Ok, so I was scrounging through Koji Igarashi’s trash (in a totally journalistic capacity) when I happened across the following pages. I only managed to scan a handful before their informative radiance broke the scanner, but I’ll post more once I work around that bottleneck.

Who knows, maybe if I’m suddenly inspired (or I find a bored graphic designer willing to work for site credit), I’ll bind these and the ingame pages into an honest-to-intellectual-property-theft manual.

The real reason E3 is so exciting this year is because developers are taking old franchises in new directions. Wednesday we hit up Kirby, and today is Castlevania: . Why yes that is a ultiplayer take on the Symphony of the Night formula. Konami has been working up to this for years–recall that bizarre race [...]

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.

When the Castlevania Movie succumbed to the gentle embrace of common sense and died, I made the terrible mistake of recommending that Konami blast the script into several pieces and then secret them in haunted mansions so they’d never be reunited. Well, it’s comeuppance time, because someone (I can only assume it was a Belmont) [...]

Well, at least the recession has had some positive impact on the world, because the Castlevania movie has finally been cancelled. The troubled film has chewed through staff (including the luminary directors of Aliens vs. Predator and I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer), but now no one seems willing to take the reins. [...]

The latest in a long stream of Symphony of the Night clones, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia transplants the core gameplay tenets of that venerable PS1 game without rocking the boat too hard. Unfortunately, the sense of place that used to reward exploration gameplay has been replaced with a more homogeneous world, so there isn’t as much to see, even if there is plenty to do.