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Replayed Symphony of the Night by blackwater 01/10/2023, 9:44pm PST
I last played it like an eternity ago, on an actual PS1.

I went through a lot of crazy bullshit looking for a good PS1 emulator for MacOS. For some reason most of the sites I looked at pointed me at ancient software that hadn't been updated in ages. But eventually I learned about DuckStation, which works great and is simple to use.

The game itself is just as I remember it, really. The difficulty curve is a bit silly -- it starts off like a typical early Castlevania, tough but fun. Then you get ridiculous and broken powers that make it a cakewalk. I don't mind the broken powers, that is all part of the fun.

I did struggle to use "spells" which are kind of like combo moves in a beat-em-up. You input a bunch of keypresses and then the special move (spell) triggers. In my defense, I think my emulator didn't do a great job at registering up+left, up+right, etc. on the D-pad. I'm also kind of lazy so I didn't want to memorize that stuff. (HEH)

The rest of it is fine, some classic gameplay. Compared to a modern game, it's weird how many things have zero explanation in the game. Like you get a magic item and it just has like a one-sentence description like "skill of wolf" or something. Well, ok, but... what does that do?

In Ye Olden Days, part of the charm of games was figuring out what you were supposed to do, from talking to your friends. (You did have friends, right? Right?) That's mostly gone now, because we can just search up stuff. But sometimes it's surprisingly hard to find out what you have to do, since you're reading web sites written by a bunch of autists who have 100%ed the game a dozen times over and don't see a reason to explain what Skill of Wolf is.

Anyway, this game is great. It has a charm which is hard to describe in purely mechanical terms. The music is a particular highlight.

I didn't 100% the game but I did kill Dracula.

If I have one complaint, it's that mist form should probably cost more mana than it does. It trivializes some areas that I remember being quite difficult back in the day.
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Replayed Symphony of the Night by blackwater 01/10/2023, 9:44pm PST NEW
 
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