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IGA's Second Symphony - possible SOTN sequel
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For a game that has a ton of travel and vicious enemies, the fact that you have to double-tap a direction to run is a glaring mistake.
I was being sarcastic, it's is honestly my favorite of the three GBA Castlevanias for it's overall atmosphere and design (hell I just spent like four pages of this thread heaping praise on it).
Double tapping to run I had no issue with. It was a little faster to do the offensive dash with the trigger anyway since you'd be running through corridors infested with enemies. There was also an awesome DSS combination that let you use the other trigger to run super fast.
I'm a fan of the older castlevanias and one of my favorite parts was the jumping puzzles, but I don't think it would work at all in the new style.
What made them complicated in the older games wasn't the complexity of the jumps, but the fact that if you got hit once in mid air you'd be screwed due to the physics of the game, you had 0 air control in your jumps, and the whip wasn't an ideal weapon for combating foes that occilated up and down while flying.
The new style games depend on some degree of air control, you need it to get around and it makes the actual combat a lot more fun and reflex based, rather then “get boomerang and triple shot stand in this area and throwâ€. And that degree of air control would wipe out all the complexity of any jump puzzle.
I'm afraid these things just can't be mixed.
I didn't play it long due to the random nature of card drops. Couldn't get anything done.
DSS was a fantastic magic system. It was such a treat to get a new card and see what new abilities you got. Like Eternal Darkness's Rune system, another of my favorites. I like to play around with my magic a bit.
EDIT: Uranus+Thunderbird and Jupiter+Serpent fo' life. Fuck false candles, too.
I wouldn't mind another Castlevania that uses the same system, wherein instead of getting progressively more powerful weaponry you get a tighter variety of stuff that's all useful at various points. And different people would have different experiences depending on which ones they got first.
I don't think they need to go that far, they just need to design the items better. I've had one huge gripe with all the metroid style CV's... there are tons of unique weapons with really fun abilities, but then they turn to crap and there is never another one that emulates it. Yet at the end there are a bunch of completely broke items as well.
There is no reason they can't carry over abilities through several weapons.
Errr, the soul system was pretty obnoxious. At best it lead to soul farming and wasting time bogging the game down to a grind. At it's worse it was so boring you'd skip upgrading entire sets of weapons, or flat out just stop playing the game or fist fight through it.
Plus abilities didn't carry over, each weapon was unique and then you didn't have the prior weapon.
I'm glad that's gone, I've always hated it with a passion.
I'm sick of weapons in games in general being useful for ten minutes and then garbage when you get a better one. Make that weapon better instead! Reduce, reuse, recycle and all that shit.
I'mf fine with upgrades if it's items you have to find in rooms, or win (100% get from say a boss).
What I object to is the random farm concept soul system brings in. It seriously ruins the games. You can be moving along at a great pace and then blamo, have fun farming golems for 3 hours. It breaks up the game. In an RPG you can get away with it, but in an action style game like Castlevania it's a pain.
I think it can be done well if they did it right. But until they do random weapon drops are the best. At least with those you don't have to go through your items in a linear line (the key and core problem), you can opt to farm when you want, rather then farm for it all or you're stuck with a certain weapon level.
I want to play CV, not korean MMO grind for drops.
The platforming in SotN didn't really offer a whole lot of menace. Yes, you lose some progress if you fall, but you aren't exactly losing your last life and forced to restart the stage.
With a real penalty, platforming is both a challenge and a threat. With virtually none at all save for time lost, it's an annoyance.
I'll say this though, to play Symphony is to realize the kind of piss poor level design we've accepted from its successors.
And I see no reason why increases in air control eliminates the possibility of good platforming, possibly with instant death traps. If anything, that should increase the potential for ingenious platforming, since now you can throw all kinds of things at all kinds of angles at the player, and he is endowed with the tools to overcome it.
The problem with dropping the player down a tower is that often times that tower wasn't much or isn't much challenge to get up: it's just a waste of time. Admittedly, when you offer save points or retry points near places where death looms, it's not much better; in the end, you still get the feeling that it's just a matter of time before you pass it, and that's really the most important issue of all. Do you allow the player a way to victory that is ultimately inevitable (e.g. if you can't win by manual control, grind until the boss becomes trivial) or not? If not, how?
I have never liked the concept of the bottomless pit though. It always seems like a cheap way to keep the player from being cool and having fun. Especially in newer games. I'm looking at you Sonic Adventure.
I never asked for this!
Steam
You know damn it you're right.
I never asked for this!
It's acceptable in the few zones that have a lot of them in Sonic 1-3&k.
I never asked for this!
My friend and I found a certain button combination that made Reinhardt blow up instantly while carrying that nitro.
The boss after that was even cooler, a bull with lasers! The way it fell apart during the battle was amazing when I first played it. I used to go easy on it so I could watch the bull slowly decompose.
Your Current Signature Picture[/SIGPIC]
I've always felt like the game really nailed the progression of a Castlevania game. The slow build-up to entering the Castle's upper towers was fantastic, and I agree, the artistic direction was some of the best in the series.
But, it suffered from alot of design changes, and generally, from being born in the early days of 3D action/adventure titles.
Yet another reason CotM is a great game.
Drunks Against Mad Mothers
Drunks Against Mad Mothers
You also never got the same sense of enormity out of the thing in the hand held games, for obvious reasons.
But in Symphony...it really is just a fifty foot ball of corpses.
Circle of the Moon was about a real vampire hunter that might have been a Belmont so pitiful things like Legion aren't even a thread, that's why it was a relatively small normal enemy in that game.
Rufus, CV64 hasn't aged great like most games of that time, but replaying it a bit again (from reading this thread) the controls actually still feel very responsive compared to, say, Tomb Raider 2 or Crash Bandicoot or the other big names of the time. I'd go so far as to say that it's held the test of time much better than its contemporaries.
What bothers me about modern 3D attempts at Castlevania are that they seem to feel obligated to pay service to the RPG flavor of the better respected entries like Symphony, as opposed to being completely original attempts at reimagining the basic Castlevania concept in 3D.
Castlevania 64 was probably the only such game to attempt that, and it's a damn shame it didn't get a warm enough reception to become better developed in future entries.
Sure Lament of Innocence was pretty bereft of RPG elements...but it also tried to ape the Metroidvania archetype with the open castle, limited platforming, and, you know, lots of backtracking.
Supposedly playing through the game is a totally different experience and feels like a straight action game due to his more traditional move set and faster speed. I never completed the main game.