorials on it. I've come to find later that while SVP may not be as ubiquitous in the editing community as the Adobe suite of products, it worked great. I've also found that it's very affordable for what it can do (at least, for what I used it for), so it gets the thumbs up from me.

Finally, yes, I was using the copy of Symphony that my parents gave me for Christmas just after my 18th birthday. It will never leave my possession if I'm still of sound mind.

Tomorrow, I'll post what is a photographic tour of how this all came together.

Thanks again for watching!

Annotated Appendix: The Cave and Floating Catacombs

Close to the end, now. We're almost there!

Unlike this Appendix entry, I thought this episode would be a challenge to make, but it came out pretty quickly. EXCEPT when I did a test run of the areas and saved the game without recording anything. Yes, boneheaded move, and yes, it happened before. I had a backup run at what I thought was the same spot, but found that I needed to bum rush a good chunk of the game to get back to the point of recording. So, if any of you detect something off about the weapon loadout, HP count, and conspicuously absent number of relics that briefly appear on the list, this is why. A little bit of sausage-making for you. I was even still equipped with the Spike Breaker armor, which you can clearly see when I fly through the specific room in the FC, much to my own surprise (and delight because I would have probably been killed).

Something I forgot to mention: Most Symphony players know this pretty well, but I neglected to point out that by skipping the Death scene and hanging on to the Alucard Shield, the game is shattered the moment you find the Shield Rod. I didn't mention it in the last video, and I didn't bring it up in this one. There. Mea culpa.

Ok, let's talk about the Galamoth fight for a bit. Someone called out in the comments that I did it in a "broken" manner by showing off the use of the Beryl Circlet, the teleport strikes, and the Alucard Shield/ Rod combo all in succession. I suppose that this is a fair point, but I don't think that there's a "right" way of handling this battle as Galamoth is a pretty hard boss and has a stupid amount of hit points. Sure, I suppose you can attack him little and then turn into Mist to avoid the lightning attacks, as was mentioned in the video, but we don't have time to do it that way with his HP count slowly whittling away. Honestly, I thought just going to town on him with the Beryl Circlet equipped would have been enough, but the clock was ticking so I threw in both other methods to get things over with instead of showing side videos of me just steamrolling him, which was the original plan. Incidentally, the first time I killed Galamoth 20 years ago was with teleport strikes and the Osafune Katana. I had the timing down to frames of animation, and in the right mode, could kill him without losing a single point of damage. But that was a long time ago. I never even heard of the Shield Rod combo until I was in my third year of college almost 3 years later, and didn't know about the hidden room with the Beryl Circlet until probably close to the same time. See? Without ubiquitous internet, we just had to fend for ourselves.

Of course, there are also videos floating around YouTube that prove that he can be hit stunned by getting to the ledge behind him and smacking him in the face. I have never tested this myself, but if I can get to it in the next few days, this might be thrown into the final video.

Here's something: Upon re-watching it, I'm also noticing that a speech impediment has formed when I speak quickly. It's weird because I'm a guy that used to basically talk for a living, and I do so relatively fast. I like getting in front of people and rambling, and had a pretty articulate delivery. As I've gotten a little older, though, I'm noticing that I'm starting to stumble with that delivery and mumble a little bit, and these videos have really confirmed this. Probably more than you wanted to know, but these Appendices are just as much for me as they are for you.

So one more to go. Just to temper your expectations now, the next episode should be on the shorter side from the where I'm sitting at the moment. I know that we're at the end, but obviously, there aren't any more new environments to deal with, so there's certainly less to show. That won't mean that it's only going to be the final boss fight and that's it, though, so please look forward to it.

Thanks again for watching.

Annotated Appendix: The Reverse Caverns

Yes, indeed, this is the episode I dreaded making most.

As you'll see in this week's video, there just isn't that much to say about the Reverse (Reverce?) Caverns, and the slow travel and tedious mapping makes for a real slog. Since I've been cobbling together two or three sections of the Inverted Castle, each new episode has been about 20-25 minutes long, and that's kind of lengthy. Knowing that it would take me at least that long to get through this area, though, meant for this section to have it's own unique show, and one that you may find ...uh... kind of boring.

But stick around to the end! All of the really interesting bits are packed into the back half, including two things that I probably should have mentioned: the fact that by skipping the Death encounter at the beginning of the game means that you can essentially break it the moment you acquire the Shield Rod (since you already have the Alucard Shield), and that the wooden bridge that covers the entrance to the Cave magically reappeared at the end of the episode. Thankfully, by leaving the screen and coming back it once again evaporated, but this is a glitch that I had never seen before, and in no way can I recreate it. Since there are several sources on the internet where Iga claims the game is practically held together by Scotch tape and hope, I'm not super shocked to see something like this, but I probably should have busted out the microphone and called it out. Aaaah well.

The good news is that, surprise, this video showed up only a little more than a week or so since the last one. Let's call that a nice side effect of just not having that much going on in this one, but that might be a little reprieve compared to the next two, which should be packed. And yes, there will be two more. I've just decided before writing this that finishing the game in the next episode might be a little too much, and I can use the final battle with Dracula and the credits sequence as a sort of final appendix for stuff that didn't fit anywhere else, like the multiple endings. I know I've said this plenty of times, but I'm writing this on October 3rd, and though there's no specific date that we can refer back to as the actual release of the game in the US, we're in the advent of its 20th anniversary, and that's the end goal. Keep my rickety old laptop and I in your thoughts over the next few weeks.

Thanks again for watching, and enjoy the new video (please).

Annotated Appendix: Death Wing's Lair and the Reverse Colosseum

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.

Enjoy the new video, folks:

Annotated Appendix: Inverted Castle 1

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.

Annotated Appendix: The First Great Cleanup

This was both the easiest and most difficult video to put together. Go ahead and watch it:

First, from an actually editing perspective, it was kind of a snap. I didn't need extensive clips from previous games since it was mostly just B roll from Symphony itself, which saved me a lot of resizing/ reframing for the side window, which always makes things easier. Since we've pretty much seen the entirety of the castle at this point except for a few hidden rooms with no real visual splendor to them, there wasn't a whole lot to discuss about actual locations, either (which will be true for the entirety of the second castle, actually), which also makes getting through things a little faster. I could just point out what we found, throw in some clips of what makes them interesting, and move on.

Even though this is maybe the longest video, too, it moves along at a faster clip than the others do, too. I think people will like that about this one, especially with the extra "filler" information that I've had in the can since this series started. Without the need for Alucard to stand around and wait for me to finish speaking, it certainly makes for a more interesting video to watch, but that's also where some of the troubles came in. All of the stuff that I point out that isn't exactly native to what we're seeing on-screen had to be nestled in there or totally re-written and re-recorded. I'm not totally above that, but there's a balance between working smarter and working harder. Thankfully, it all kind of fit. So a few sentences are a little awkward in that I keep saying "series producer, Koji Igarashi," and "an interview recently translated by Shmupulations," (whom does work so great that you owe it to yourself to dig through their back catalog and lose an afternoon or two, and then contribute to their Patreon like they deserve), but I think it gets a pass. It's nice to do a video that's essentially an information dump but winds up being a much more active one.

Last thing about that: boy, I sure did a shitty job getting around those Flea Riders in the Keep, huh? That wasn't by design; I actually thought that I had enough magic that I could make the flight in mist form to the other side of the keep. By the time I got swarmed, I knew I was in for it. But it sure was convenient, though, because the dialog running over that whole clown show fit perfectly. Happy accidents, my dudes. Happy. Accidents.

So a note going forward-- I'll probably do two sections of the inverted castle per video, so things should move along a little faster. Other than the new enemies to talk about, there's just isn't that much to discuss. Sad, maybe, but the truth, so be prepared.

Thanks again for watching, and I'll see you in a few weeks.

Annotated Appendix: The Catacombs

Oh, hi. This one took forever to get out, so let me just start this one off by apologizing for the tardiness. Thanks for sticking with it so far, though. Let's get into the Catacombs.

The big insider dope with the making of this one is the fact that I totally botched my save files, which set everything back about a week. Most of you know this already, but one cannot make multiple saves in SotN, so if you accidentally save the game at a point that's inconvenient (which, really, only happens if you're making internet videos because it's practically impossible to screw yourself in that manner here), you have no choice but to start from scratch. It had been so long since I had made a previous video that I mis-juggled my current playthroughs and saved over what was the master run of the game. Yes, I am stupid.

I guess I'm lucky in this regard in that getting back to that point was only a matter of hours, but it's not the same save file, which slaps the some of the original intent of this series in the face. It's really not that big of a deal, I know, but there was a certain integrity that I wanted to maintain and now I have a flaw that maybe I alone will notice. Oh well, I suppose.

To the actual episode, though, there really wasn't a ton of development anecdotes to relay with this one, but there was a lot of fun research to put into it all the same. This is really where the references to demonology kick off in earnest, and the Tolkien stuff is also starting to mount, too, but sadly, nothing really specific came straight from Iga's mouth here. The best stuff about the Catacombs are its subtext, really.

I mention in the video that the area is basically split in half, and I'm almost 100% certain that this was an early design choice. On the left side of the map, Alucard can fight it out with Granfaloon and obtain the Mormegil, which is a proper Dark elemental weapon. This is for the crowd that may not map the whole castle because Mormegil is a weapon that can turn Richter Belmont into mush. Since it takes some exploration and a little experimentation to get through the pitch black spike room on the right side of the map, the designers want you to take this new weapon to the top of the castle, finish the game, and remain curious about what you didn't uncover. This means a return trip to the area after obtaining the Echo of Bat. It's honestly not all that deeply hidden, all things considered. "I can go here, but I can't go there, yet," is, in this genre of game, all the enticement necessary to eventually get there. It's why we crossed oceans and go into space. People just want to see what's out there.

The other big nod is the combination of Orphic myth and Dante's Inferno. I make it pretty clear in the video, but just to reiterate: Alucard is descending to the lowest reach of the castle. Like in Greco-Roman mythology, he was transported there by a boatman only to be met with a watchdog sentry before breaking his way in to fight a demon that was mentioned by name (which is fairly rare) in the Christian Bible. He literally goes into the underworld, complete with fire at his feet. The prize for killing it is a means to finish the game, but only one facet of it, so this Hell that Alucard is in must be explored thoroughly or fought through a second time. For those of you in the know (which I'm pretty sure is everyone reading this), we get to see much later the difference between a Hell that we thought was under our feet (as our ancestors may have thought) and the Hell that's an upside down reflection of reality, which, in a lot of ways, is a whole lot worse.

Not much of a discussion question this time around, but after doing my share of reading into the origins of catacombs, I kept thinking of Edgar Allen Poe's "Cask of Amontillado" and wondered if there were any subtle references to it in the game. I have a feeling that one of the statues in there might be, but that's too much of a stretch. Curious about that you all think in the comments.

Thanks again for watching, and we're off to the Clock Tower.

Annotated Appendix: The Abandoned Mine

Sorry for the break between episodes, but a nice chunk of freelance work has come in. Some of it was harrowing, all of it was awesome. Head over to USGamer.net and bask in its majesty.

Ok, then. The Abandoned Mine. Let's get to it.

This was a nice place to ease back into movie-making because it's the smallest section of the castle, except for maybe the Entrance. There's still a lot to say, though, and it even has a very cool. cleverly hidden reference to a mythic story of a Gothic king.

To get there, though, we needed to nab the Demon familiar, and have him hit the switch in the more mountainous-looking sections of the zone. Not that big of a deal to those in the know, but in practice, it's a finicky behavior for the little devil to take part in.

Here's why: whenever you summon a familiar from your Relic menu, they'll say a few words to you to sort of announce their presence as long as Alucard is standing still after you leave the submenu. This is a neat little extra feature that doesn't have any bearing on the game other than this one spot (and its counterpart in the Inverted Castle), because if you bring in the Demon while you're standing still, it will come down to your side and mumble something and not fly upward to hit the switch like its supposed to. The other weird quirk that I found with this is that it won't consistently press the button if you go from the Fairy familiar to the Demon, either, which has got to be some sort of weird bug. I can nearly always get it to behave the way I need it to when I start with the Sword familiar, though, which is why you see me equip it immediately as this episode starts. What you don't see is about 20 minutes of previous recordings as I try to get the little bastard to do what I want without starting with the Sword. This right here is why these Appendices exist. Inside baseball!

Anyway, as you work your way through the secret passage, you fight it out with a few random Thornweeds (Unes) and a Venus Weed (Alura Une), which is a pretty tough enemy if you don't come into the fight prepared. Notice the Venus Weed's shape, though, that of a giant rose (and, sure, the naked woman that sprouts within it). The next room is where Alucard finds the Ares Ring, which is called Laurin's Ring in the Japanese version. The video tells the story of Laurin the treacherous dwarf king and his rose garden. You just busted your way through a giant rose, and since half of this level looks more opulent than the more cavernous sections (like where you pick up the ring), the game sort of implies that this whole section is a representation of King Laurin's mountain palace. That's pretty cool.

The other thing (that I'm asking about in the comments) is the Peanuts room where the Power of Sire is found. This is a stretch, but I always sort of considered this room as something of a lament for Alucard. Follow me here: in the West, there's a certain cultural cliche of a father playing catch with his son, whether it be a bonding experience or a teaching exercise or whatever. Traditionally, professional baseball games sell peanuts by the truckload. Since the small room has a smattering of peanuts lying around next to one of only two Power of Sires found in the game (a bomb item that displays Dracula's image in two separate ways), I always connected these items as going to see a ballgame with your dad, and maybe it represents the strained relationship that Alucard and old Vlad have. Or, since it's a secret room within a secret room, it's more from Dracula's perspective that it represents a botched fatherhood. I wonder what you think. Talk about it in the video's comments, if you please.

Speaking of subtext, the whole next episode, the Catacombs, will make Alucard's descent into Hell complete. I honestly have no idea when I can put it together, but hopefully in the next two weeks or so.

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.

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 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.