Have you ever had a gaming epiphany? The past ten years of gradually fading Castlevania games just snapped into place for me, like the sixth bullet in a badly-planed Russian roulette.

Castlevania: Rondo of Blood is the missing developmental stage between the (S)NES era action-platormers and the modern action-RPGs. If you look at the enemy design, semi-linear exploration, and even the menu screen, Rondo plays like a first draft of Symphony of the Night. Both games open with a cinematic (read: rigged) boss battle that deftly mixes hook and tutorial. In Rondo you fight Death, and in Symphony you fight Dracula, but it’s the same trick in both places. Each game lays down foundations of series continuity. Rondo begins in Aljiba, a town from Castlevania 2, as it is razed by monsters. Symphony starts, funnily enough, at the end of Rondo. Even the spinning cogs that unlock secret doors in the clock tower are the same.

In fact, the overlap is so extensive that Rondo and Symphony feel less like drafts and more like genre remixes of the same game. They’re so similar, in fact, that you can imagine why Rondo didn’t see US soil for 16 years. With the all-too-common localization delays in the 90′s, the PC Engine‘s failure, and Symphony‘s subsequent runaway success, Rondo would have felt like a redundant atavism by the time anyone seriously considered sending it over to the states.

Now consider the situation from Konami’s perspective. When they created Symphony of the Night, they revised Rondo‘s foundations, essentially to incorporate a Super Metroid kind of non-linearity, but otherwise aped Rondo of Blood. This is the exact strategy they employed for Dawn of Sorrow and Order of Ecclesia, progressively shallower remixes of their predecessors. There are probably marketers (or worse, misled designers) at Konami who just won’t stop chasing lightning with a bottle.

And no man can say who shall emerge victorious what they can do to fix it.

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Tags:   castlevania · konami · rondo of blood · symphony of the nightNo Comments

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