And I wouldn’t be harping on about difficulty, but Igavania games are SLAVE to their brand name, weirdly desperate to try to appease insufferable grouches like me even as they basically use the series for wallpaper. Alucard has subweapons, but why? The Holy Water or Bible subweapons can’t measure up to even some of the basic weapons you can get, and you can just jump everywhere to get at hard-to-reach enemies, so who needs a vertically arcing axe? Circle and Harmony both saddle you with a classic whip again, maybe in hopes of stemming your wide range of attack options, but with the expanded spell systems in those, it’s a futile effort and reads like a nostalgia grab. You will hear people say that Circle of the Moon or whatever is really hard, but I literally do not understand how or why. Symphony’s early game when you’re stuck with shitty weapons can be rude, but once you get a nice sword and some potions it evens out. The difficulty problem actually gets worse as the series goes on, though; in Circle some spells can buff your damage massively, or provide any number of projectiles, and that’s before late-game screen-clear summon cards. In Harmony, specific spell item/subweapon combos give you really early access to pretty spammable screen-clear attacks too, and by the time you hit Dawn of Sorrow you’ve got three separate spells/abilities available on their own buttons. These games can pretty much never be hard in combat terms.

Because of the way levels need to be easily traversible as well, though, platforming is gutted compared to the old games. I think of it sort of the same way as driving in a bad open-world sandbox, or web swinging in the Amazing Spider Man 2012 game; the traversal could be fun all its own, but the game wants to use it purely to get from place to place. Jumping stuff is just something you do to move around rather than being a challenge in and of itself. And for what? It’s not like many of the rooms are innately interesting, primarily grey corridors you just pass through, and full of stupid enemies. So what are you exploring for, purely just to get to dracula? I feel no innate drive to explore really.

Mostly what results is that the powerup-based progression is garbage. Get a new power, say the Mist, and try to remember which of the seven dead ends on the map had a Mist grate in it. Go to every one. It’s not too bad in Symphony, but later games again get worse, with useless box-pushing in Circle and the ice blocks in Dawn. So aside from just making forward progress, you can find items and stuff occasionally. Swell, a new sword of +2 damage, up from 78 or whatever. I have brainworms that force me to 100% the maps in these games, but I rarely if ever find it fun.

So the game is a lot of generic and annoying grey or beige rooms with random platforms everywhere. There are cool areas here and there, like the Chapel, but on the whole it’s shockingly boring for the series that brought you the Sinking Old Sanctuary level in Bloodlines, or the pirate ship level in Bloodlines, or even the themed castles in Belmont’s Revenge. I think being mostly inside the castle limits the game’s environments too much, partly because the outdoor segments in Dawn of Sorrow are so much more interesting. The spritework and animation for the game is really high effort, (even if it harms control feel now and then) but the game doesn’t seem to have the natural sense for bright, contrasting colours and dark backgrounds that made all of the old Castlevanias that weren’t 4 look so distinct. It’s a decent looking game with some impressive visuals, but it’s worse than it used to be!

Relatedly the sound is lesser now. I think part of the problem is pure bloat, (SotN’s soundtrack is much longer than even Rondo’s) part of the problem is that it’s expected you’ll hear tracks repeatedly as you waltz through areas, but also it’s just lame. Yeah Alucard’s Theme and stuff, but this is Michiru Yamane we’re talking about here. I was surprised to hear in interviews that she was nervous about living up to the standard of Castlevania music circa 1994, but MAN if you haven’t heard Bloodlines’ soundtrack, you have not lived. Reincarnated Soul, Iron Blue Intention, The Sinking Old Sanctuary, and all of the classic remixes are absolute bangers. A soundtrack to surpass Rondo or Castlevania 1. Maybe too high a standard to meet? Most of the Symphony stuff is forgettable in a way that the classic Castlevanias really are not. Circle of the Moon, also by Yamane, has a much better soundtrack too, despite much worse hardware!

So what’s good then? Uh, the cutscenes and story. I think the voice acting teeters dangerously between really good ham and genuinely awful, and the script does too - it has bad translations and weird word choice, but that’s part of the appeal, the sort of theatrical flair. Symphony’s plot elements are a huge upgrade over previous-best Rondo’s; I really like how Dracula seems caught between boredom and annoyance at being summoned AGAIN! Plus, “perhaps the same could be said of all religions” is fun, it’s rad. Symphony’s cutscenes and stuff are classic and everybody loves em.

I guess I just find Symphony (and the games like it) to be a deeply unsatisfying experience. There are no high points or moments of victory, just a series of crappy enemies you destroy and immobile bosses to grind down. Nimbly jumping a medusa head at the right time, cracking the whip to knock one Axe Armour axe out while jumping another, getting down the pattern of a specific boss and being fast enough to pre-empt it, that stuff gives me good brain juices in old Castlevanias. It takes care, planning and consideration to be good at Vania. It does not take anything to be good at Symphony, outside of speedrunning and extreme challenge runs. Scrounging for a new cape down shitty dark hallway #374 after getting the Obligatory Super Jump powerup, doesn’t really compare. I hate it therefore it’s bad!

Koji Igarashi and Toru Hagihara looked at games like Bloodlines and Rondo and thought Gee, these games are just too hard! Their carefully designed, intentionally strict gameplay really doesn’t sell well! We should make a game anyone can get through just by grinding! This sounds like angry gamer projection, but you can find actual interviews, IIRC circa Harmony of Dissonance, in which Igarashi states this bluntly.

I’m not looking to gatekeep people out of Castlevania, like several of them have difficulty settings and I have no problem with that, but the joy in a classic Vania (a la Mega Man) is in using the curated toolset at your disposal (limited jumps, restricted default attack, sub weapons) to overcome challenges that are made for that toolset. Igarashi’s Castlevania has none of that of course: Alucard is so incredibly overpowered that it isn’t even funny. He can swap weapons for different attack ranges, damage values, hit rate and more. He’s got sub weapons, he has shield powers, he has familiars, he has ridiculous superjumps and stuff. Enemies in Symphony and the subsequent games just cannot respond to your vast pool of attacks in any meaningful way. What’s stupid too is that the Headhunter boss from Aria shows you how Igavania enemies could be more Megaman X-esque to accomodate your new attacks, but the majority of enemies are annoyingly inert if not just recycled from Rondo again.

Even if Alucard didn’t have sixteen billion methods of obliterating anything in his path though, nothing beats just grabbing a shortsword and wailing on stuff real fast, DPS-ing. It became dominant strategy for me honestly, because nothing can challenge you like this. Why experiment? Not only have enemies not been adjusted to account for your ridiculous arsenal, but you can also just gain xp and increase your attack power. There’s now no enemy, bosses included, that cannot be defeated by grinding and just wailing on it. There is no “I can’t do enough damage to it fast enough” anymore, and so zero strategy in combat. Theoretically you could use backstepping to dodge some attacks, like the old spear knights… but you have refillable health now, and potions are plentiful to buy, so why bother? Especially if you’re going somewhere, just tank the hits and chug, I mean why not? It’s similar to Moongrass in Demon’s Souls, functionally infinite and barely gated. Level up enough and those hits just become scratch damage anyway. Fighting outside of boss rooms is more like an annoyance than any kind of fun, tough encounter.

I assume there were a lot of complaints about the “stiff” control in the older games, reflecting early-2010s “discourse” about Castlevania, because Alucard has totally fluid control on the ground and in mid-air. The moon-gravity doesn’t feel pleasant like in Sonic Adventure, say, but it does work. Alucard’s base movement is so jacked though, that there are very few enemies you cannot answer by simply jumping over them, particularly with the double jump, and stuff like the bat power just makes things silly. The movement contributes to enemies feeling really pathetic; in Castlevania 1, the only enemies you can ever jump over are basically bats, jaguars and medusa heads. By contrast I struggle to think of an Igavania enemy that does not get jumped over eventually. Maybe the lady-plants…?

Trouble is that enemies have to be ignorable, basically, by design. The open-ended map means nobody would enjoy backtracking through levels designed like classic Castlevania, purpose-built to bust the ass of your fixed jump arc and horizontal-only whip. By contrast, platforms and enemies are just kind of splattered around in an Igavania, always trying to strike a balance between “engaging combat and platforming” and “traversal”, which do not gel IMO. The best examples I can think of are the Chapel area in Symphony and the Eternal Corridor in Circle. It’s sad how bad level design has become in this game: the Clock Tower area is back from the classics, but the gears aren’t hard anymore because jumping is easy, so the game resorts to throwing like five medusa heads at you at once, with some that petrify Alucard. That’s the best they can do. My general solution in this game became to just whack anything that was in my path, unless it took more than three hits, at which point I’d jump it. Coincidentally this also results in you constantly being overlevelled ad destroying bosses… or maybe I just got that gud?