Deep breath.
Mon Mar 23 2020 Bamb00manLet’s go back to when this title hit America!
This is really the best game ever made hands down (90s), and this is what transformed so many other games to replicate its authenticity! And yet Nothing can beat it because it is what fans wanted in all the other games? they will never replicate it and meet its match. Even if this game came out on the current phones we have now, Yes I approve of this game no matter what.
It’s my love life and success I had as a kid and remembered all the sweat and sleepless nights achieving the most difficult of bosses and actually using my wits to improve my skills as a gamer. And actually studied and talked with friends about skills to use and actually learning spells through guides and handbooks that didn’t come out til new game magazines gave us hints and tricks to learn that YES more stuff in the castle was to be explored!!!!!! And yet. As an adult looking back at this game and downloading it made me look at my childhood and see what I have become today. Sure problems are here and there on this download and touching the screen and not enhancing the screen bigger and making the graphics a tide more tighter to today’s standards would help it. But I just want to say thank you for releasing this title to my hands. As I can see my inner childhood grow brighter!
Really fun game with a few flaws
Sat Mar 07 2020 Chainb0yThe game is fun, challenging, and best of all, let’s you skip the story to just enjoy the exploration and hunting. A few irks:
1. The save system is really weird. I’ve saved, chosen rather explicitly the “overwrite data” option, and still found that my game wasn’t saved. The continue option seems to work as long as the app isn’t closed in the background, which is fine as long as you don’t switch to some other task / restart your phone.
2. The touch controls are terrible, to the point that it forced me to get a physical controller. My guess is that this was just a straight port from a console (I stopped following console systems when everything moved to Call of Duty clones a decade ago) with little to no exploration of how to make it more touch friendly. There are plenty of metroidvania games on iOS that have figured out touch controls.
3. When you die (and at least for me, I die frequently) I have to sit and watch a cheesy screen that seems like it was drawn and written by a 12-year old Japanese boy (“let us go the night for pleasure, the night is young”) and you cannot clear it quickly. You have to wait like 10 seconds, just staring at that screen. Like, why? Get out of my face and go away. Let me tap a button to go back to the menu.
4. The menu system is pretty terrible (hooray Japanese OS, did they hire the folks from Sony to make this menu?)
Points 1 and 3 are bugs, IMO, the other two are just due to a phoned-in port.
Love the game but fix the controls.
Thu Mar 26 2020 Fury RoadI’m sure other reviews have said this but the game is a great port and I’m looking forward to getting into it... as soon as they fix the awful controls (or lack thereof). You can’t just slap the imprint of an old school control controller, make its activation areas hypersensitive and call it a day. The game feels clunky, unresponsive and needlessly difficult with its current movement system. Please add controller support as well as on screen customization and button mapping. The left thumb movement pad should not be fixed. This alone would infinitely improve the game. It’ll get 5 stars once they update.
Update: Still waiting for them to fix the controls. No reason not to given all the complaints.
Second update: So I realized they really designed this to be used with an external controller. You need to buy a Bluetooth controller and download an app that allows you to customize your controllers input and locations. Something like ShootingPlusV3. With those two additional times this game was a real treat. I’m giving it 5 stars now. But really, they should have said something about using a controller!
Making a great game slightly less great
Thu Mar 05 2020 Smokemonkey76Let me start by saying I love this game and I’ve been playing games a long time. It would have been great if the graphics were a little more detailed, especially when you have to read text on screen. That is a minor issue. The bigger issue is the control and placement. The direction control is to large and partially encroaches on the screen making it hard to see enemies coming. Simplify it by turning it into a stick in a circle allowing you to control direction keeping your finger down on the screen instead of clumsily sliding it hoping you stay on the direction pad. The other issue is the sizing of the action buttons. Nice to have a large jump button, except the others are a little small. It may work better to have four dual size buttons in an up/down/left/right placement instead. It’s almost like they didn’t plan for use on touch screen in hopes people would just play with a compatible controller. I honestly think fixing the resolution to be more friendly to the pixel count and cleaning up the controls would make this a 5 star game! I’ll hang in looking for improvements, but it is nice to see an A+ title make it to IOS at a $3.00 price tag.
BEST RPG/METRIODVANIA EVER
Wed Oct 09 2024 HumanusuallyTrust me on this, it just is. This was my first Castlevania game I ever played, and now the Castlevania series is one of my fav series, I’m already collecting all the old Castlevania games. The story is great, the gameplay is great, everything about this game is just no joke, hands down great. You just have to trust me on it. This game in my opinion has zero flaws, except maybe the older 90s look if you don’t like that I guess, but even if you don’t like the 90s look for some reason, it’s still worth it to play this game. I mean the gameplay is already incredibly long, but the fact that they double the amount of gameplay by making an inverted castle with a brand new map to explore, new monsters to fight, and more, the puzzles are fun even if they are somewhat irritating at times. One of the things I love most about this is that even tho there is a leveling system, you don’t have to spend time in this game grinding for stats for even a second as long as your determined, skilled, or both. Altogether great game well worth 3 dollars.
Great game, one problem.
Wed Oct 14 2020 NormalDiceI’ve been itching to play this game ever since I got into Aria of Sorrow, and this port of the original Symphony of the Night is amazing!
I will say that the touch controls do seem (like many other games with touch controls) difficult. They work, but they aren’t comfortable. Playing with a controller though eliminates that problem.
The one problem I DO have with using wireless controllers for this game is that the button to open your map is set to UP on the right joystick. The controller that I use doesn’t have joysticks (it’s just a d-pad, L/R, Start/Select, and the A/B/Y/X buttons), so it becomes annoying having to disconnect my controller to open the map from the touchscreen and then reconnect it to play comfortably.
The select button doesn’t even do anything in this port, and I know that in previous Castlevania titles the select button served the sole purpose of opening the map. If Konami could fix that and remap the map button to select, then this game would be flawless (when used with a controller).
Amazing game
Sat Mar 14 2020 Defcon106As many have already said, this is a great game and I was really happy to find it for 3 bucks. I use a ps4 controller anyways so this was perfect and the controller works real well. It feels like I’m playing the OG version but I can use the analog stick if I want (I won’t). The graphics all look the same, not sure why people need to nitpick a 20 year old game. The music is fine too, most of the Rome my phone is silent so who cares about the VO? I got rid of my PSP years ago and now I can finally lay SOTN again wherever I want. Seriously, it’s $3. If you can’t find than much money for a fun game with tons of gameplay, you probably shouldn’t be wasting your time playing phone games anyways. Maybe open a lemonade stand or mow lawns.
My ONLY issue needs to be fixed for me to give this the full stars it deserves. Give me the map when I’m using a controller. That’s it.
Edit: on the PS4 controller it is apparently using the right analog stick, not clicking it, just bumping it. So that’s ok.
Still A Masterpiece
Tue Mar 10 2020 NilesTheWhiteTailedDeerQueerThis, for a long time, has been my favorite game of all time. Castlevania is my favorite game series and I was extremely excited for Season 3 of Castlevania the Netflix show. Little did I know, to celebrate, they were releasing my favorite game of all time on the phone! As soon as I saw it I was extremely skeptical, but I got it anyway and I have to say, this has been my favorite experience with this game and I have been playing it non stop since I got it. The best part is the update controls (special buttons for combos and transformations) and the new menu screen which is very organized and allows for extremely easy access of everything. I haven’t had any issues with frame rate or glitches or any problems, really. It’s been a perfect experience and I am extremely happy with the purchase and whether you are a new fan or an old fan I highly recommend spending the money on this game and completing it, you won’t be disappointed.
Still waiting on a true remaster...
Mon Sep 28 2020 RadioMercThis is more or less the exact same game that released on the PSOne in the 90s. That's not a bad thing as SOTN is hands down one of the greatest games ever made. That being said it hasn’t aged particularly well. The game has always had some balancing issues. Depending on how you tackle it, Alucard can become godlike pretty early on and never really gets challenged. Especially once you know the boss patterns, many can be cheesed way too simply. More challenging boss battles and an adaptive enemy leveling system (hunting down the most powerful times in the game would be a lot more rewarding if you knew there where still enemies that could challenge you to use them on) would go a long way to freshen this game up. Along with some new items, areas, enemies, and updated graphics. Still, until (if ever) we get a true remaster, this is still the best Castlevania out there and having it with me at all times is pretty great. I never get tired of playing through it. All time great gameplay and the best soundtrack of all time.
Two last things...
Controls are merely adequate, and while not awful I’d definitely recommend a controller. Some fights really require precise timing and touch screen controls just make it annoying.
Why on earth replace the original classically bad voice acting with updated but still just as bad voice acting!? Get good voice actors or lean into the cheese and keep the originals.
Best game ever made - play with controller!!
Tue Aug 11 2020 ThechrisboltonI am a 36 year old lady who has never written a game review in my life. I have been playing SOTN since I was about 11 years old, and have bought it on every playstation it has ever been available, and usually go back and play it all the way through once every couple of years. I saw this pop up in my App Store and the bad reviews truly made me sad and confused. Then I got to thinking about how hard it probably was to play on a touch screen so I started reading these comments. Some wonderful person mentioned that they play this game with their PS4 controller, and I had no idea you could even do that. So I connected my PS4 controller to my iPad and who knew?? This is officially my favorite platform to play this game as long as you have a controller!! It’s smooth and clear, and I just thank you so much for releasing it here!! My childhood lives on...
![PSX Longplay [369] Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/5HnhPNS0rqM/0.jpg)
