The Stack

Prince of Persia (2008) is organized around groups of four. There are four colors of power-plate, and four distinct sets of zones, each of which is made of an entrance zone, a terminus, and a circle of four zones between them. And there are four bosses, each ruling over one of the four zone groups.

The bosses are a bit like ringwraiths. Former humans with bodies made of black, oily Corruption ¹Come to think of it, Corruption strongly resembles petroleum, and the whole game is set in the middle east. I’m a little tempted to read allegory into this, but such things are really too subtle for this game. , they accepted power from Ahriman during their mortal lives, and consequently now serve him for eternity. Their names are apparently forgotten, because they’re all identified by their jobs: the Hunter, the Alchemist, the Concubine, the Warrior. And the peculiar thing is that most of the fighting in the game is against just these four creatures. You have to fight them over and over; every zone has a boss fight you have to win before you can cleanse it. And there isn’t a lot of combat beyond that.

To be precise, I’ve seen three other sorts of foes. In the very beginning, you have to fight some soldiers who are chasing Elika on her dad’s behalf. (Notably, you don’t kill them. They run away when defeated. I recall that The Sands of Time also had a bit at the beginning where you fought ordinary human soldiers before everyone turned into sand-wraiths, but it wasn’t so squeamish about letting them die.) Then there’s a periodic between-chapters battle against Elika’s father himself, who’s not undead yet but probably on his way, if I understand the backstory correctly. And finally, there are lesser Corrupted that spawn at specific points in the paths between corrupted zones — but there’s at most one such point per path, and it’s possible to slip by them without a fight if you’re fast enough. Even if you do fight the lesser corrupted, they’re a lot quicker to defeat than the bosses: if you can back them all the way up to a ledge or wall, you drain the rest of their lifebar automatically. A boss in a similar situation will just teleport closer to the center of the battlefield.

Combat is always one-on-one (apart from Elika’s magical assistance), and feels a bit like a simplified Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat-style fighting game, in that it’s about carefully-timed button presses rather than fluid grace — a charge that could be leveled at the platforming sequences as well. For what it’s worth, I’m rubbish at this sort of fighting. I understand that there are combos to be discovered as well, but the only combos I’ve managed to pull off are the simple ones like “sword-sword-sword-sword”.

All Corrupted, whether minor or boss, have a habit of metamorphosing into forms that are vulnerable to only a single sort of attack: turning the Corruption of their body into a sort of armor with blue highlights means you need to use sword attacks to get it off, a sort of black cloud around the feet and back needs you to pull them out with your gauntlet, and turning into a mass of black tentacles is an invitation to use Elika’s magic. You’re given a help text explaining these vulnerabilities the first time each form is used, but after that you pretty much have to just remember them (unless Elika shouts out advice, as she does sometimes). What I didn’t notice at first is that the combat QTEs work very similarly. I mentioned before not being able to react to the QTE button prompts quickly enough; I now suspect that this is intentional. What you’re supposed to do — what works — is to recognize the situation before the button prompt comes up. If a boss rears up on a tall column of Corruption, for example, it means that you’re about to be asked to press the Jump button to leap out of the way before he falls on you like a wrestler. So for once, we have QTEs that make it worthwhile to pay attention to what’s happening in the gameworld instead of just staring at the UI.

I’ve probably been making Prince of Persia (2008) sound more linear and constrained than it is. Let me describe its structure more fully.

The map is a highly symmetrical network of zones and passageways. The divisions between zones aren’t explicitly marked; it’s possible to go from one zone to another without realizing it. Each zone starts off in a state of darkness and corruption. In fact, “The Corruption” is the name of a sort of writhing slime that covers any surface that the level designers don’t want you to touch. And each zone has a special spot called “Fertile Ground”, consistently pronounced with a long i, like “fur tile”. When Elika does her sacred magic thing on the fur tile, a Genesis-Effect-like aura spreads out from it, restoring color, making grass grow, and permanently cleansing the zone of the Corruption. (The architecture is left in ruins, but you can’t have everything.) Cleansing all of the zones is pretty much the game’s main goal.

The important thing to recognize about this is that the Corruption is a constraint on your movement. Entering a corrupted zone, you’ll find that you’re mostly confined to a single path. Cleanse it and your options open up. Which is a good thing, because you still have a good deal more to do there. The cleansing magic also makes glowy floating things called “light seeds” appear, turning the zone into a hunt for collectibles. And in this phase, the player has considerable freedom. Yes, you get the same visual cues as always for reaching them, but in some cases I’m pretty sure that I spotted and followed alternate routes to light seeds before I found the preferred one. Notably, light seeds that you collect while falling stay collected even if you get rescued by Elika. I don’t think the preferred route ever actually requires you to be rescued, but it’s a serious option.

Now, with certain exceptions, every zone in the map is open for exploration from early in the game. However, most of the fur tiles (and some of the light seeds) are in places that can only be accessed by means of special magical powers that Elika accesses one by one over the course of the game. There are four different powers, including flight and a power-climb that can take you across ceilings, but they all come down to the same thing: they all, in some way, transport the player from a special colored plate — the color determining the power — to a fixed destination. The plates are another assertion of authorial control: if you could just activate these powers from anywhere, the experience would be in the player’s hands, and we can’t have that.

So, how do you obtain these powers? By collecting light seeds. You get your first power at 60 seeds, the second at 170, the third at 340, and the fourth and last at 540. 540 is significantly less than the amount available, and (as far as I’m aware) there’s no advantage to collecting more after you’ve got all the powers, so obsessive completism is not required, unless you’re like me and just value 100% completion for its own sake. You do, however, need all four powers to complete the game, and that means a lot of hunting and backtracking to find enough seeds. Inevitably, you wind up crossing through zones that you can’t cleanse yet in order to reach ones that you can.

The interesting part, however, is that you can take the four powers in any order. Whenever you go back to the Temple to cash in your seeds, you get to choose whichever of the remaining powers you want. And the order in which you take them affects the order in which you can cleanse the zones. If you want to tackle a particular zone first, you can find out its required power (which is helpfully listed in the map screen’s zone data) and obtain that power first. You still ultimately have to cleanse all the zones, but there’s no particular ordering to them, even though there’s still a Metroidvania-like progression of decreasing constraint.

Prince of Persia on the PC really feels like a port of a recent big-budget console game. I don’t even play recent big-budget console games, and even I can recognize this.

The most obvious signifier is the button icons. There are six basic action buttons: jump, sword, block, gauntlet, talk to Elika, and use Elika’s magic (with effects that depend on context). On a console, these are bound to the four face and two shoulder buttons. With PC controle, all six can be executed with the keyboard, but also, the game rather surprisingly supports up to four mouse buttons: by default, sword and block on left and right mouse buttons respectively, magic and gauntlet on the forward/back buttons that are usually only recognized by web browsers. The trackball that I use for PC games does in fact have these extra buttons, but I think this is the first game I’ve seen that supports them; even HTML-based games tend to not handle paging around through your browser history very well. Anyway, each of these buttons has a circular icon associated with it, each with a distinct background color. Invented for this game, they’re clearly replacements for the standard console button prompts, in both appearance and function: options in menus have button icons displayed next to them, and in the QTE-like moments in combat where you have to press or mash a specific button to execute or avoid a special move, the icon for the required button is displayed on the screen. This isn’t ideal. When it’s in combat, I usually fail to execute the move, because the symbols don’t have a strong association with their associated buttons in my mind. I do have a strong association between the buttons and their actions, but looking at the symbols is like reading a foreign language; it takes me a moment to translate from “green circle with a pair of legs in mid-leap” to “space bar”, and so by the time I know which button to press, it’s too late. I speculate that this is because it’s a two-step associative chain: the icon depicts an action which I associate with a button. On the consoles, it presumably just shows a picture of the button.

The other thing that seems particularly symptomatic of modern console games is the sheer amount of guidance the game gives you. The QTE prompts, where it tells you exactly what button to press, are the extreme case of this, of course, but it goes beyond that. In platforming, the player is basically never trusted to figure out what to do next. Sections of wall where you’re expected to do the Prince’s trademark wall-run ¹The wall-run was introduced in 2003’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and quickly became known as the Prince’s signature move. I’m old enough to remember the original Prince of Persia from 1989, and at the time, I felt that his signature move was leaping across a gap, catching a ledge with just his hands, dangling for a moment, and pulling himself up. But then Lara Croft took that over, and nowadays it’s just expected of any decent platformer hero. are marked with scratches. Even if you get stuck (or, more likely, disoriented), Elika can produce a ball of light that floats ahead, showing the path to your current designated destination. Mind you, you get to designate your destination yourself — the game isn’t linear. That alone saves it from the worst excesses of the don’t-let-the-player-get-lost philosophy. Also, it is in fact still possible to wall-run in non-indicated places, and possibly even to discover shortcuts that way, although there’s a tendency for the solidity of objects to break down when you’re in a place where the game doesn’t expect you. Even so, the intense guidance robs the experience of a certain element of discovery found in prior Prince of Persias. I remember having to look carefully around a room and plan out a route, thinking “Will I be able to reach that beam from that pillar?” and the like.

And in general, the whole player experience seems very planned. The mechanics here don’t allow for a wide variety of alternate approaches. You can’t try to somersault under blade traps like in prior games — there’s no somersaulting (and, indeed, no blade traps). You can’t run away from fights. Combat generally takes place on circular platforms without exploitable environmental features; in the few places where you can exploit the environment, it’s because you’re facing a puzzle-boss who can’t be defeated any other way. The fact that you can wall-run in non-indicated places almost feels like an oversight on the developers’ part. Even when there’s no button icon on the screen telling you what to press and when, there’s a very clear sense that there’s a single right thing to do at every moment, except at planned branch points.

I’ve seen it advised that one should design games by thinking first about the experience that you want the player to have. I get the impression that a lot of big-budget games these days attempt this, but confuse experience with spectacle: they start by deciding what they want the player to see, then implement a game around making the player perform the correct actions at the correct moments to see it. For all the sophistication of its underlying engine, Prince of Persia can be viewed as a descendant of games like Cyberia. There are bits where you slide down a chute and have to clear gaps by pressing the jump button at the right moments, and other bits where you’re sent flying through the air with no control over your trajectory and have to dodge obstacles with the directional movement controls. These are both things that could have been done in a Dragon’s Lair or Rebel Assault engine without significant loss.

And yet I’m still having fun with it, which perhaps means I’m being overly sour about this sort of gameplay. Or perhaps it just points out how shallow fun is as a criterion for judging games.

For our next game, we have Prince of Persia, which unfortunately doesn’t have a subtitle to distinguish it from Prince of Persia. Prince of Persia at least had the excuse of being the only game titled Prince of Persia when it was released, but I’m not playing that one, I’m playing Prince of Persia, the 2008 game with a new “prince” (apparently a thief, although I suspect he’s just pretending and incognito) assisting Elika, a young magician-princess, in keeping Ahriman, the god of darkness, from escaping his prison. I won’t call this a “reboot”, because I think it’s pretty well-established, in “expanded universe” materials if nowhere else, that PoP continuity contains multiple different Princes echoing each others’ stories at various points in history. This is just one of the ones we haven’t seen before.

I have quite a lot to say about the gameplay, but for this post, I’ll just share some early impressions.

The graphical style makes a strong first impression, somehow looking very illustration-like. It’s not cel-shaded, but there’s some similar simplification going on, or maybe it’s just the thin black outlines on the characters that make it seem that way. It reminds me of what little I’ve seen of Street Fighter IV. Still, as usual, it doesn’t take long to get used to it and not notice it any more. Elika’s magical effects, on the other hand, turn her outline and shadows, and sometimes those of Prince as well, into pale blue, and that remains a striking effect when it happens, presumably because it’s not in front of your eyes all the time.

My second strong impression is dismay at the characters’ wardrobe. It’s not nearly as direly sexualized as in Warrior Within, but there’s still a strong “who in their right mind would wear that in public” vibe. It isn’t that they show a lot of skin — both the Prince and Farah wear more revealing outfits in The Sands of Time, but garments in this PoP08 expose skin strategically. The prince wears an impractical-looking muscle shirt that’s cut to show off his slab-like pectoral and abdominal muscles, and yet manages to give the impression that he has no nipples. Elika sports a tattered top that leaves weird portions of her hips exposed and was probably intended to go with some kind of high-waisted skirt instead of the trousers she’s got on. (Those trousers seem fairly practical, mind you, especially in contrast to everything else ever worn by any woman in a Prince of Persia game.) To expand on the contrast: in The Sands of Time, Farah managed to be dignified even in her slave outfit, while the Prince was the hapless victim of gradual wardrobe loss, a symbol of his lack of control over the catastrophe that he himself helped to cause. That was their relationship in a nutshell. PoP08 turns this backward, giving the female lead a torn and ill-fitting outfit that suggests victimhood, and pairing her with a tall, muscular man who looks like he’s dressed to go cruising for chicks.

In fact, Elika’s weakness is a major plot point. Use of magic sometimes drains her to the point where she collapses onto the floor, or into the Prince’s arms. (The Prince manhandles her quite a lot, considering that they only just met.) And yet, whenever the player makes a mistake and jumps off a ledge or something, Elika uses her magic to instantly rescue him, regardless of the circumstances. Even if she’s bound up in a writhing cocoon of magical darkness and awaiting rescue, which is something that happens more than once over the course of the game, she finds a way to break out of it for just long enough to save the Prince, and then immediately becomes bound and helpless again. I suppose you could argue that this shows that the relationship between Elika and the Prince is really one of mutuality, that each of them relies on the other, but it feels more like the Prince’s needs come first, that he somehow has the right to expect a woman who’s suffering from fainting spells to run around making sure that he never has to suffer the consequences of his actions.

Am I being unfair? Perhaps. I have to admit that I simply find this incarnation of the Prince irritating. His type is what I think of as the Brendan Fraser role, all smug and cocksure, with a smirk in his voice. He keeps telling Elika that she ought to get out and live real life among ordinary people, which is not so much a piece of advice as an aggressive act of reverse-elitism, a way for him to act superior and assume authority while at the same time accusing her of the superior attitudes. And in contrast to the Prince’s arrogance in The Sands of Time, which was flaw that humanized the character and made him more sympathetic, it seems like in PoP08 the writer, or possibly just the voice actor, doesn’t even think he’s being arrogant. He’s just trying to be the common-sense voice that the audience agrees with. If the Prince and Farah in TSoT bickered like Tracy and Hepburn, the banter in PoP08 comes off more like the arguments between Spock and McCoy, and has about as much romantic tension. Fortunately, most of the dialogue is optional, and only comes up if you choose to press the “talk” button.

I had to look this up, but a growing suspicion of mine turned out to be correct: the voice actor for the Prince is none other than Nolan North, best known as the voice of Nathan Drake in the Uncharted series. I haven’t played any of the Uncharted games, and certainly didn’t recognize the voice. I just guessed this on the basis of the complaints I’ve heard about Drake.

Anyway, despite all that, I am quite enjoying the actual game. When my mind is on wall-running and leaping across chasms, I don’t much care about what my avatar is wearing, or what he sounds like. And it’s rather compelling, with a strong “one more level and then I’ll stop” factor, possibly assisted by the way that Elika’s automatic rescues keep you away from any kind of “game over” screen or save/load menu.

I recall that these auto-rescues were controversial when the game was first released, and that some people complained that it caused the game to lose something — a sense of danger or whatever. I was skeptical about this; it seemed to me that it was just expediting the die/restore or checkpoint cycle, and thus not really changing the interactivity in any significant way. Well, I don’t quite know how to justify this, but in practice, it honestly does feel different, like your failures are less significant than they should be. Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s happening within the context of the game’s fiction, and thus makes you aware of the cheatingness of infinite take-backs in a way that you don’t notice when it’s at the system level. Perhaps it’s that the game is robbing you of even the possibility of doing things wrong, and thereby reducing the sense of agency. Regardless, it only feels this way for a while. Just like the graphics, I got used to it pretty quickly.

Zak, the player character in Cyberia, is a cyberpunk-as-interpreted-by-videogames sort of hero: a cool tough guy with computerized shades. His voice is permanently bored and his face never changes expression, or indeed shows any sign of being able to move his facial muscles at all, which is a bit of a problem for a kissing scene early on. And he kills and kills and kills. Once you’re in the Cyberia compound, leaving anything alive behind you generally means getting shot in the back. If you manage to slip by someone without killing them, it just means you’re going to have to kill them some other way later.

For the wandering-around-corridors segment of the game contains shooting of zap guns aplenty, usually in the form of shootouts where you and the enemy are popping out from cover repeatedly. This is one of the game’s few ways to keep repeatedly killing you in what would otherwise be a lightweight adventure-style situational puzzle sequence. Some puzzles require actions in more than one room, which is a bit of a strain on the checkpoint system, which is designed to just remember a location, not any state. The result is that the checkpoints can get pretty far apart here, with the result that any time I died, I needed to repeat multiple roomworths of content, including shootouts. Just a few days ago, I complained about the rapid die/retry cycle, but it’s even worse when it’s long.

Each floor of the compound is mostly just one big curving corridor with rooms hanging off it here and there, but in its favor, the place really is conceived as spatially coherent, and there are a couple of puzzles that rely on this. For example, one bit requires you to open a vent so you can reach through it from the other side, after going back the way you came and then coming back through some unusually spacious air ducts.

Also to its credit, the game does go slightly nonlinear here, with two entrances to the compound, one guarded by a guard with a gun, the other by something even more lethal: a spinning metal fan. (For some reason, videogame designers seem to think that fans are the most dangerous things on Earth. Even in a game where you can keep going after falling five stories and taking multiple bullets to the chest, touching a fan kills instantly.) Anyway, the guard route leads to one of those self-contained wall-panel puzzles that I liked so much. Unfortunately, that seems to be it for those puzzles. Just two in the entire game, and one of them is skippable.

We get more story in the compound than in the rest of the game put together, partly through snooping into the staff’s video emails. But the story is pretty much all cliché, including the genre-mandated betrayal of the hero by his employer. Why is this such a mainstay of the cyberpunk videogame? It wasn’t that big a part of literary cyberpunk.

Towards the end, there is more of the FMV swoop-and-shoot, but not in the way I had anticipated. In fact, you get three different contexts for it, two of which involve controlling a machine remotely, so that you’re playing the part of a person sitting and staring at a computer screen. The third, the climax of the game, involves becoming a sort of nanotech superman and flying off into space for the most direct Rebel Assault imitation yet. Space seems to me a better setting for this stuff than Earth, if only because it’s easier to render convincingly.

And that concludes Cyberia, a game that I didn’t want. I’ll say this for it: it’s a pretty pure specimen of its type. If someone asks “What were 90s FMV games like, and why are people so down on them?”, you can point them at Cyberia to answer both questions.

So, my latest session was all about the Rebel Assault-style FMV swoop-and-shoot. For a lengthy portion of the game, that’s all you get, just one air-combat mission after another. It makes me think of how the vehicle sections of Half-Life 2 were broken up with obstacles that you could only clear by getting out the the vehicle and pressing a switch or something in a guarded building nearby, a fragment of ordinary FPS gameplay inserted to make the whole thing less monotonous. Nothing of that kind happens here.

I have a couple more big complaints about the way air combat is handled here. One is that the underlying movie clip sometimes cuts away to show a third-person shot of a particularly dramatic explosion or your plane noninteractively executing a sweet maneuver, and that’s pretty much always a mistake in the middle of an action scene, particularly if there are still targets on the screen that the mini-cutscene is keeping the player from blowing up. Even worse, because some of these cutscenes show things that you can shoot at blowing up, there is no way to destroy those things before the video playback reaches the cutscene. You’ll be shooting at a plane over and over for a couple of seconds with no effect, and that’s frustrating.

Also, I can’t help but feel that this sort of fast-paced first-person air combat really needs a resolution higher than 320×200. Enemies often spend most of their time onscreen as one or two pixels, too small to identify even on the level of “is it a plane or a tank”, and thus too small for the player to anticipate their behavior or prioritize their destruction. Instead, we’re given the opportunity to learn what’s going to happen and how to react to it by means of exact repetition.

To be honest, there is a pleasure to be found in this: the pleasure of finally overcoming a challenge that you’ve failed many times, a mix of triumph and relief. But I’m impatient with this game, and want it off my Stack, and some of the levels just seem insanely difficult. And so I’ve dropped the difficulty down to Easy for action sequences (the game has separate difficulty settings for action and puzzles), despite the implication in the docs that this setting is for babies and grandmothers. Even on Easy, I had some difficulty with the later shooty levels, but the overall experience was an improvement, replacing the pleasure of overcoming a challenge failed repeatedly with that of getting it right on the first try. 

There was just one problem: the game doesn’t support switching difficulty settings on the fly. To drop down to Easy, you have to create a new profile and start over from the beginning. But I didn’t have a whole lot of ground to re-cover, and it goes a lot faster when you know what you’re doing. Also, I decided to take advantage of this discontinuity by switching to a different machine, and found that on the other one I could play full-screen without problems. I’m finding this much nicer, even if it does expose the pixelation more. Well, it’s not like the graphics were all that good anyway, right?

Anyway, I seem to be done with this stuff, at least for now. Last night, after something resembling a boss fight (involving a large aircraft with three weapons that had to be destroyed individually), I reached my destination, the compound housing the Cyberia project (which is something to do with nanotechnology), and that seemed like a good stopping-point for the session. It remains to be seen if I’ll need to do more dogfighting as I make my escape.

Although it was just a random fluke at first, once a pattern is established, why not carry it out to its conclusion? Ia! Ia!

Cyberia (not to be confused with Benoit Sokal’s atmospheric graphic adventure Syberia) is a thick slice of 90s FMV cheese. I obtained it as part of one of Interplay’s cheap old game anthologies, and it wasn’t one of the games that I bought the anthology for. As a result, I had basically forgotten about it until I saw its name in my list, and had some difficulty locating the disc: I have most of my physical media nicely alphabetized by title, but a CD-ROM with multiple unrelated games on it breaks such a scheme, especially if you don’t remember that the title you’re looking for is on such a thing. Installing the game under DOSBox (and convincing it to use an image of the CD-ROM instead of the real thing) went without problems, except that the color map goes all strange when I try to run it in full-screen mode. Irony, that: here we are playing a game from 1994, when full-screen FMV without special hardware was finally feasible, but I’m playing it in a tiny portion of my screen anyway.

The video content here is all pre-rendered CGI, and shares with most other pre-rendered CGI video of its era the sad attribute that it doesn’t look as good as what’s done in realtime by stuff that you can play for free on the web nowadays. It’s ever the fate of games that emphasize style over substance to age badly. Ah, but what about the substance? So far, I’ve seen three sorts of interactivity: bits where you wander around and try not to get killed, bits where you solve self-contained puzzles, and bits where you shoot at aircraft (or possibly spacecraft; this is a sci-fi game, but I’m not sure just how sci-fi).

The wandering around is weak and Dragon’s Lair-ish, with a rapid die-and-retry cycle and no other way to anticipate the results of your actions. (Like Dragon’s Lair, it even bases its interface on the equivalent of an Atari joystick, four directions and a fire button.) The shooting is more reminiscent of Rebel Assault: you swoop around on a pre-rendered video track and sundry targets present themselves in sync with the scenery (but with a rectangular targeting thingy around them to make it clear that they’re not actually part of it). It’s easy to fail this stuff, and the unvarying background video makes it feel extra-repetitive when you do. As for the puzzles, I’ve really only seen one so far, and it was pretty cool. It involves just as much dying and starting over as everything else, of course, but it was in the service of figuring out an ambiguous mechanism with a minimum of instruction. There were details in its graphical representation that I didn’t notice until I had gleaned some notion of what I was looking for, and that felt very nice. If only more of the game were like that.

Having left the last post in a bit of a cliffhanger, it’s time for a big spoiler. What’s on the other side of the fake ending? The entire second half of the game, it turns out. There’s a teleporter to another castle. Or not quite another castle, because it’s exactly the same layout, the same furnishings and everything, although palette-swapped a bit in places. There are of course different monsters (including a completely new set of bosses, and also a few of the earlier bosses demoted to grunts) and different treasures (including all the items that were taken away from you in the intro, which are pretty much the best items other than rare random drops). Also, it’s all upside-down. The whole castle.

This inversion doesn’t affect the monsters. It does affect all stationary scenery elements, which includes any flames or bodies of water, as well as the sky and the ground, in those places where you can see outside. It has the effect of making you climb to reach the deepest caverns under the castle. It’s basically a lazy way to double the amount of terrain while still varying it in significant ways: a room with an arched ceiling becomes a room with a curved and sloping floor, a pool that was hard to avoid falling into becomes instead hard to reach.

Actually, water is one of the few things that can be hard to reach at this point. By the time you reach the inverted castle, you’ve necessarily gained the ability to turn into a bat. You can’t go through water in this form, but you can merrily fly over the heads of some of the toughest enemies who would otherwise block your way. In extreme cases, like when there’s an endless stream of flying medusa heads in your way, you can turn into mist, although this uses up mana a lot faster than bat-form. Still, the simple ability to skip combat whenever you feel like it is one of the factors that makes the second half go faster than the first. Another is the fact that you already have all the obstacle-circumvention powerups in the game. Another is that, because the second castle is identical in layout to the first (only upside-down), you already know the map, including the locations of secret passages and how to access them. (This cuts both ways: there was one secret passage that I found in the inverted castle first, because it had been on the ceiling before.)

The only real obstacle, then, is the boss fights, which get pretty tough. There are things on the scale of Shadow of the Colossus here; past a certain point, things that don’t fully fit on a single screen become the norm. And I have to take a moment now to remind myself to be impressed with that, that they could spare the resources, both in terms of system memory and development time. It’s easy to take for granted in the post-FMV age, but I can remember being impressed with lesser efforts at the arcade. And the most impressive part isn’t even just the big things: it’s that this game has a roster of enemies as large and diverse as a Final Fantasy of its era, only where FF was using static images for everything but the player characters, these monsters are fully animated. In some cases, particularly with armored foes, it looks like they might be saving some cels by building creatures out of rigid parts that can be rotated independently, now that they could target hardware with native support for bitmap rotation. But there are a lot of creatures that are just animated as full-body bitmaps, and I could be wrong about the game ever doing anything else.

(One trick I have to mention: there are a couple of types of ghostly sword-wielders that spend most of their time invisible. The swords of these beings are always visible, swinging and swashbuckling freely, but the body only appears in brief flashes. This means they can have an elaborate attack routine with only two or three frames of animation, and the poses you can see are carefully chosen to suggest more than they depict.)

Anyway, the second half goes fast enough that I’ve already finished it. This gives one the opportunity to start over in the role of Richter Belmont. I don’t consider this to be necessary for removing the game from the Stack, but I’ve played in Richter mode enough to be impressed with how different it is. It essentially turns the game back into a traditional Castlevania: there’s no inventory or equipment, no mobility upgrades, no leveling or XP. It’s just you, a sacred whip, and one special weapon at a time. Richter even moves with the blocky, shuffling gait of the original Castlevania on the NES, which looks downright silly after Alucard’s more detailed walk animation, with his hair and cloak all flowing and windswept. To compensate for his inability to turn into a bat, Richter gets a free pass on some things that Alucard needed upgrades for, such as opening enchanted doors. Come to that, Alucard needed upgrades just to use some of the basic features of the UI that Richter gets automatically, like having the amount of damage your blows are doing to the monsters displayed on the screen. That’s a kind of upgrade I’d normally expect only in satire.

One thing tempts me to keep on going with Richter, and that’s the thought that all that upside-down terrain would become more relevant with him. He’d have to navigate it all without flying, without even double-jumping. But I suppose he must have some secret hadouken-like combo that lets him clear the larger gaps in the game, or he’d never be able to reach the topmost tower. But I’ve never been much of a one for secret combos. Heck, I barely used the combos I was explicitly given for casting spells. (I’m told that playing through the game without using spells is a common voluntary conduct challenge for those who have mastered the game, and I came pretty close to doing it unintentionally.) What’s worse is that some of the special powers that Alucard can unlock are combos that the game doesn’t even tell you how to use. No, not even in the docs. For example, one grants you the ability to run fast while in wolf form. I have no idea how to trigger this. I managed it once, but only by accident. Apart from one place where you need to shift into wolf form to pass a narrow gap (because Alucard is apparently too proud to crawl), I basically didn’t use wolf form, except as a result of getting confused about which button does which transformation. Because wolf form is basically useless unless you can do the combos.

One combo I used a great deal: the one for the high-jump power, down-up-X. I didn’t figure this out on my own. I resorted to hints. Perhaps it would be more easily guessable by someone steeped in 1997 console-game lore. It certainly seems like the sort of action that would be used in multiple games. I recall that Half-Life did something similar for its long-jump action. The only other time I used hints was to open the rightmost passage in the clock tower, which is something of a riddle. The room is dominated by a working clock face, and there’s a passage on the left that opens and closes at intervals of a minute, so I thought that the passage on the right must have some similar time-based pattern, and spent some time waiting for it to open when the clock hands were reaching significant-looking points. But the trick turned out to be nothing like that, and I doubt I would have got it on my own.

That closed-off passage by the clock was the last of the obvious obstacles for me. There may well be more secret passages that I haven’t found, hidden behind crumbling walls and the like. I suppose I could do a sweep of the castle with the Faerie familiar equipped if I wanted to find them all: as the one familiar who doesn’t participate in combat, the Faerie helps you in other ways, like pointing out frangible walls and feeding you healing potions when you need them. But, having taken a longer glance at some FAQs and walkthroughs now, it seems like discovering absolutely everything is a goal for those more dedicated than me, people who like to play the same game over and over and master its every detail. The game indulges such players by giving them lots of obscure stuff to discover. The Shield Rod combos, for example. The Shield Rod is a bludgeoning weapon that I used for a while, then abandoned when I got a better weapon. Apparently if you use it at the same time as a shield, pressing the weapon and shield buttons simultaneously, it produces a magical effect determined by the type of shield. This is obscure enough that it would come off as an easter egg if it weren’t so elaborate, another of the game’s extravagances. It’s a short step from exploring this kind of content to discovering glitches and exploiting them to break sequence, get outside the castle walls, and similar activities. And there have been people so in love with the game that they put documents on the internet explaining how to do this.

For my part, I may eventully find enough motivation to finish with Richter, but am unlikely to take things farther than that. Life is too short, and the Stack too large.

Today, I beat Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. In a sense, anyway.

There was a boss fight against former hero Richter Belmont — I had been expecting Dracula, but when you think about it, Richter has already been established to be tougher than Dracula. The fight was kind of anticlimactic, over with disappointingly quickly. This is always a danger with RPG-like leveling systems that allow the player to keep on leveling beyond the point of challenge, but you’d think they could keep a bit of drama by making it a multi-stage boss. (It’s not like the notion was foreign to the designers. Dracula in the intro had two stages.) Victory was followed by an epilogue cutscene, and then the credits scrolled by, and ordinarily I’d consider that to be enough to get a game off the Stack. But, well, there were indications that I wasn’t actually finished with the game.

There were still passages I hadn’t yet found a way to get through, and even an optional miniboss that I hadn’t managed to beat. That in itself didn’t mean very much: there are a lot of blocked passages that just lead to a single room containing a piece of equipment or two, and in a lot of cases, I only found them after they had been rendered obsolete. But in the castle library, you can look at a sort of pokédex of all the monster types you’ve encountered, and something close to half the slots in the list were yet to be filled in. This made it seem like there had to be more than just a handful of isolated bonus rooms. The really convincing thing, though, was that the map showed a couple of small rooms on the opposite side of, and only accessible from, the room where the final boss fight took place. Which made them clearly impossible to get to, because you don’t get to leave that room: win or lose, the game ends there.

And so, jumping back to my last save before winning, I went to fight that one undefeated miniboss, a magician who summons swarms of bats and flying skulls. I had initially found this much harder than the fight against Richter, and I kind of wonder if this was deliberate, a way to encourage people to fight Richter first. But then, maybe not: after a little thought, I realized that there was a specific special weapon, a book that swirls around you in a defensive cloud, that would take down the swarms easily. Special weapons, the ones that use “hearts” for ammo, have the peculiar property that they don’t go into your inventory like most items, and you can only hold one at a time. It’s a weird mechanic for this game, but it’s one that Symphony of the Night inherited from the original Castlevania, which was just a platformer rather than a platformer/RPG(/adventure) hybrid and didn’t have an inventory. Anyway, it worked, and that led to an item that had obvious application to exploring another previously-unexplorable area, which turned out to hold another item that unlocked a different area, and so forth until I had a new way to handle the encounter with Richter, and, through it, access to those impossible rooms on the other side.

One of my vague wouldn’t-it-be-interesting game ideas that I’ll probably never actually implement is the idea of a game with a secret. You’d have a straightforward quest: rescue the princess, say. You could complete this quest by playing the game in the obvious way, and some people would do that and be satisfied. But other people would put together some details and realize that rescuing the princess isn’t what they should actually be doing: the royal family are all secretly alien shapeshifters, perhaps, and the player characters who win the straightforward way will wind up with their brains sucked out of their skulls while the credits are rolling. The people who discover this would have an opportunity to go off the obvious path and wind up playing a larger game, with different goals.

There are a few games that approach this to various degrees, but none I’m aware of quite reach it. Portal does the subversion, but forces the player into it. The Path lets you either pursue your stated goal the simple and direct way or wander the world around first, but doing the former is explicitly unsatisfactory. Gregory Weir’s The Day has two very different stories wrapped up into a single game, but it doesn’t make a secret of the fact.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night may be the closest thing to the concept I’ve seen. I really can imagine someone defeating Richter and putting the game away, satisfied that they’ve finished it. But I can’t, now that I know the fuller story, that Richter isn’t the bad guy after all, and now that I’ve seen what’s on the other side of that room. Which I will describe in my next post. All I’ll say for now is that I’m very glad that I didn’t accept the false ending. Pursuing the game further has replaced anticlimax and disappointment with open-mouthed delight.

I have a vague memory of reading someone’s commentary on golden age Superman comics, in which much was made of a scene where Lex Luthor, in an laboratory under the ocean, suddenly remembers that he saw an enormous sea monster nearby recently and decides to use it to keep the approaching Superman at bay. That, to the commentator, summarized the old-school sensibility perfectly: suddenly pulling things like sea monsters out of nowhere. Mind you, he felt that the more modern approach, of giving the sea monster an elaborate backstory explained in its own miniseries, was even worse.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has a similar sensibility to golden-age comics. You’re exploring Castle Dracula and all of the sudden, apropos of nothing, you find yourself in a boss fight against a hippogriff. Why is there a hippogriff in Castle Dracula? I guess because the designers thought it would be cool. This isn’t a game that explains things particularly. It just throws visuals at you and lets you come to your own conclusions. The freakiest monster by far I’ve seen is essentially a huge floating ball of corpses, too big to fit on the screen all at once, that mainly attacks by shedding a rain of animated corpses down on you. Damage it enough, and you can knock sections off of its hull, revealing a starfish-like tentacle monster at its core. And now that I’ve said that much, you have as much idea as I do of what it was or what it was doing there.

It isn’t even just the creatures that come off as gratuitously inexplicable. It’s the architecture as well, which is more thematic than plausible. This is ostensibly a castle, and the outer sections tend to be surrounded by plausible castle exterior, but it contains a colosseum — not just a combat arena, but something specifically called a colosseum, with, furthermore, decaying posters plastered around its entrance, because apparently even colosseums built into inaccessible castles just kind of grow posters. There’s a section called “clock tower”, which does contain a room-filling clock at one point, but it’s in the middle of some longish rooms completely filled with grandfather clocks, their pendulums swinging in eerie unison. One imagines the architect (either in-game or out-) saying “Of course there are clocks. It’s a clock tower. What else do you expect to find in a clock tower but clocks?”

The thing is, I’m not really complaining. It’s clear that this castle is a magical place. One of the few drops of story we’re given is that the castle only appears once every hundred years. This game is supposed to be set in a break in the pattern when the castle appeared 96 years early, but still, the very nature of the place gives it an excuse to be dreamlike and phantasmagorical. Things that don’t quite make sense just enhance an appropriate sense of otherworldliness. Or so I’m willing to tell myself as I play.