"Castlevania: Symphony of the Night" is 2D side scrolling action carried through to perfection.
Everything about this game really is nearly perfect: the music and graphics all contribute to an intricate environment with a dark atmosphere, and the controls are all very smooth and responsive. It's a pleasure simply walking around this mansion and slashing through the great zoo of enemies, with the large array of collectible weapons and hearing the many variations of sounds of death from enemies and yourself.
There is a proper story integrated with the game, with the obstacles of the castle carefully arranged so you receive the fragments in the right order. These obstacles are really the best part of this game -- the places you want to go to may be in plain sight, but they are only reachable after resolving the right dependencies. This genre of games is known as Metroidvania, and "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night" can claim credit for that suffix. This is a design that provides great replay value, and have withstood the test of time even after 20 years.
Symphony of the Night has a particularly addictive replay value, sufficient to make me want to play it again after this many years. Really, I got the strong urge to start over from scratch right after completing the game 200.6%, so I did exactly that and had to resist restarting the game again. The size of this game is such that it's large enough to have sufficient variety, but short enough such that it only takes an average player a weekend or two to complete. I can totally understand how some people might choose playing this game as their full time job.
I am going to stop before sinking more hours into this game, but I will definitely come back to it in the future.
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