Raging Justice wrote:There's no challenge curve issue in Symphony of the Night. You never need to grind for any reason. Success comes down to using the right weapons, equipment, and spells.
Except some of those right weapons and equipment are random drops, meaning you have to grind for them. Or they're hidden or secret or revealed later, meaning you have to either already know about them which means you're using an FAQ or replaying. A replay is always going to be a different experience. And I do find that even though I've replayed the game ad-infinitum that the challenge curve is wonky. I can play with my eyes closed but I still have to grind a little unless I want to get annoyed (and even then it doesn't help with some of the obstacles in the inverted castle).
Raging Justice wrote:Everything works and nothing is frustrating.
Given some of the games you've complained about on here and the specific complaints you've had, I find this statement to be very bizarre.
Raging Justice wrote:The only legit criticism I've ever heard is the voice acting
Raging Justice wrote:Most of marurun's comments just sound like nitpicking. Alucard walking too slow? Seriously? He then mentions some tricky jumps in the second castle as an issue. Well, it's a platform game, it SHOULD have some tricky jumps. When you have to resort to nitpicking to criticize a game (as I myself did in this post) that just PROVES that a game is a GOAT. It's hard to criticize legit classics without just finding small, inconsequential things to complain about.
I never said the jumps were tricky as in hard. They simply take too much time to navigate and mess with the flow of the game. The inverted castle feels VERY stop and start in terms of movement. There's no flow to it. The inverted castle doesn't feel so much designed as it does hacked-on, very much unlike the regular castle.
SotN is a fantastic game that I have a lot of fond memories of and enjoy playing greatly. I consider the game a masterpiece of it's time, but I'm still not 100% convinced it holds up today against more modern games of the same type. I'm more likely to pick up SotN because despite a bit of jank in places I have nostalgia for it and it offers so many systems to interact with (even as many of those systems are completely unnecessary: I almost never use the transformations except for shits and giggles or to get past one of the rare barriers which requires them). But many later games of a similar type have much tighter experiences with more solid level design and better integrated mechanics. SotN revived a game type which was common on the NES but had fallen out of favor in the 16- and 32-bit era and that revival has had long legs. It is absolutely historically important. But would a new player enjoy it as much as the more tightly-crafted games it inspired? I'm not a new player, so I can't say, but I suspect someone coming to the game for the first time these days might not like it as much as I do and have a very different experience of it. And when you name a game a GOAT, you have to account for new players that weren't there then.