Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 64: Dracula X

Episode Date: April 25, 2016

Dan Adelman joins Jeremy and Bob to discuss one of the true treasures of the '90s: The Castlevania series' transformative duology, Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night. Enough talk, have at you! Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more great stuff. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way, head on over to our Patreon page!

This week in Retronauts, your words are as empty as your soul. whatever of Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish hosting this week. And with me on hand, we have, of course, Bob Wippett Mackey. Sorry. It's okay. I'm Bob Mackey. You know who I am. Yes. And our special guest this week.

Hi, I'm Dan Aitleman. Of? I'm independent, but I work on a couple of games. One is Axiom verge. And another one that's coming out fairly soon is Kazim. And Dan was called here by me to pay tribute to Castlevania Symphony of the Night. and its predecessor Dracula X Rondo of Blood because Dan has quite a bit of expertise

in the style of game. I mean, that's kind of his thing now, basically. Yeah, well, I think it was just kind of coincidence. So for people who are listening who don't know anything about me or who I am, I used to run the indie business at Nintendo for about 10 years, 9 years, I guess, and went independent because I wanted to work directly

with indies on their games, like helping them with biz dev and marketing. And one of the first games to reach out to me was, or one of the first developers was Tom Hap, who was making Axiom Verge at the time. And I was like, holy crap, this amazing game just fell into my lap. And like, how could you not work on that? And I was a big Super Metroid fan, Castlevania fan.

So I just jumped at that. And then not too long after, like a couple months later, the developers of Kazim contacted me and said they wanted to, you know, have some biz-dev marketing help. And it was one of those things. At first I was thinking, well, are they too similar in terms of genre? But I was playing chasm. And I was like, this is more Vania than Metroid.

So I think they're... Axi and Verge is more Metroid than Vania. And so I thought, yeah, to people who really are fans of the genre, they'll totally see a major difference. I think from the outside world, when you just give that, you know, 30-second elevator pitch spiel, it sounds like the exact same pitch. but once you actually play the games, they're pretty different. So, yeah, so that kind of became, I think.

There's actually a third game I'm working on that I haven't talked about yet because the game's never been announced. So even if I said the name, no one would know what it is. And that's totally outside of the Metroidvania genre for the first time ever. I guess everyone needs to branch out occasionally. Yeah, I like all kinds of games. But, yeah, Metroidvania's, especially with really tight precision controls, Yeah, I could just play those all day.

And, I mean, when you want to talk about a Metroidvania with tight precision and controls, it doesn't come tighter or more precise or more Metroidvania than kind of the definitive work in the genre, which is Castlevania Symphony of the Night, which came out in 1997 for PlayStation. But on Retronauts over the past year or two, we've been, I guess, two past two years. We've been kind of looking at the Castlevania games a little bit at a time. we did a micro episode or a pocket episode on Castlevania for NES, the trilogy. I recently did a pocket episode on Castlevania

4, but I feel like the Dracula X duology deserves a full in-depth episode just because there's just so much to these games. They're really just incredibly deep, incredibly rich. They have a tremendous

amount of history behind them, and they're just great games to play. I mean, I could, Castlevania Summit in the Night is a game I could just play over and over again. It was the first game I ever imported from Japan, and it had a little more text than I expected. I didn't know how to read any Japanese at that point, so it kind of blundered my way through and got some tips from the Internet. But, you know, when it came out in America, I bought that version and played it over and over again,

and it's just one I can go back to any time, and always take a different approach to it, do something new, try like a different secret code, or try some sort of new, self-imposed limitation to make it harder or easier. It's just a flexible game with a tremendous amount of variety and just loads of fun. Yeah, absolutely. It's one of those games where the first time you play it, it's actually a hard game. It's not an easy game that just kind of holds your hand through it. But as you get more and more familiar with it, it becomes like this almost like comfort food

where like you go back to it and there's a familiarity there. And it almost becomes like a casual meditating. relaxing experience because you know you know where you are at any point. Just punching scarecrows until you get the crissacrim. Yeah, I think experience really compresses the space of the huge castle where it's like, oh, this wasn't really that big, but it's still

fun to explore. But it seems so huge at the time. Oh, yeah, for sure. And that's really kind of what made it remarkable. So, to really discuss Symphony of the Night, I think we need to talk about Dracula X first. What does the X stand for? Is that how Dracula signs his name? I don't know. I think it was meant to denote that it's not like, this isn't Castlevania. This is like the weird spin-off version.

Because, you know, in Japan, Castlevania was Akamajo Dracula, then Dracula 2, then Akumajo Dinsets, and then the Super Nies game was Akumajo Dracula again, the Evil Castle Dracula. So it kept kind of like having Dracula in the title, which is never the case here. It was always Castlevania. So I think Dracula X basically said, this isn't like, you know, your mother's Dracula game. This is kind of its own thing. and it adopted a totally different style than the previous Castlevania games.

It was very heavily anime influenced. And that was kind of appropriate for the platform. It was on the PC engine CD-ROM. And that platform kind of made its name in Japan. It was very popular there. And it was mostly on the strength of these anime-style games that had, you know, like hand-drawn, semi-animated cutscenes that couldn't fit onto a cartridge.

Dracula X definitely had that. It opens up with kind of like a drawn cut scene and has a few of those throughout the game, especially at the end. So it kind of means like this isn't really Castlevania. It's kind of its own little thing. And that was even more true for a symphony than I actually. Yeah, I found that like the hero is not as much of a Frank Frazetta painting as he is just like this sort of more Japanese character with like a headband and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, he's, he has a much leaner look to him.

He's wearing like a full tunic and trousers as opposed to. like a burry loincloth or whatever, like armor. He has dark hair as opposed to blonde hair. And, of course, your mission is to rescue young girls who are very, like, large-eyed, fluffy hair, like 90s, early 90s anime, like pre-Avangelian anime style. So it's definitely the most, I would say, the most Japanese Castlevania game to that point,

which kind of makes sense because it was never released in America. And honestly, like, the fact that this game even existed strikes me as a little bit weird because Castlevania was never especially popular in Japan. It did much better in America. It's always done better in America than overseas in Japan.

But for whatever reason, they decided to make a Dracula game for the turbographic CD-ROM, the PC Engine CD-ROM, which had no traction in America. So it was a series that the Japanese didn't like on a platform that would never come to the U.S. So it was kind of doomed.

to be this niche thing from the very start. And I think that sort of empowered them to just go hog wild and make a super crazy game. I'm trying to remember. What year was that? I'm trying to compare it. Is that when the Keanu Reeves Dracula movie

came out? Maybe there was like this renaissance of like Dracula themed excitement in Japan so they were like, oh, maybe we can ride that. Could be. That could possibly be it because that, you know, that movie sort of tied closely to the novel, took some liberties, but it definitely had, like,

the heavy emphasis on the vampire women and things like that, and that is an element in this game, too. And they were inspired by Keanu Reeves' acting for the cutscenes. I will go to, Dracula. That's what he sounds like. Yeah, so to kind of put this in the context of the series evolution, You know, Castlevania debuted in 1986 on NES, MSX version came out like a month later, and the NES trilogy was very consistent in terms of design.

I mean, yeah, Castlevania 2 was open-ended and non-linear. But in terms of visuals, in terms of mechanics, like the whipping action, the jumping, the three games were very similar. And everything else was kind of not so great. I mean, there was Haunted Castle in the arcade, which was kind of crappy. Castlevania the Adventure for Game Boy, which was also kind of crappy. And I think once they got away from the NES, Konami had a really hard time figuring out what exactly Castlevania should be.

And Castlevania 4, for Super NES, almost felt like this reaction to the NES games saying, no, we're on a new generation of platforms, new hardware. This game should be totally different. So they remade the original Castlevania in this completely different style. and it plays like no other Castlevania game. But I think at the time, I really feel like that was meant to be like this is the new beginning for the series.

For whatever reason, that never really took, and it's kind of this odd evolutionary dead-end for the franchise that is a really good game, but it just feels weird compared to everything else. So at the time Dracula X Rondo of Blood came out in Japan, there were two other games in the series in development. There was Castlevania Bloodlines for the Sega Genesis Mega Drive.

and there was just Akumajo Dracula, another remake of the first game, but much more faithful to the first game than Super Castlevania 4, for the Sharp X-68,000 home computer. And that came to the U.S. 10 years later as Castlevania Chronicles. So all of these games had a very different style. Like the X-68,000 game was very, almost kind of reminded me more of haunted castle

in terms of its visuals. and it was very set-piece-driven. The Sega Genesis game was kind of faithful to the NES style, but had much more varied and vertical levels, and there were two playable characters. There was a character with a whip and then a character with a spear. Of all these games, Dracula X was definitely the most in keeping with the NES Castlevania games,

and it really feels like an elephant, evolution of Castlevania 3, which was kind of the ultimate expression of the NES Castlevania games. We've talked about it before, but like so many things about Castlevania 3 were just amazing. Like how do they fit that into an NES game? There were four playable characters. There were three or four branching paths through the game.

Dozens of stages and bosses. All kinds of variety. Like everything from, you know, levels that would flood as you ran through them to underwater, underground stages where acid was dripping and eating away the floor and you had to make it through before the entire level disappeared from you. Dracula X definitely feels like it has the most in common

with the NES games and especially feels like the progression of Dracula's curse, Castlevania 3. I don't know if you guys kind of feel the same way. I do. It does feel like the next logical step from that formula, for sure. And I feel like it's one of the last games

where the whip was actually like a thing that you needed, that you relied on, right? I mean, from then on, like, they will give you a whip as, like, a pleasantry. Like, here's a whip, but also use a sword and say. That's not really true. Really? There were several games after that that used, you know, focused on gifts. I'm just thinking of, like, the main series.

Like, the 3D games were all very much. They were kind of the big deal. That's true. Maybe that was the problem. Too many whips. Circle the Moon was whip-based. That's right. Dishonance was whip-based.

I retract my comment. There was another one that was a whip-based. Oh, Portrait of Ruin. Yeah. So, yeah, so, you know, that's not clearly like a huge divide. But I do think it's interesting when you mentioned the whip is that the whip mechanics in Dracula X, they kind of walked it back from Super Castlevania 4,

where Simon's whip in Castlevania 4 was really versatile. Yeah. You could whip in 8 directions, which was something that was impossible in the Kasselv, the NES games. You could only whip forward and, you know, face backward and whip. they reduced Richter Belmont, the hero of Dracula X, to that kind of classic style. In Casolvaniap four, Simon could hold out his whip and dangle it to kind of serve as a shield.

Sausage link quality too. Yeah, there were a lot of strange things about Castlevania, four. It's cool, but weird. But Richter didn't have that ability. Instead, if you held down the whip button, he'd spin his whip. So it kind of create this, like it would deflect projectiles and stuff. But there was a little bit of a windup to it. They gave him some new abilities, the ability to sort of do a jump backward to safety to dodge enemies, which was really hard to pull off.

I can never do it reliably, but if you can do it, it can be really useful. And Castlevania Four really downplayed the importance of the subweapons, like the axe and the boomering and the dagger and everything. Rondo of Blood brought those back and made those really important. I mean, they never went away, but they became really important in Rondo of Blood because your whip was less capable, less versatile. And on top of the actual existence of the sub-weapons, you also had the item crash where you could sacrifice a ton of the hearts that powered sub-weapons for one single screen-clearing attack. So it was more versatile in that sense. And they also did a really great thing where when you picked up a sub-weapon, the one you were holding didn't just disappear, it would drop out and land on the ground and stay there for a few seconds. So if you accidentally, you know, you had like a triple boomerang and, well, I guess you couldn't do triple counters in this.

But, you know, if you had the boomerang and, you know, it's a great weapon or an axe and you really need the axe and you accidentally picked up a dagger and all of a sudden you were screwed, you didn't lose the axe or the boomerang. You could go back and pick those up. So there was that and, you know, a few other little niceties that kind of, you know, took the game style back more toward the NES approach. But with, you know, a little bit of learning from what they had done on Super NES. So, yeah, the thing about Castlevania Dracula X is that it never came to the U.S., or at least it didn't come to the U.S. until, like, 2007, more than almost 15 years after it came to, was released in Japan. Because of its kind of dead-in status, it was always this, like, legendary thing that people heard about. We got a game called Dracula X or Super Nias, but it wasn't the same thing.

It was kind of loosely based on that game and lacked a lot of the great stuff that made Rondo of Blood so great. I remember in the late 90s, I was waiting to emulation, and there was this one ROM site that was like an honest ROM site. It wasn't like, you know, vote for me in the top 100 ROM sites or do this or that to get the ROMs. They're just like, no, you're a bunch of ROMs. And the guy was really obsessed with TurboGraphic 16. And I think, if I remember correctly, he was like literally raising money from the community to buy a copy of Rondo of Blood and rip it. How much was that game back then? Like, before it was in wide circulation, like in the 90s when everyone had money.

In the 90s, I would say it was probably somewhere. around $100, but it was just hard to get because the online sales weren't what they are now. Yeah, but that's what I remember most about the game. Yeah, like it was legendary. It's like, I need money to buy this and rip it so we can all experience it because no one has a turbographic 60, sorry, turbographic CD. No one is importing this really. So we want to like share it with the community. It's still piracy, but you know, it was an honest, honest piracy, I guess. Yeah, what did you guys first hear about, or learn about Rondo of Blood. Well, I was living in Japan in the 90s.

I lived in Japan from 92 to 98. But my game consoles of choice at the time were Genesis with the CD-ROM attachment, SNS, I had a NeoGeo. I had later on, of course, PlayStation and Saturn, but I never got a turbo graphics. So that was one that I missed out on. So I saw it on store shelves probably, but because I didn't have the system, I just never got it. And none of my friends had that either. So, you know, we would share games all the time. But, yeah, TurboGraphics was, even though it was more popular in Japan, it still was never a main, you know, one of the main consoles.

Right. Yeah. Well, it was a bigger deal over there than Mega Drive was, Genesis, right? That's true. Yeah. So the reason I had a Mega Drive was because I. I had brought that from the U.S., and so – because I moved out there, like I said, in 92, and then when I was out there, I got a Japanese SNS to go with it.

So, yeah, so, yeah, definitely Mega Drive was also not a big deal. Nor was Saturn, but there was one game that I wanted to play on it, so I got a Saturn as well. Yeah, I found out about it through that emulation thing, but it wasn't until I read – you're writing about the game, Jeremy, probably like four or five years later that I understood like the context of what it meant to the series and how all these things I didn't understand from Symphony of the Night were explained by that game we never saw like

that they never bothered to give context in the game itself because they assumed probably wrongly that you played Rondo of Blood you know. Right. Yeah it's kind of weird because the game's predecessor, Sylvainty and the night's predecessor of Dracula X never came to the U.S. the opening scene

of Symphony of the Night which is sort of a reprise of the final battle of Ron of blood, is introduced as being from bloodlines, which was the Genesis game. But it's nothing to do with bloodlines, and it was really confusing. Is that a localization choice or just a mistake? No, it was a localization choice, I think, or maybe a mistake, because whoever localized it was like, it's a Castlevania game called Blood Something. Oh, it must be that one.

So it must be Bloodlines, not Rondo of Blood. So, yeah, it's kind of this weird discrepancy. but, you know, that introductory scene kind of set me to becoming curious about it because I had been familiar with Dracula X, the Super E.S version that came to America, and I was really kind of baffled when it came out because a lot of the more hardcore magazines like, you know, game fan were really down on it. They were like, this game is trash. And I was like, well, it's not as cool as Castlevania 4, but it's not bad.

Like, it's, you know, just kind of old school Castlevania. It's fun. So I was really baffled by the fact. that they just, these magazines just hated it. What I didn't realize is that they were, you know, like super into importing, and they had played Rondo of Blood, and then they played the Super Nies game that just cut so much out of it and really simplified and skilled down the game

that they were reacting to that, not to the actual quality of Dracula X for Super NES. So that was kind of, you know, once Symphony of the Night came out, then I started to become aware of, oh, no, there was this other game. It was called Dracula X, but it wasn't the one that I played, It was a different Dracula X that had much more substance to it. So it kind of set off this unicorn quest to find this game. And I didn't actually play Rondo of Blood for probably eight years.

I think I bought the game at Pax. I bought the game and a turbo CD, a PC engine duo CD at Pax 2005 or 2006. That sounds expensive. It was very expensive. I was doing a lot of freelance work on the side at that point, so I had a lot of money. I was also single. So, you know, I kind of dug deep and wrote a check for like $500 for this one game, basically.

Like, that's really expensive. I can't imagine doing that now. And I'm trying to find, you know, crazy rare Game Boy games in box to document them. But 500 bucks for a game, that's ridiculous. But I bought it and I loved it. And then, like, a year later they announced, oh, this game's coming to the U.S., and I said, you assholes. And that was the beginning of my weird ability

to spend a lot of money on rare games and then months later prompt them to come to America and become more common. You're a trendsetter. No, I'm the scapegoat as well. On Wii Virtual Console, we just looked at what you were playing and then we're like, oh wait, let's hold off,

let's hold off for like six months and then we're releasing it. Oh, yeah, yeah, it's totally in on it. How was that PSP version? I never played it. I never played the Rondo Blood for PSP. Let's talk about that later. There's good and bad to it.

I'm glad it exists, though. I'm really glad it exists, even if it did mean that I spend a lot of money on a game that I could have just waited for. But yeah, so it kind of became this legendary thing. As people became interested in Symphony of the Night, they started to say, wait, what about this other game that explains all this stuff that I'm doing in Symphony of the Night?

So this kind of like weird, dead-end side niche of Castlevania became suddenly very important to the most diehard fans of the series. It went from anonymity to, you know, essential must-have game. Was that the only Castlevania that was so closely connected to a sequel? I feel like we've talked about timelines in some episodes like Zelda timelines, things like that. I feel like they jump around more than they're like, oh, this happens immediately afterwards, you know. No, I mean, Castlevania, Castlevania 2 are very closely connected. That is right, yeah. Castlevania Adventure is very closely connected to Castlevania 2, Belmont's Revenge for Game Boy.

So there was this kind of like, you know, duology thing in effect for the series. But it was the first time, I mean, that was the only Castlevania game that I know of that never came to America or had not come to America. So it did, I mean, okay, I guess, you know, the MSX game hadn't come. But it was close enough to the original Castlevania that I don't think anyone really cared that much. But this one suddenly became sort of like a holy grail. And, you know, it's one of those rare instances where a game becomes highly sought after and super desirable and actually deserves it because it is an amazing Castlevania game. Of all the kind of classic, if you want to call it, classicvania style games,

very straightforward, linear, action-based, no RPG systems, like this is the best. There's so much to it. It's just an incredibly deep game. And every time you play it, you can take a different route through the castle and have an entirely different experience with different enemies, different bosses, different stages. It's just amazing how much they packed into this game. And that was kind of the point of Rondo of Blood. It was the first Castlevania for CD-ROM. And they really said, like, you can go to shmupplations.com and a few other sites that have interviews with the development team.

And, you know, the developers basically say, yeah, like, we had the CD-ROM format, and so we really wanted to take advantage of it. We had live music, and then we just put in all kinds of stuff, just as much as we could fit in there. And it wasn't just, you know, like a throwing things at the wall kind of approach. It was more, like, how much can we add to this game to make great content, to create a great experience? And instead of just, you know, spreading the entire experience across one set of linear stages, they kind of mixed and matched with these crossover paths where you could go from one stage to another. And yeah, it just really added a lot to the experience and created this really interesting, varied Castlevania game.

Like the screen, the title screen, actually tracked your progress through your save file to show how much of the castle you had seen. and how many objectives you had met. So it was very cool, like in a sense of, oh, there's always something new to do. It's interesting that you mentioned that because I think a lot of people don't necessarily appreciate in terms of game development the difference between things like available CPU power, available RAM, and then raw storage capacity. And it was interesting around the time that CD-ROMs came out and became popular, you know, RAM and CPU. capabilities, you know, were continually improving a little bit at a time. But CD-ROMs really grew the storage capacity overnight from like nothing to, you know, 650 megabytes, which at the time

was like, how could you ever fill that thing? So it was really interesting to watch how game developers were taking advantage of how many more assets you could just throw in the game. You know, the core game engine itself probably wasn't able to evolve that much between, you know, slightly between generations, but just the capacity of stuff you could put in the game definitely increased a lot. Yeah, I think the scaled back style, you know, the kind of reaching back to the NES format of Rondo of Blood is due to the fact that the PC engine, the Turmographic 16, was a less capable system than the Genesis or the Super NES. It was basically like an 8-bit system masquerading as a 16-bit system. It was kind of in-between generations. So I think it went backwards a bit as a matter of necessity. But, you know, the game looked pretty good.

The developers in some of those interviews complained about how they had a hard time making the backgrounds look as nice as they wanted to. But they, you know, they could only do so much technologically, but they could add a ton of content and really, you know, create this varied criss-crossing experience. experience that would set the game apart. So I think it was a great use of storage space. And, you know, a lot of developers in the early CD-ROM days looked at all that storage space and were like, all right, Red Book Audio, maybe a cutscene, you know, maybe some anime video CD style. And that was fine, but it didn't really add anything.

It was just like, you know, the same game you would play on a cartridge system or on Hew card or whatever, but with, you know, live music or, you know, some. fancy cutscenes between stages. Or you'd have games like Night Trap, which were just like videos that you would just like skip around and watch, yeah. Yeah, so this was a great example of the developers saying, how can we make the game better? How can we really express ourselves with this format?

And that was actually pretty uncommon. And it was, it's a shame that, you know, the game didn't get wider exposure at the time because I really think the ideas that it had. had the lessons that it could have taught other developers might have been valuable. Well, you mentioned the director of this game in your notes, Toru Hagihara, and I'm looking at his Moby Games bio now. I don't know what he's been doing for the last nine years. He could be one of those unfortunate people that was, like, demoted a janitor in like a Pachinko factory or something. I think he went to become an executive. Okay, yeah. It says he was president

during Symphony of the Night, which I'm not sure if it's true, but that's what he was listed as. So he could have been president of Konami? Yeah, I think, I think, um, I think, you know, He was originally the director of Symphony the Night, and it's possible that he was promoted. I see. That's why he left and Koji Ikarashi took over the project. Well, you did mention that he does, he did a few of the Game Boy games, but he also did things that I have a lot of familiarity with, like the Tiny Tune Adventures game for the Game Boy, the first one, which I like the best. So knowing that he made that game or worked on it, it makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, Hagi Harah was pretty inexperienced when he was made director of Rondo Blood.

He had made like four or five Game Boy games. he had made one NES game. And I feel like the fact that one of the games he directed, or programmed, sorry, was Belmont's Revenge for Game Boy, which was a massive improvement over the first Game Boy for Castlevania for Game Boy. I feel like, you know, basically on the strength of that, they were like, hey, direct this game for us. But he didn't have, this was, I think, his first directoral experience, if I'm not mistaken. Apparently his first role of Konami was a QA tester on Bayou Billy, so I would. would have fired him.

That game should not have been released. I'm just kidding. You're a good man, Toru. Yeah, so anyway, I think this was his directorial debut. But, you know, for whatever reason, there was just kind of this, like, devil may cry attitude. I like the devil may cry attitude. Damn it. He put on his red leather jacket and got to work.

Smirked. No, anyway, I think that accounts for kind of the overriding attitude of the game design, because, you know, he had programmed but not directed before. So maybe there wasn't a sense of like, oh, I know what I can do and I can't do. It was more like, hey, what can I get away with? I'm just kind of interpolating that, but it would make sense. I mean, there is this experiment of experimentation and just like, what can we get away with in Dracula X that makes it so great. All right. So I mentioned that it plays most like Castlevania 3,

and I mentioned that there's kind of like multiple paths through the game. I think it's important to kind of explain how the game works. Basically, you start out with sort of a prologue, and there's a first stage, and then midway through the first stage, there's a place where you can kind of go off the main path and find a hidden path. And if you take this hidden path, then you go through an alternate route to the end of the stage and fight a different boss. And depending on whether or not you can beat that boss, which is really difficult,

then you go to like an alternate stage two. If you take the main path, then you go to a much easier boss and go to the prime version of stage two, which is completely different than the alternate version. And at various points, you can fall through pits that look like they're going to kill you, but actually lead you to separate paths. You can end up going from one version of a stage to another. It just, like I said, it criss-crosses all the time. And it's kind of unpredictable, and finding certain areas requires... Exploration. It requires a willingness to do things that might seem stupid, like fall into, say, the fourth hole in one stage, which isn't a bottomless pit, but instead takes you to a secret area. It requires incredible platforming skills. It requires the ability to beat really tremendously difficult bosses. So it really kind of puts every skill that you develop playing this game to the test to really see the entirety of Rondo. Blood, you need to really just dig into it and master the game.

And one thing that I like about Rondo of Blood versus Castlevania 3 is that Castlevania 3, you know, you pick a story path or a path through the game, and you're pretty much committed to it. You go along that path through the rest of the game. And then if you want to see the other path, then you start the game over, do the new game plus, and take the alternate path that way. Here you can go to the title screen and select a stage and go back and revisit it. And you can keep revisiting stages until you master the challenges or figure out the secret of, you know, finding the hidden maiden or whatever in that stage.

So it really encourages experimentation and revisiting levels. And it doesn't feel like you're just grinding. It feels like, no, there's a challenge here. There's something I need to do. And I want to master this. It's really just, it's very compelling and very addictive. Like actually getting a 100% safe file is something I've never done. But I would love to do that.

It's just, it's such an interesting and engrossing challenge. Would you compare this to Super Mario World in any way? That's kind of what I pulling away from it. Just like... Kind of except that... You do have to fall into things that look like they could kill you in order to get secret levels and whatnot. But Super Mario World, basically you like find the alternate stage and, hey, there you go,

there's another path. But it just feels like this is much denser and everything is much more intertwined than in Mario World. I mean, I love the alternate paths of Mario World. I think those are great. It's a really addictive element to the game. But I feel like it's done to an even higher degree here and is just really part of the fabric of the game.

And I don't know. It's been a while since I've checked, but are there a lot of speed runners on YouTube that show 100% speed runs? Kind of like Symphony in the Night, I know. That game's been broken in so many ways to exploit all the different things to get 100%. 100% quickly.

But I haven't seen for X that much, Rondo Blood. I watch the games done quick things every year, and I think that's in the rotation. And I don't know if they go as deep into this game, because I feel like there are more things to break in Symphony the night. But I have seen a lot of great speed runs of it. That's mainly how I'm familiar with it because it's way too hard for me. Like I've seen a lot of speed runs of Rondo Blood.

Yeah, I don't know that a 100% speed run of Dracula X would be that interesting because the levels are so it's kind of like you go one way and it's mutually exclusive of the other way and then you have to go back to that stage and replay it. So there's a lot of replaying and revisiting areas that I don't think are really that conducive to speed runs. Yeah, I don't know if they go for 100%. I might just be reaching the end.

I guess it's like a speed run. Like how fast can I beat the end and like the game is ending and maybe like rescue the maidens along the way or something. But that's pretty much it. And I guess that's something I should talk about is the women in the game. Dracula X is built around the old, like, kidnapped princess trope. Basically, the story is that Richter's fiance, Annette, was kidnapped by Dracula, along with three other women from the village, who are Maria, a young girl, Tara, the nun, and Iris, just a villager, like the doctor's daughter.

and part of the challenge of the game is finding these women as you are traveling through the game. And not only do you have to find them, but you have to find the key that will allow you to open their jail cells. And the key counts as a sub weapon. So when you pick up the key for a stage, you can't use subweapons that stage. If you try to use like an item crash while you're holding a key, like Richter looks puzzled and a little question mark appears above his head. Richter needs pockets, it seems like. Yeah, so there's kind of this trade-off. Like, not only do you have to make it to the end of a stage holding the key,

but you have to make it to the end of the stage without the ability to use some of your most effective attacks against enemies. And the kind of the hidden areas where the maidens are kept are very, very difficult. Like, you know, like this underwater or underground catacomb with fishermen jumping out of the water unpredictably. It's really challenging. And once you manage to rescue Maria, then the game basically enters easy mode because you can play as Maria. And despite the fact that she's like an eight-year-old girl,

she's amazing. She's the most powerful character in the game by far. It's a pretty great reversal of expectations. It is. Like this tiny girl is like kicking ass all over the screen, yeah. Yeah. So how'd she get captured in the first place? She must have been asleep or something.

Maybe they lured her with candy. I don't know. But yeah, she's really interesting, because instead of using weapons she has animal friends and she like throws birds and enemies and the birds like fly out and hit an enemy and then fly back to her

and she can collect instead of like subweapons she collects other animals that she uses kind of like subweapons like turtles and stuff. They're the symbols of the Chinese zodiac. So there's like a Suzaku and you know all that. So

then she has like amazing item crashes with the animals but she's tiny and I think she has a double jump. I can't remember exactly. It's been a long time since I've played, but she's just like really fast and really effective and really powerful. So it's kind of funny.

Like, you know, the Bell Monsters are supposed to be the legendary vampire killers. But if you play as Maria, the game gets way easier. And the developer said that was deliberate. Like they wanted to make that kind of like a reward for going to the trouble of finding her. So it's just another way to play through the game.

And I think she has a separate ending if you beat it with her. It's like a goofy kind of childish. cartoon ending. Seems like a Konami staple, I guess, at this time period. I'm just thinking of Silent Hill as like you have the silly ending

in every Silent Hill. If you do something really ridiculous and difficult, you get the goofy ending with the dog and stuff. Yeah, so that's just one of those little details that makes this game great. It's just like there's this kind of random, unexpected twist in which character

is actually best for beating the game. But one of the things that really makes Castlevania, Dracula X, Rondo Blood, whatever you want to call it, great, is just the amount of one-time details. There's so many little things in the game. I mentioned, you know, the secret path in the first stage. The way you're kind of tipped off to that

is the fact that it's like this sort of hidden alcove with an enemy that doesn't appear anywhere else in the game. You see them in Symphony of the Night, the stone roses, that kind of like the big flowers that spit rocks at you that'll turn you into stone. Like, that actually comes from Rondo of Blood. and it's just in this one location. It's not a boss.

It's just kind of like this enemy that you can attack. And, you know, it sort of obscures the alternate path. And a lot of the hidden paths kind of have these unique setups. There's one alternate path through a stage where there's like a lift system, these buckets going up and down, and you can jump in them. And there's these, like these, I don't know, golem slaves or something at the top of the screen, at the top of the shaft, who are kind of systematically carrying these giant balls out

and putting them into the lifts and causing the lifts to go down. So as they're doing that, you're going up. And, you know, it's just like this random detail, but it's great. And a lot of the sort of big, bulky knights that you see in Symphony the Night appear as one-off enemies in Rondo of Blood

and are very challenging there because you're not Alucard, you're Richter. So it's just the more you play the game, the more you discover. Yeah, I think, I think Konami in this period had some of the best, if not the best Sprite art ever. I'm thinking of games like this and Perodias and Snatcher and Sparkster. I feel like this era for them was some of the best Sprite art video games had ever seen,

just in terms of pure detail that didn't need to be there. That wasn't distracting either. It was like really neat little touches. This was also the first game that really said, you know what, Castlevania has fans, and we should give them fan service. And the game was packed with fan service. The game begins, the sort of prologue stage is you're riding a horse-drawn carriage. Richter is riding a horse-drawn carriage through the woods at night, and death appears,

and you can fight him off. You can't beat him at this point, but then he ends by launching this, like, giant skull attack at you. And then that takes you up to the town. So the town you go to is like a town taken straight from Castlevania, too, and it's on fire, and the enemies have invaded it, which is kind of a big deal, because in Castlevania, too, the towns were the safe spaces, and enemies couldn't exist in towns. So it's kind of like taking this thing that you've seen before

and turning it sideways and saying, oh, no, everything's a danger zone now. There's so many little secrets that are like that are little tidbits for fans. I think you can tell a series has made it when it's allowed to be self-referential, when it has enough of a history and enough of confidence where it's like,

we can point to things we've done before and understand you will know what we're talking about. Yeah, I mean, the second stage of the game, once you get past the town, the main part of the second stage, is a recreation of the original Castlevania's first level, which has become kind of a cliche now. But this was really the first time, I mean, Castle kind of had that at the end where you go to Dracula's Castle and it's a collapsed ruin. You kind of recognize, oh, some of the architecture here. But this is a recreation of Castlevania Stage 1. But it's different because as you're going along and fighting

zombies and stuff, all of a sudden this giant behemoth bursts out of the wall behind you and starts chasing you, and you can't destroy it, you can only run. And there are secrets hidden in depending on how you approach this area. But if you just take the straightforward approach, eventually the behemoth will crash into a wall and die. And that shows up again in Castlevania Symphony of the Night. Yeah, but it's a skeleton at that point or something? Right, yeah, that's right. Yeah, so basically it's just a game that rewards exploration, rewards people for being familiar with Castlevania.

It's just, it's great. everything is good about it. It's also really hard. It has great music because most of it's Red Book Audio. The Castlevania series always had great music, but this was the first time they could actually just rock out and have this Baroque guitar heavy metal music. And they did a great job of the music.

I don't know. Everything is great. The boss battles are unique. One of the cool things is that just about every boss has a death blow. so once you whittle it down to just a few points of health and you launch the final blow against it it'll pull off some kind of desperation move and I think that they said the desperation moves

deliberately can't kill you but it's always kind of this like whoa like the surprise you know you fight a weirwolf and he's really agile and he darts around the screen you might be familiar with a weirwolf from Symphony the Night it's the guy you fight in the Coliseum right so he's a boss that just is on his own in Dracula X.

And when you defeat him, then he pulls off this desperation hadoken, or no, like Ashur Yucan. He, like, rushes at you and does an uppercut. And then once he crashes to the ground, he bursts into flames. So it's just like all this really great stuff. Go ahead. This might sound stupid. I don't know, but, because, I mean, this was true of a lot of games at the time, more so than now. But I feel like this is a game designed for people who really like playing video games,

which was true a lot in the 90s. it's not so much true now. Like, you don't have to be more accessible. But this feels like if you really like video games and you really like finding secrets and you like paying attention to small details and you like when people are making references, you understand, you will like this game.

We talked about Devil May Cry on an episode and Kami has said, this is a game for people who like playing video games. And I feel the same way about this, even though it was much easier to make that kind of experience back then, a much more viable. I agree. And I think it was also a game made by people

who loved making video games. It was not kind of like, this is our day job, let's punch the clock. and create a game. It was made by people who really just love the idea of seeing what they could do with a game concept. Dan, you said that you have not played Rondo Blood. I have not, but I will remedy that.

I actually have to break out the old Wii. I have it lying around somewhere. I never actually transferred the data to my Wii. so I've been meaning to do that before I buy any more virtual console games from the Wii because I think you were saying that it's available on Wii virtual console but not Wii U virtual console

which I should have known but I didn't know that. I didn't know it either. Well, I worked on virtual console. Yeah, exactly. When they announced Dracula X was coming to Wii U virtual console I was like, oh cool, we did a live stream of it that day and then you know like I cracked open the file and said wait a minute, this is a super-neal

version. The Super Nias version was the one that came to America and was, like I said, a little bit of a disappointment for some people because it was much more simplified. It didn't have the branching paths. It didn't have Maria as a playable character. A lot of the stages were completely different. The final battle against Dracula was a load of BS. It was terrible. But at the same time, the music was actually really good, even though it wasn't Red Book Audio. It was really great Super NES, you know, sampled synth. The graphics were considerably improved in places. Like there's a, in the main path of the first stage of Rondo of Blood,

the town is on fire and there's like a field of fire behind you. On the Super Nies version, that effect is so much more impressive. And the enemies, a lot of the enemies look better. It's just, you know, like there's some good to it. There's some bad to it. It's a very solid classic Castlevania on its own. it just doesn't compare to the depth and substance of Rondo of Blood. But it's still totally playable, very fun.

I think the game gets bagged on a lot more than it deserves to. But fortunately, Konami did remake the game in 2007 for PSP as the Dracula X Chronicles, and that was made specifically to address the concerns of American fans who wanted to play Rondo of Blood. So Kojaigarashi took a break from making New Castlevania games to, do a 2.5D remake of Rondo of Blood, which also included the original Rondo of Blood as an unlockable item and also Symphony Night is an unlockable item. So it's like the full story right there.

The 2.5D version is, you know, it has kind of like the deficiencies you'd expect where the graphics aren't quite as good. The collision detection's a little fuzzier because things aren't sharp, sprites. But it does some interesting things. It changes up some of the levels. Some of the levels in the original CD-ROM version,

were some of them were better than others. And so they took some of the worst levels and remade them. They kept all the same elements, but refined them to be a lot more fun to play. They also added a plot event where Richter's, like if you don't go through the game the right way, then you have to fight Richter's fiancé

who transforms into a demoness. So there's like... I think the correct term is Bridezilla, Jeremy. Bridezilla, okay. Wow, that thing's over a lot. So, yeah, so there's a lot of new stuff to it, and they made the final battle with Dracula much harder because, for whatever reason, Igarashi likes really hard BS Dracula battles. So anyway, like, that's a good way to play it. If you don't want to go to the trouble of dusting off the Wii, you can pick up the Dracula X Chronicles for PSP.

Is that also on Vita? Yeah, you can play it on Vita. Yeah, because there's a whole bunch of, including Symphony of the Night, that you can get, like, it's the PS1 version that's made to run on PSP. and you can download it on Vita. It's an interesting series of hoops to jump through. Yeah, do you know if it's one of those games where you have to buy it on your PS3? I'm pretty sure you can just download it through your Vita. Okay, because I hate that.

It's like you have to set up an underground railroad to sneak games into your Vita. Yeah, I don't think that's one of them. It was, but I think they added it to the Vita storefront. So it's like $10 now, really inexpensive, so definitely worth playing. The emulation on the PC engine version is not as good as the Wii emulation of the PC engine. So there is that, but it's still a great game and worth playing in any form. I know this is completely unlikely because Konami is not in the business of releasing games. But, man, I would love to see Rondo Blood on Steam, just like the emulated version of it,

because, like, I don't know where I got my copy, my digital copy, which means it was stolen. But it is just an executable that someone put together, just like double click on the icon, what are your controls, what do you want them to be, resolution, and then the game runs. Like, I don't know how they did that, but obviously the technology has existed for 20 years to emulate the game. why not put it on Steam? It's a free money, I think. Die, Monster, you don't belong in this world. Yes, it's time to talk about Castlevania Symphony of the Night, the game with the finest voice acting ever. What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

Okay, so yeah, Castlevania Symphony Night came out four years ago. after Rondo of Blood, and there was a significant change that happened in the industry between the two games coming out, which is, one, that the PlayStation arrived and brought much more power than the PC engine had, and two, polygons arrived and changed everything. So the Syphemy Night was kind of this weird little side project. It was not Konami's chosen path for the future of Castlevania. The Chosen Path was Castlevania for Nintendo 64. Ooh, boy.

A 3D action game that would, you know, be the Mario 64 of Castlevania. Symphony of the Night was this weird little game that was all sprite-based graphics. Could have looked like, you know, for the most part, it could have been on a 16-bit system. It couldn't. It did a lot of things that were new and unique to PlayStation and only possible on PlayStation. But, you know, the look was 2D games. And for a long time, there was even doubt the game would come to the U.S. because Sony had its well-known antipathy

toward 2D games on PlayStation. They don't want the PlayStation to look like, you know, it's a last-gen system. So it's only polygons, only boxes, no pretty sprites. Only chunky boxes. Brief question for you. The true path of Castlevania, 64. Wasn't that game just made twice

because they didn't do it right the first time? Yeah, they didn't finish it the first time alone. So Legacy of Darkness was actually just Castlevania 64, plus all the stuff they didn't get in at the initial release. Wow. God. Yeah. That sucks. The game was troubled.

Do you know for Symphony of the Night, though, were they ever, I should know this, but I don't. Do you know if they were ever targeting Sega Saturn or something? Because the game came out for Saturn. Oh, it did? I didn't know that. It was targeted for PlayStation. And you would think, oh, a 2D Castlevania game, Saturn. Yeah.

But no. The Saturn version of Symphony of the Night is actually worse than the PlayStation version. It has more load times. It doesn't have transparencies. The polygon effects are less impressive. Like, a lot of the things Symphony the Night does are PlayStation-specific. That's interesting. Because I always think of it as like Saturn being the last, you know, perfect 2D gaming console.

You'd think. But, no, Symphony the Night is interesting because it was really designed as a 2D game for a 3D system, And by which I don't mean 2.5D graphics, I mean they really threw in a lot of very subtle effects that needed the PlayStation's power to run. Like if you look at things like the save points or these coffins, and when you save in the save point, the coffin spins around and then explodes into like triangles, that's polygons. But a lot of the kind of the big supersized enemies, those are also polygons that just are kind of presented in flat planes. So, like, the knights that move around, they know the sword brothers and things like that. They're actually kind of like marionette style, which is something you saw in a lot of treasure games. Which is something in a lot of ways could have been a treasure game if the treasure people had stayed at Konami or something.

But it did use a lot of effects, a lot of transparencies too. You know, like invisible enemies that would just kind of briefly flash into visibility. Let's see, there's like the swordsmen. The giant swordsmen toward the end of the game, but also the hunting girl, like the woman with the rapier. And you only saw the rapier, like, slashing this kind of, like, glowing path in the sky. But then when you'd hit her, then she would briefly flash into translucence. And you'd see, like, the white outline of a woman. So Saturn just did not support transparencies at all.

Is that true? Or just... It was... It had poor transparency support. It wasn't innate. People could do transparency on Saturn, but it wasn't... It wasn't supported. at the hardware level, which is really weird

because the Super NES had alpha channels and that was a 16-bit system. It was like Saturn is supposed to be the ultimate 2D system and then had kind of like these odd little oversights. That project had a lot of trouble. A lot of great games came out for Saturn kind of despite the system itself.

Anyway, no, Castlevania 70 of the Night was very much designed for the PlayStation and you know as much capacity as they had to take advantage of with the PC engine format they had even more and did even more

with Symphony Night like it had so many stages it had so many areas it had an entire second castle it was just like everything you could imagine was thrown into this game and I really feel like

I really feel like the fact that it was meant to be kind of like this forgotten dead end for the series that the executives didn't care about really worked to its benefit because the team was just like let's just go crazy and they did Like, there's so much in Symphony of the Night.

Anyway, I've been talking a lot, and my voice is starting to give out because I said so much about Rondo Blood. So you guys need to take up some slag here. I'll talk about this a lot. I love Symphony of the Night. It didn't win me over immediately because I thought Castlevania was too hard for me. But we'll talk, I mean, I'm sure we'll go into detail, but just the sheer amount of content you can miss in this game really brings me back to an era in which that was possible. Like, I feel like no game would have this much content you could, we would just never know about, you know, especially in an era where not everyone had the Internet or game facts. I don't think there was a strategy guy published for this in America.

So, like, I think one of our friends might have played through it and then went back to it later. Who was saying that? It was on an earlier podcast. I don't know. You tell us, but I don't know. But somebody I know actually beat the game and then, like, found out much later that, like, oh, there's a whole second half I didn't know about. And, of course, a lot of it is reused assets, but a lot of it isn't. A lot of it's, like, original bosses and things like that.

So, man, God, it just, I love it. Yeah, there's a whole lot to that, you know, there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of reason why people call the genre Metroidvania now instead of just like Metroid likes or something like that. And I think some of the things that really originated with Symphony of the Night, or at least maybe

really just became that more polished in Symphony and Night where some of the RPG style elements that really made it feel like you were leveling up your character, you were improving yourself. And I think that was combined with

the exploration, it just made for a very deep personal experience, which is why I think people identify with it, maybe more than some of the earlier Castlevania's. Yeah, you mentioned, Bob, that there's so much you can find in this game and miss. I'm still learning things about it. In researching for this podcast, I wanted to look up a couple of the specific items you can find, and I discovered that there's a weapon called the Jewel Sword. and I knew that, you know, every sword has, or many of the swords have like a secondary attack. You can attack, but if you do like a street fighter fireball maneuver while you're attacking, a lot of them will have secondary attacks.

Okay, I knew about that. I didn't know about that. The jewel sword, if you're holding it, it's not a very strong sword, but if you do a fireball attack, then Alucard will shoot coins out of the sword. Oh, wow. And you can go pick them up and add them to your, you know, to your cash. So they're not his coins. They're just like materializing. I don't know.

Right. Oh, cool. They're new coins. But that's not the secret. The secret is that if you use the jewel sword, sometimes you'll kill enemies, and instead of dropping money bags or whatever, they'll drop gyms that you can sell.

But if you equip one of those gyms as like an item slot, an accessory slot, that will increase your, I think, luck if you, or maybe your attack. Yeah, okay, it increases your attack power. So the nicer the gym you equip while the jewel sword is in your possession and you're using it, the stronger you are. That's pretty amazing.

I had no idea that existed until yesterday. Yeah, it sounds like something you find in Dark Souls or whatever, like one item reliant on all these conditions that you would never find on your own. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, there's just so much stuff. You know, at the beginning of the game, you enter the castle, and death is like,

why are you here? And Gallup card's like, I'm going to kill Dad. And death's like, well, I kind of like Dracula, and I'd feel bad about killing his son, but we can't have you running around messing up his plans. So I'm taking all your stuff. So it takes away all your equipment and you're left pretty much naked

just punching things with your fist with no gear. So in the course of the game, you can find something called the Al U-Cart gear. Not Al-U-Card. That's right. Al-U-Cart. And it's like completely useless. It has no attack power, no defense power.

But if you equip all of it at once and basically like are running around essentially naked and useless, then you get this huge luck bonus. and if you use that in conjunction with the luck code like everything like the game just falls into place there was a live stream I did of this game last year I don't know if you remember that Bob but for US Gamer

didn't you play the I was playing the luck code yeah I thought so and the luck code is really hard at first because you're very weak and all you have going for you is a lot of luck but at first that's no no big deal but occasionally you'll get lucky blows in and good items start dropping So I got to the point where you fight Al U-Card's doppelganger the first time, and I was like, this fight is going to be really difficult. I was like running up to it saying, I'm probably not going to live. I'm probably going to just, this is going to be a really embarrassing fight, and I apologize in advance.

So I got in there, I punched the guy, backdashed away when he had tried to attack, and I ran up and punched him again, and he died because I got like a lucky critical hit that just annihilated him in two punches. and it was just like this stunning live event that I couldn't have engineered. It was just like one of those crazy things you can do in this game. You roll a 20. Yeah, I mean, it's like you can have just so many random, unexpected, surprising experiences, even if you know this game inside and out.

It's just, it's always fun to play. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. No, I was just going to say it's a very interesting difficulty curve mechanic in that people who are really comfortable with the game and good at the game can then seek out just, you know, buffing out their luck so that they can maximize like all of the drops that they get or all of the gems and the money that they get, the coins that they get, whereas people who are maybe the less confident in their skills are

going to equip all the best gear, maybe not care as much about luck. So it's a good way, though not intuitively obvious way, to kind of do that and reward players who are already pretty good at the game itself. I love the luck code because it's really the best way to see all of the game, like all of its secrets. There are so many items in the game that you never would normally get. They are only conditional drops or only rare drops from certain enemies, like the Medusa Shield.

And all the times I've played the game, I've seen the Medusa Shield like twice. But it's amazing because if you're equipped with the Medusa Shield, then the Medusa heads, the yellow ones that stone you have no effect. They hurt you a little bit, but they can't stone it. you. And not only that, but there's the crazy shield rod, which you can use in conjunction with any shield in the game to perform a different attack. Like if you have a leather shield and you use the special attack, which is both attack buttons at once, like attack with the sword and bring up

your shield, then you'll summon a cow. It'll just like come in and like shoot a laser on the screen. If you have the Medusa shield, then you will summon Medusa to come and like zap everything on the screen with a laser. It's just all this super obscuring. hidden stuff. And again, the luck code is how you kind of come across these things. And it's almost like if you think, can I do this thing and you try it. Yes, you can do it. It really is amazing how much the developer is accounted for in this game. And there's no other game in the series that has that. Like the later games tried to have some of that in there, but they just, they don't have the sheer unexpected hidden depth of content. Yeah, I think the games after this were really focused on

collecting a certain kind of thing more than just experimenting. So it's like I collect all the souls and combine them or whatever, but it was more of an explicit thing than just like, you know, try this weird stuff out. I think Portrait of Ruin probably did the best job of recapturing this like oh, there's surprising little details

that I wouldn't have noticed. It has the, you know, the two swappable characters. And different characters will respond to different, or different enemies will respond to your characters differently. There's like the dude who will attack the male hero. But if you're the female hero, then he bowed, and, like, hands you a rose and makes himself completely vulnerable, so you can just kill them.

But Symphony in the Night is full of things like that. And it's not just, like, new details, too. There's also tons of fan service. There's tons of, it's just, like, weird little unique scenarios. I love fighting the cast of Wizard of Oz as bosses. Yes. Well, they're not bosses, but they're... Oh, I thought they were, oh, no.

No, they're just enemies. They're hanging out in the library. Okay, yeah. So, all the enemies in that area are Wizard of Oz. Yeah, character's so funny. Yeah, well, I mean, people get familiar with that because one of those guys, carries the chrissigrim, which is the rarest and most powerful sword in the game. It's just like, if you have the chrissigrim, you can kill Dracula in like three seconds.

It's ridiculous. And which phase in the game do you go through the Castlevania won bosses again? Is that the reverse castle? Yeah. The second half of the game is just like ultimate fan service because you're fighting the five bosses of Castlevania. And when you fight them and win, you earn the five tokens of Dracula from Castlevania 2. and then the final set of bosses you fight

are doppelgangers of Al Ucard's companions from Castlevania 3. So it's just like all this love for Castlevania the series thrown into this game. Do you think it's fan service because you have to be a Castlevania 2 fan to figure out the secret to unlocking the upside night? It seems like it's not that hard because they give you a ring and they tell you like 13 o'clock or whatever. But it feels like a real Castlevania 2 style like old NES secret. it, like, go here with this item and duck and, you know.

Yeah, it was really, it's hard for me to say because, you know, I played this for the first time in Japanese without being able to read Japanese. So I was like, uh, what's this about? And I got the secret from the internet. But the ring descriptions that you're supposed to use do give a pretty good clue. It's like clearly there, the descriptions are one phrase broken into two parts. Right, yeah. So you put it together and it's pretty easy to figure out what you're supposed to do.

But it is kind of like, you know, a pretty obscure secret, nevertheless. All that would be DLC today. Crazy upside down mode, 599. So did you guys play symphony the night when it first came out, or was this something you discovered later? I personally discovered it later. So I've been playing it, I think the first time I played it, was either on PSP or Vita. So I actually never got it on PS1 back in the day. I played it when it came out, but I didn't really get it.

I didn't play that much of it. I just played up to the first boss or whatever. I'm like, I don't really care about this. But I had no idea there'd be so much depth. And then only later after I heard friends raving about it and reading it being appreciated after the fact that in magazines that I pick it up and actually play through it, probably like a 99.

And then I really loved it. And I'm still really bad at Old Castlevania, but that's where I really started looking Castlevania. And then every game after that was, like, just made for me. So, Dan, what was it that that brought you to the game after all that time? It was really, like, I played through part of it probably in the, I want to say, mid to late 2000s. And then it wasn't really until I started working on Axiom verge and Kazum that I really wanted to go back and revisit like Super Metroid I played, you know, years and years ago. And so talking with Tom Happ and he would make all these references to things going on in Super Metroid and Discord

games, James Petruzzi would keep mentioning about things from Castlevania Symphony of the night. And I was like, I vaguely remember these things, but I really need to refresh my memory. And so I went back and replayed both of those. So, so yeah. And I think all, also it, now I have a deeper appreciation for the game design behind them. So, you know, little things like, you know, at the very beginning of the game, the choice to strip away all of the weapons. You mentioned that earlier is a really interesting choice of how you do that because, you know, the, you know, I was kind of set up with a decision like, on the one hand, it's a sequel and

you're already a badass, but on the other hand, you're at the beginning of the game and you should be totally vulnerable and weak. So how do you do that? Well, the interesting thing is that even though it's a sequel, you're playing as a different character. So they could have just said, oh yeah, you're weak as a kitten. But, you know, he has a history. This is Alucard, who was one of the heroes of Castlevania 3, and he has kind of this legacy. Like, he's supposed to be really powerful. So, yeah, they sort of kind of have the best of both worlds there. They kind of dabble in both. Right, right.

Yeah, but it was, it was an interesting design choice the way, you know, you start off showing the potential of this character and, like, how powerful you might be at some point. And then later, later on, obviously, you've got to rebuild up to that point. Giant Bomb has a great, what's the word I'm thinking of, neologism for that, Abilities, T-E-A-S-E. They came up with it a while ago. I love that expression, though. That's what that is. Like, you get all your stuff in the beginning,

and then it's taken away from your, and you're like, I want to get back to that point. Yeah. Had there been a game that did that before? Super Metroid, right? No, Super Metroid, you start out pretty weak. Yeah. I thought you at least had some abilities that you weren't.

No. Weird. No, Samas just threw away all over gear for whatever reason. Poor planning on her part. Maybe that was the first. I'm sure there was some similar game we're forgetting about. Probably. But it has great effect here because, yeah,

You do just like stride into the castle and destroy everything easily. Like you just laugh at everything. Oh, Wonder Boy. Monster World. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good call. That was also kind of a Metroidvania. Yeah.

I can't tell you which one it is, though. The Dragons Trap, part three. No, it's interesting because there's actually kind of two intros. There is the prologue where you replay the final battle of Rondo of Blood and fight Dracula and that kind of sets the stage for the end of the game and then it jumps ahead in time

Richter Belmont has gone missing and Dracula Castle Dracula's Castle has reappeared mysteriously way before it was scheduled to so Alucard rises from his slumber and goes off in search of Castlevania to figure out what's going on and so you get kind of like

the taste of Richter and an introduction to him which is important because he plays a major part of the plot but then you get to play as, like, super powerful alley card, and then you get to play as weak as a kitten alley card. Right. So, yeah, there's kind of like these multiple layers going on. But because the game does fold back on itself, and it is an exploratory game, you know,

it takes the branching paths of Castlevania 3 and Rondo of Blood and turns it into just a legitimate backtracking kind of experience where you get to points and you realize, oh, I can't get past this because I need some other ability or some other item. So, like, these things kind of build up for. later. When you finally reach Dracula's Keep as Alucard, you go up the same path that Richter trod, and it's like kind of broken down, and there's a part of the spire that you have to reach that's broken and missing, so you have to get the ability to fly to get up there. But you recognize, like, oh, this is it. This is the end. So even if you haven't played Dracula X,

if you've never played another Casillvania and don't know what Dracula's Keep always looks like, you know there. So it creates this sense of importance and the sense of frustration, like, I can't make this jump, so I need to go find the tool because I'm almost so close to the end. It's really effective. Yeah. Yeah, I think it has – it did a very good job of kind of leading you to that conclusion of – because there are some Metroidvania games where it's not entirely clear if you can't reach a certain point. Is it because you're just not good enough at the game or you're doing something wrong? or do you actually need another piece of equipment?

And I think Symphony and the Night did a really good job of helping you understand, like, no, you really do need something else here and kind of setting up that tension of, you know, I'm almost there. Yeah, the only kind of an elegant area that you come across, like missing abilities in Symphony the Night is when you come to grates that you need to turn into mist to get passed, and it'll actually have a little pop-up that says mist could pass. Yeah, that's right.

Like, they couldn't figure out how to make that intuitive, so they actually say, go get your misdibility. But other than that, everything else is very kind of transparent. Like, you know, you get to the crumbling keep at the upper right-hand stage that leads to the clock tower, which in turn leads to the keep. You can get there really early. Like, you fight the first boss and you can trace a path that takes you up there with like two more bosses to encounter. but you're not ready to get through that area yet because you need the double jump. And it seems like you can get through, but then as you're running along the kind of the parapets and everything, the bridges, they start collapsing and falling.

And so it's like tantalizing. You can almost get to that next area, but there's these giant ghost skulls that appear and there's stuff falling out from beneath your feet. So you just can't make it. So you need to go figure out what you need to get to. that point. I don't know if you would agree with me or if anyone would agree with me on this, but I feel like Symphony Night is the first game in the series to really break free of the tribute to the universal movies of the 30s where Rondo Blood did it a little more. It was a little more

of a Japanese take on things. But in this game, I mean, Alucard and Castlevania 3 was basically like Bella Legosi, but a little more cleaned up. In this game, Alicard's like this beautiful man. Oh man. And like everything, everyone is so dreamy in this game. But this game actually is the first Castlevania to really look to Brom Stoker's novel and say, I'm taking inspiration from this, because Alucard's three transformations of the game are bat, wolf, and mist, which are the three forms that Dracula transformed to in the original novel. But he can travel over running water or whatever. Well, no, at first, when you're playing as Alucard, when you go into the water areas,

if you go into water, you take damage. You need scuba gear. Yeah, you need the holy snorkel. Yeah. Or I think it's called Holy Symbol in the U.S. version, but the translation is actually Holy Snorkel. So, yeah, it takes all of these elements from Brom Stoker's novel and applies it to Castlevania, which is really cool. It starts to get away from, yeah, like, hey, it's a cheesy monster movie to, you know, like this is all tied to Cassilvania or to Dracula's actual legend. And, you know, there's even the kind of optional, I think it's an optional cutscene where Al Yucar.

sees a vision of his mother being persecuted like his human mother being murdered for or being lynched for consorting with Dracula and it's actually an illusion with a succubus

trying to convince him to fight against humans but it starts to develop like hey there's a backstory to Dracula he was once in love with a human woman and he had a child with her it's much darker than the Boris Karloff's joke you got at the end of Castlevania 1

Exactly. Yeah, you know, we've mentioned Super Metroid a lot in the context of this game, and I think it is an easy comparison to make because of the map system. When you, you know, pull up the map to look at the castle, it looks very similar to Super Metroid's. But Koji Igarashi has actually said that they didn't look so much to Super Metroid for this game. It was really based on the legend of Zelda. and it really does have that kind of progression where, you know, it is very kind of ability-based, and I don't know, maybe you guys can talk about this. You don't get a heart container, but you get a giant heart when you defeat a boss, correct?

It does raise your magic. No, you get a little vial, like rainbow-colored vial. The hearts that you find raise your heart max. That's right, that's right. But it does feel like a Zelda thing in which you get this. I mean, you always got an orb for killing the enemy in Castlevania and that would level you up. But, yeah, like, I talked to Igarashi once. I interviewed him for Bloodstain, which is coming out, I guess, in a year or two.

But he did also recognize the problem with early Castlevania as being too hard for people. And even he thought they were too hard, like being someone who played video games. So, like, you're right. It is, like, Zelda is not an easy game, but it's approachable because you can put time into it and, you know, level your character up and get more hearts and get better weapons and stuff like that. So I think he wanted a more accessible Castlevania, which is a bad word sometimes, but in this case it made for a better game. Yeah, I don't want to second-guess Igarashi because he would know his inspirations way better than I would. But to me, I see a much stronger Metroid connection than Zelda, despite what he said his actual inspirations were. Because with Zelda, I think of that as much more about the puzzle elements to it.

How do you get from point A to point B in some clever way? whereas the exploration in Castlevania, Symphony of the Night, is much more about ability-based and kind of backtracking after you get certain power-ups that give you access to different areas. So I see that personally a little bit more aligned with the Metroid model. And the other main thing that I think separates it from a Zelda-style experiences. In Zelda, of course, you do fight enemies, but fighting enemies is not the main thing that you're doing. It's more about the puzzle elements to it.

And Metroid is, you know, there's enemies all over the place. And I think of, you know, Castlevania Symphony and Night being much more on the Metroid side of things where you're... Every room you go into, there is something you have to kill to keep progressing through. Yeah. I mean, also in Metroid, and I, even though he said it's more inspired by Zelda, like, I can see that because the Metroid connection, because in Metroid and Castlevania, I think it's your character is upgraded.

Their abilities are upgraded. In Zelda, it's more like you get better equipment that you can use to get to different places. Link can't, like, jump further all of a sudden or, you know, run faster. So it's more of a character-based upgrade system than an equipment-based one. Well, it does have the, like, the leveling system that was in Zelda 2.

That's right. So there is that. It is side-scrolling like Zelda 2. Something worth noting is that Igarashi was not the lead designer on the game at first. He was actually, he worked on Rondo of Blood, but only in kind of like a special things capacity. He wasn't a team member, but I think he was working on Toki Mecki Memorial. Yeah, he wrote that game, right? Yeah, he was working on that, like, and his desk was right next to the Rondo of Blood team.

So he would, he loved Castlevania, so he would jump in and, you know, playtest Rondo of Blood and give them advice. And so from there, he became a team member of Symphony the Night. and when Toro Hagihara, I guess, was moved upstairs to president or whatever, he left the project, then Igarashi took over. So I imagine a lot of the basic design documents were laid down in advance of Igarashi taking over. So, you know, I would probably say it's a little bit of column A and column B. The original design document probably looked pretty heavily to Super Metroid, and then Igarashi came in and brought his love of Zelda.

and, you know, the two flavors came together to create the delicious taste of Symphony the Night. That's my guess. Yeah. But again, like, it's just, it just blows me away how much stuff is in this game and how much just hidden things or secret things. You know, I mentioned the crumbling tower

that's impossible to beat without the double jump, but then there are things you can do if you try hard enough, but there are easier ways to go about it if you know how the game works or if you're patient. In the second castle, the inverted castle, at the very top, there's a super boss called Garamoth, which is like a reference to the final boss of Kid Dracula for Game Boy. And it's like this giant Egyptian god looks kind of like a nubis

that is like two screens high and walks back and forth with this scepter that blasts you with lightning. And then if you get close enough to him, he'll kick you. so he's really dangerous and the lightning fills the screen constantly. It is possible I've done this. I've beaten him without the right equipment but there's

an item in the game that absorbs lightning and turns into health. So if you get that then the fight becomes pretty trivial but without it then it's like this 15 minute long slog where you're constantly turning into mist to avoid the lightning and trying to get in a few shots as soon as you can and then changing back into mist.

So the game really just has a lot freedom to experiment and to explore. And even if you don't go hunting for the secret items and try to kind of exploit the game, there's still a lot of diversity to it. And the second castle, we haven't really talked about that, but if you find the alternate ending to the game, then it opens up the second half of the game, which is an upside down version of the castle with new bosses and new enemies and new music. Like the second castle is totally, free form. The first castle is very much, it's not linear, but there is kind of a linear progression track, and you have to go back and forth a lot to find the items, but there is kind of

like this set order in which you have to complete the game. In the second castle, though, you have all of your abilities, and the castle is completely open to you. So it's really a matter of like, where do I want to go? What do I want to do? So you can, you know, you can take a really difficult path through the second castle and come up against enemies that are way harder than you can deal with right away, or you can, you know, maybe luck into a much easier path. It's kind of up to you, and it rewards exploration. So what is your favorite detail of Castlevania Symphony tonight? one of the first things I said, it's the, it's the Wizard of Oz cameos.

When I realized what was happening in that level, like, oh, these are all Wizard of Oz characters. I thought it was darkly humorous that I was killing them all over and over again. But I also did like the, the scene you talked about earlier, Jeremy, I started to bring up old stuff, the, when you go into the confessional. And I think that's where you do see that scene of what happened, Alicard's mother. But yeah, but... Oh, no, no. The Alicad's mother is in the second castle.

The confessional is just like... You either get stabbed or... Yeah, I forgot about that. You can sit in all the chairs in the game, and if you see... sit at the chair at the confessional, then a priest will come out, and he'll either give you, occasionally he'll give you, like, grapes and bread. Yeah. Or sometimes he'll, like, snicker.

If it's a priest in a black robe, he'll snicker and then try to stab you with a bunch of knives. I was conflating the two, but that's one of my favorite parts in the game, because it's just, like, you don't need to do it. It's just a cool thing you can do, and it's just there for fun. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, and there's all those, like, kind of like in Rondo Blood, there's these one-off enemies.

When you first come to the inverted castle, there's this skeleton running around on the floor down below that you don't even have to bother with. He's, like, completely harmless because he keeps, his head has fallen off and he keeps kicking it and trying to run after it. And as soon as he catches up to it, he kicks it by mistake again and goes after it. And if you kill him, you find out his name is Yorick, which I don't think was the case in the Japanese version, but it was a great localization choice. Yeah.

Also, the Donkey Kong skeleton, I always like. It's early in the game. I don't know if he ever shows up again in the game. He probably does, but, uh, aren't those from, I think those. are from Rondo of Blood. They show up in the first town. I mean, a lot of enemies are, right? Yeah, but the fact that he's on a staircase,

throwing them down and they're bouncing and stuff, and I'm just really cute and clever. Like, I'm either just the reference. Well, there's a puzzle built out of that too. Right. Yeah. You can use the barrels to attack the other enemies, right? No, you can use the barrels that, like,

they burst into flames. If you break it when it's over this wooden beam, then it'll cause the beam to burst into flames and open up a hidden area. Oh, that's right. Yeah, okay. There's just, there's so much stuff like that. It's just ridiculous.

It's hard to think of all of them because there's so many little touches. But that's what's great is like no matter how much we spoil of the game right here in this podcast for someone who's never played it before, they will play the game and still be like, what is all of this stuff? Yeah, I mean, I notice something new every time I play it, which is every two or three years probably at this point. But yeah, it's a pack with so many details. I don't know how long development was or if they were given so much freedom because it was just like cheap to make a 2D game with reused assets. I don't know. I don't know. It was a magical lightning and a bottle style thing.

I think for me, it wasn't even secrets that I personally found, but I was lucky enough to go to the bloodstained Kickstarter kickoff. And so I was watching a speed runner, blanking on his name, but he was kind of showing Igarashi in person how much they've, you know, are able to basically corrupt the game to get it to do things that. that it wasn't supposed to do. And it was hilarious that, like, you know, being able to walk in between floors and the way, you know, just backdashing the entire way through the game. And the fact that you're able to take a game like Castlevania and Symphony of the Night and distort it in such a way that it doesn't even look like the same game. Like, there were areas that I didn't recognize where he was until,

He'd kind of beaten something and gone through it and just passed through the floor. And I was like, oh, now I know where you are. So the fact that you can do that, whether it was intentional or not, just I think lends itself to a lot of exploration and just kind of seeing not only what was intended, but also how the game was designed and put together. Yeah, I think some of the speed running interest in the game came from the fact that the in-game map tracks how much of the – how much of the territory you've seen, and it tops out at more than 100%. Once you go to the second castle, it goes to 200, but it actually goes a little further than that for some reason,

and it's like 204.6%. So there was this interest for a while in people trying to figure out just how much of the map they could expose, and they found all kinds of tricks. Like when you first enter the castle as Alucard, you can do something where you, like, backdash or something, and you'll fall through a hole. in the castle, like the castle grounds,

and there's like the shaft that you can go down and then kind of dead ends. But that'll add a little bit to your percentage, and you can only do that at the very beginning of the game when you first start playing. And that actually, in the Saturn version, leads to a new area that they added, like a hidden garden. So I think that was something that was designed

to be there as a secret, like or as another area, and then just never got finished. But you can still kind of access it by mistake. so people would find ways to break outside the castle wall by using like warp dashes and stuff like that. It's just, yeah, it has all these different features. It's kind of like a modern-day Bethesda game. They just threw so much in

that they couldn't possibly playtest at all. So, you know, there's some weird interactions that are possible as a result. Yeah, but I think being able to break a game, actually in some ways, you know, I'm sure the deaf team. In fact, Igarashi was kind of embarrassed at some of them. like, oh, that bug was probably me because I coded that area. And, but I think it actually, as long as the, you know, obviously there's some minimal

level of QA that's been done so it's actually playable, you can actually, for people who are students of game development and like to see how games were put together and assembled, and you can actually learn a lot about how this game was structured and put together by seeing how the pieces fit together. And it's not always intuitive, because some of those things were intended to be put in and never were, but the hole was still left there and nobody forgot to take it out, you know, those kinds of things. Yeah, but there are entire websites, like Unseen 64 dedicated to just saying, like, how was this game originally meant to be? Like, what was cut from the game? What was invented, you know, and made up, but then never added.

I mean, we just talked about Zelda Ocarina of Time, and, you know, there were a lot of things that, Nintendo thought about doing with that game and then didn't do, but the fact that there is kind of this evolutionary process is great. And to me, yeah, those are those bugs and those little weird defects you can find. They can be kind of a symbol or, you know, like almost like an archaeological record of the game's creation. Speaking of cut content, wasn't there like an ending recorded but not used? Yeah. English voice acting was recorded for it because like I say they were just given all the voice acting that they did or something like that.

Right. Yeah, there was a. An alternate ending, apparently, where Maria, who, you know, that was the little girl in the first game, she becomes an NPC in this game, and apparently there was some alternate ending where she could turn into a demoness or something. I think they might have taken that idea and brought that into the Rondo of Blood Remake. But, yeah, it's something that you can find in the game files, and it's very intriguing, but there's nothing like that content in the actual game. So I don't know if it was something cut from the last minute or if it was a story direction that they decided to. not to go in, but it was interesting. Yeah, so it's just a huge game, and the Saturn version is worth playing once just because

it does some kind of interesting things. It makes Maria playable, and she's more like kung fu now because she's, you know, a full adult at this point, but it still kind of calls back to her rondo of blood abilities. And it adds a couple of areas, which are not very interesting or good, but they're there. and then you can kind of see like all the things the game doesn't do as well on Saturn that it did so seamlessly on PlayStation. I mentioned loading times.

One of the great things about the PlayStation version was those CD rooms whenever you went from one area to another. Those were basically to mask loading time. And I guess the game would like partially load two different areas at once. In the Saturn version, the load times are longer. So even though you go into the CD room,

they're still loading time after you get out of them. And then each area has to load into RAM again midway through. So the game was really kind of sort of a masterpiece of PlayStation design. It really worked within the limitations of the PlayStation. And, yeah, I don't know. Like, I guess by all rights, it should not have been a masterpiece. It should have been this kind of like weird relic of the past. But it's just such an amazing game.

And absolutely one of my favorites of all time. So it's interesting. You mentioned like it's worth playing the same. Saturn version. Do you know of any place you can actually get that? Japan. Well, you would have to get an actual Saturn, right? Yeah. Yeah. So that's the thing is like a lot of these games that I think a lot of people either missed or they were too young to play. There's not that many avenues where they can go back and experience it, especially if it's like virtual console I think is the only place that I know of where you can actually legally play it on a modern piece of hardware. I know like, Symphony of the Night, you can get on PSP and Vita as part of their PS1 classics kind of thing. Yeah, and it also plays on PS3. Oh, is it on PS3? I didn't realize that.

Yeah, all those PS1 classics are PSP and PS3 or almost all of them. I see. Yeah, that is kind of a challenge is finding those games. For something like the Saturn version of Symphony the Night, I don't think it's skin off anyone's teeth to just emulate the thing. like who's losing money on that really like the game never came to America it's not in print it's almost 20 years old just try it out pay pal Konami $5 if it makes you feel better go go play one of their casino games for them they'll make more money off of you that way but yeah it would be great if some of these were archived better when the PSP rondo dragonlex collection came out I asked Igarashi like are you putting the Saturn version on there and it was pretty clear he was like I don't want to do that because

That version sucks. I didn't work on it. It was done by some other people, and I'm not really happy with it. So, yeah, like, out of personal, professional pride, they left that off. But I think that's a shame, because it is a part of the game's history, and I think it deserves to be brought to light. Even if it's not a good part of the history, it's still there. Likewise, the Super Nias version of Dracula X. He didn't put that on the collection either, even though that's a perfectly competent game.

So, you know, there are these kind of frustrating gaps, and I wish that those could be cleared up, but game history and archivism and preservation is an imperfect science, and that's really one of the reasons this podcast exists so we can at least talk about stuff, even if we can't actually bring it to light or, you know, let people play it. We can at least prove it existed once. Yep. Anyway, final thoughts on either Castlevania game. I'm going to say, like, I think Symphony and I is the best Castlevania game, period.

It doesn't matter what style you prefer. I just think it's the best. And if you haven't played it, please do. It's available pretty much on everything, I think. I mean, you're not going to get it on Wii U, of course, but you can find a way to play it. It's on PSP, PS3, PlayStation, of course. Xbox 360. Yeah, that too.

So, like, yeah, if you have a system, you probably have a way to play this game. So please do if you haven't. If we haven't convinced you by now, by God. Well, I would say, actually, if you haven't played this game, wait until Kasm comes out because it's going to be so much better. And, you know, and it was taking it. I got to get one plug in there. But it definitely took a lot of inspiration from Castlevania Symphony of the Night as well as Super Metroid. So it's kind of interesting, moving away from the plug aspect of it, just thinking about its legacy in terms of how many games.

I'm really excited that there's this renaissance in the Metroidvania genre because for the longest time, they're just really. wasn't anything in that genre. And now all of a sudden there's, you know, it's weird how these cycles just naturally happen. Yeah. I started up a site to kind of archive and keep a list of Metroidvania

games because at the time there were like one or two coming out every few years. Now I can't keep up. Shadow Complex. Yeah. And that was like the only one that had come out in like years either before or after. And it's interesting like talking with James Petruzzi and Tom Hap

both of them were saying like when they started their games one of the reasons that they chose to do a Metroidvania was because no one else was doing one and they wanted to play one apparently a lot of people have the same thought yeah I guess so yeah yeah so it's just interesting how that

you know great minds tend to think alike all right well thanks Dan and of course Bob that wraps it up for Castlevania something tonight as Bob said it's a game both of them are games everyone should play and they are pretty easily accessible for Americans to enjoy in this day and age. So you should check them out.

You should play them if you haven't already. And if you have, play them again because they're awesome. So for Retronauts, it's been Jeremy and Bob and Dan. The usual plugs apply. You can find Retronauts at Retronauts.com and on USGamer.net. You can download our show from iTunes. and you should also give us really loving, glowing ratings

because we're amazing. And let's see. You can find us on social media at Twitter and I guess where else are we? Fumbler, Facebook, YouTube, all that good stuff. Right on. Way to go, us. We're so on top of things.

Millennials love us. Yeah, they sure do. Because of these one weird tricks. Let's see, what else? Oh, right. This podcast is made possible through Patreon. So if you enjoy what we're doing here and want to encourage us to talk at length about great games like Castlevania Symphony the Night, your pledge of a dollar or two, I think $2 each month, will take us far. So please consider contributing to keep us alive, let us rent our studio space and pay for flights and things like that to record. And I guess that's about it. So you can find me personally on Twitter as GameSpite and, of course, writing and editing for usgamer.net.

You can also check out my side projects at gameboyworld.com and goodnintensions.com where I'm chronicling old Nintendo system software libraries because I do stupid things like that. Bob? Yeah, you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. I also write for USGamer, of course, and something awful. and you can always check out my chronological Simpsons podcast, Talking Simpsons, on the Laser Time podcast network. Just search for Talking Simpsons in whatever you listen to podcasts with and you'll find it.

Dan, do you have any obsessive, compulsive type A nerd chronological projects that we should know about? You know, I don't. I'm really bad. I have a blog on Dan-Aidleman.com, so Danadleman.com, where I talk mostly about business stuff, the business of indie games, It's been a long time since I've been really bad about updating, but things like, you know, how should indie developers? It's really more for indie developers, aspiring indie developers, about how they should think about how to approach game development and the business side of things. But other than that, just I hang out on Twitter every now and then more than I should.

And yeah, so feel free to reach out that way. And, of course, if you are looking to develop a Metroidvania game of your own or not some other game, I'm sure Dan would be happy to talk to you about representation and so forth. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's interesting. I get contacted by a lot of game developers, which I'm really thrilled and excited about, that a lot of people are interested in working together. and I like to work on a small number of games that I'm deeply passionate about as opposed to working with dozens of games, like kind of like a PR agency or something like that. So, but I'm always happy, even if I can't, like if I'm not available to take on a project full-time,

kind of like I'm doing with Axiom Verge and Kazim and one other game that hasn't been announced yet. Still, I'm always happy. I think of it's kind of like your duty as being part of the indie games community. We all try to help each other. So if anyone, you know, just wants to reach out and ask some one-off questions, get some advice, I'm always happy to talk to people. All right. Thanks, Dan, for coming in.

And thanks everyone for listening. We'll be back next week with a Retronauts micro episode and video. You know, I'm going to be able to be. You know what I'm going to do.