Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on PS4: Sorry, this is too old to be fun

My favorite type of games are probably a draw between Metroidvania and Real Time Strategy games. MV games have seen a resurgence lately but RTS games are rarely made anymore, and when they are made they are "free" to play meaning that it is going to be a paywall nightmare so, no thanks! I'd rather not play it.

It is no secret that the birth of Metroidvania games were the ideas behind Metroid and of course Castlevania. While I have extremely fond memories of these games I think that it is more the way the games work than the games themselves that appeal to me today.

For some reason I missed Symphony of the Night when it was originally released and I have always heard it was an amazing game so I was thrilled when it was part of the Playstation Plus membership free games for the month.

Unfortunately, I didn't have to play it very long before that enthusiasm died down.

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It's actually 2 games bundled into one called Requiem but I haven't tried Rondo of Blood yet. Hopefully it is better but I am not getting my hopes up.

For one thing, they didn't update the graphics at all and they didn't even adjust the aspect ratio. We were all using rather square TV's and monitors when this game was originally released so you have no choice but to play the game in a square box in the center of your screen with what I consider to be entirely too much unused space around the actual play area.

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Yeah yeah, I get it: Stretching it out for the entire screen would have made everyone just look tubby but honestly, did they even try to do better than this? This kind of reminds me of when arcade ports would get put on home consoles but the screen had to be smooshed because generally speaking arcades had what was essentially a television screen turned on its side.

To make matters worse, the sound and graphics are the same as they were ages ago and while this might appeal to some people, we have really moved on as gamers in the past 20-30 years and even though this was cutting edge in 1997 it is really weak by today's standards. I suppose this could be another reason why they kept the screen size small because televisions are significantly larger today than they were in 1997 and it is already pixelated as hell.

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Another thing that irritated me is that the controls are not very "tight" by today's standards either. After playing Ori, Hollow Knight, and Ender Lilies as my last 3 Metroidvania games this just seems extremely clunky because games were clunky with their controls back when we had limited technology. It would have been nice if they had improved on this a tad but platforming just becomes annoying when you have lagging controls and limited aerial options. At least you are able to change direction in the air mid jump, I would have quite much earlier if that was not the case.

I think what might have irritated me the most was that the first time I played the game I accidentally walked past a save room because I had forgotten that was a thing in Castlevania then I died, and I was forced to go through a sequence of events that included 4 unskippable cutscenes that probably took about 20 minutes in total to get back to where i was before.

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The conversation with Death where he takes away all of your powers - which was a standard way to start an MV game way back when, takes 5 minutes and you can't skip it or speed up the dialogue. I know this is me being nitpicky but in this day and age, non skippable cutscenes or dialogue is unacceptable.

I made it past the first boss, saved, and then said to myself that some things are better left in your memories. I was trying to force myself to like it but unfortunately a 25-year old game that has made not graphical or control changes just doesn't sit well with me and I have instead moved on to another game.

Next up is 8Doors: Arum's Afterlife Adventure and it was released in 2021. I would imagine that it is going to be a bit more of what I am looking for in a game. We'll see!