Topic: Randomness in Castlevania or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nothing

[thernz]

It's an interesting thing, knowing that IGA and his team deliberately disallowed any randomness in the formula of attacks in Symphony of the Night, despite its apparent takings from RPGs. It seems like they didn't want to take any chances of muddling combat with chance, perhaps to retain the tighter, more predictable, thus more flow-like aspects of the older titles. And yet, random item drops made their debut, and began to plague newer titles in a way that disregarded their design tenets.

Why was this?

In Symphony of the Night, most of the drops are fairly moot. It doesn't take a scholar to realize that the crafting of a more exploration-based experience dominated Symphony's design more than a combat-based one. Regardless of those random drops, Symphony's caches and troves were plentiful. Perhaps even the item drops themselves added to the exploration, with a multitude of hidden goodies from special attacks to discretely increasing your height. Here was a game that was the anti-thesis of elegant play, but was made all the better for it. Weapon balance? Who needs that? Symphony was about giving the player the illusion that he was subverting the playfield. He was mastering the spatial relations in further runs, becoming more powerful faster than ever, using his new-found abilities to crush once tough foes. It was less about skill in the traditional sense, and more about knowledge from exploration.

Random item drops were perhaps intended for "moments," where the player would be given the illusion that no, he would never be able to fully understand or predict the system's motions. The game's randomness would either help or hurt him so that some ounce of dynamics populated the system.

(Admittedly, Symphony isn't much of an exploration game. It's clearly linear in design. The game pretty much shoves it in your face where to go. There's a branch here and there, but it isn't really until the Inverted Castle that the player is left to his own devices. Unlike Super Metroid, your knowledge doesn't allow you to zip and skip ahead or go in a totally disorderly fashion and truly subvert the environment a la sequence breaking and etc.)

But as the later games went on, the collecting aspect grew. In Aria of Sorrow, the core mechanic was dominated by randomness. Sure, it added to replay, but it just seemed to be a hokey method of making it by grinding. You might as well applaud MMORPGs for their design of keeping the goods entitled to the player away from them. There was nothing deliberate about getting souls, beyond a luck stat. In Pokemon, another game about collecting, there were clear rules that bolstered your chances at capturing a Pokemon. In Shin Megami Tensei, you could negotiate, fuse, and et cetra, giving the collection aspect a broad, diverse, field of mechanics, all in-depth or at least engaging to enjoy. In Aria, you whack a guy a million times, re-entering the same room, to collect a dingy soul whose purpose may just be completely futile.

Though this honestly wasn't a real problem. There were still a number of places to collect weapons and et cetra. There was still a feeling of exploration, that this castle housed more than an obstacle course, it was a being with multiple branches. There were simply things to do rather than kill, kill, kill.

Lament of Innocence was neat about it too. Though it still had drops, there were a number of lite puzzles and secrets like Symphony of the Night. Despite how mediocre it was, you knew there was a bit of love in that baby. It was rich in ideas.

Then came Dawn of Sorrow. To improve weapons you had to farm for souls. Look at the castle's atrocious design. While littered with a few secrets here and there, Dawn of Sorrow's castle falls flat. There is absolutely no interest in the castle. Besides from an aesthetic point of view (where it is very much ugly and barren), Dawn's castle was the sign that Castlevania was becoming confused. No longer was exploration a core emphasis on the game.

Curse was a real baby. You wanna love it, but it just really really smells. But boy, look at that stealing system. Now that is some good stuff. I loved that stealing was pretty much required for improving your weapons. Having to understand the enemies, then use their patterns against them, that's probably the funnest thing Castlevania's had with dealing with enemies, since well, making fighting enemies an actual reflective and deliberate action, that the series has long since forsaken.

portrait of ruin? what's that?

Finally, we arrived at the Order of Ecclesia. Wow, look everything's an obstacle course. But Order had something I like. Taking a cue from Curse's wonderful steal system, Ecclesia offered the player to further probe into enemy patterns, allowing them to take glyphs when an enemy was conjuring a spell. It wasn't overly complex or as nuanced as Curse's, but it was good. They found a way to incorporate observation and undermine grinding. There was finally something more tangible to the collecting, along the lines of Pokemon and SMT. Though not incredibly deep, I thought it was a bold premonition for the future of Castlevania.

Then Harmony of Despair pooped out, and there's just Lords everywhere. So why even care about this anymore?

[Sinful]

Hey, that almost looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger! Who is it?





... I don't know what's going on in this topic? (And yes, I read it all) See ya's!

[Lumi Kløvstad]

A masterful topics that went nowhere we haven't been before.

But Thernz wrote it, and for that I will read it four more times.

[crisis]

thernz with yet another insightful topic. 5 stars

Hey, that almost looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger! Who is it?

LOL

[Flame]

Hey, that almost looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger! Who is it?

Must be Simon Belmont.

[darkwzrd4]

thernz said what we all have been thinking for years.  CV is broken.  Both from a gameplay aspect as well as a story aspect.  Gameplay was joke between SotN and OoE.  SotN changed the style of the gameplay, but it wasn't until OoE 12 years later that it seemed to be perfected.  Everything in between seemed like SotN clones each with it's own special gimmick that didn't really add anything.  Plus, they were all relatively easy.  OoE was actually a challenge on the first play through.  It the new game+ only suffered because you retained your level when you did one.  If your last save was at level 60 and you started a new game+ for that file, you would start at level 60 making the game a cake walk.  They should have made it so that when you do a new game+, you start at level 1.

LoS from a gameplay aspect was great (minus the titan fights and excessive shimmying).  The story on the other hand was not in any way CV.

[X]

LoS from a gameplay aspect was great (minus the titan fights and excessive shimmying).  The story on the other hand was not in any way CV.

Don't forget how looooooong it took to kill the weakest of enemies while pulling off combos.

[thernz]

This topic is all about figuring out what I meant.