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.

Annotated Appendix: The Colosseum

Here's some actual inside dope about the making of this episode: It went wildly out of control right after I picked up the Shield Rod. Let's talk about that first.

See, the Colosseum is a relatively circuitous area of the game, not necessarily a straight line. This is good from a design perspective, actually; the player will find themselves wandering around in similar, though not redundant (it's not that big of a level) locations sussing out the best ways to get the Form of Mist relic, which is on display behind an obstacle from the second they walk in. Do they stumble into the boss fight right away? Certainly possible since it's pretty close to the entrance. But for the sake of a video series like this, boss fights are good places to end episodes since you can easily put a period on things that way. That meant showing the majority of the location before jumping into the final showdown, which takes a little cartographic forethought.

Totally blew that. What you don't see is that I save the game after grabbing and explaining the Shield Rod --a holy object to most players that destroys the game-- and lose track of where I was and what direction I was going. Not that big of a deal since I can just edit stuff together, but I had to reset the game and start from that save room, losing video footage of actual item drops that I could point out. Lame. Worse, I went through the second run at a faster clip, which meant that I had to re-record some of the dialog to reflect that I had already passed some rooms by the time I could actually talk about them. From the standpoint of you, the viewer, I wonder if you're ok with that. Sure, some places mean that I have to just sit tight and blabber for a while, but in terms of less significant spots like the torture chamber where the Blood Cloak is found, it probably isn't that big a deal. Hmm.

What you can also probably glean from my voice in this one is that I'm sick, and have been for weeks. This may be something you care about very little because you have cold, black heart and don't really give a poo for my well-being. That's fine. For me, and the fact that I'm doing this whole thing for some perverse sense of posterity, I want to get these out the door in the best possible state they can be in, which means that I was trying to get better first. Since I have the cold that wouldn't die, though, I made the executive decision to just get it out the door. So there.

Anyway, enjoy episode 7. I'll map the rest of the library and probably move on to either Orlox's Quarters or the Underground Waterway next (probably the former).

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.