Why it's worth spending your lottery win on Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997)
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997)
I always said that if I won the lottery, I wouldn’t be overly extravagant about it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m gonna spend my millions, because there’s nothing I hate when there’s a massive EuroMillions win, €190 million squids in the bank, but the winners are boring. It’s always Mary (73) and Joe (75) and they say the money won’t change them, and they’ll still work every day on the farm, and all that rubbish.
What?! Joe, this is your big chance. You know your heart hasn’t got much pump left. Get out there to Vegas, and throw thousands of dollars on every spin of the roulette table. Keep the drinks and drugs coming, and even if you blow through a hundred thousand in a night, you’ve got zillions left in reserve.
And you Mary, it’s time you put your feet up - not on some old stove, but on a sun lounger over in Bali. An influencer in her seventies? It could happen, and it could be you.
You could ramp up your online shopping habits a hundred-fold, and have new packages and parcels arriving every single day without fail, give you something to look forward to that isn't cleaning. You might even replace Joe with a squad of chiselled hunks. And, of course, it’ll be margheritas morning, noon and night.
That’s a lifestyle change that even I’d hard to match. I’m terribly frugal, you see, and I love nothing more than watching the numbers go up. If I had one hundred million quid go into my account, and there was some kind of real-time interest counter where I could quite literally see the money working for me, I think I would watch it 18 hours a day.
This wouldn’t leave me much time for frivolities. I’d probably look up some kind of Super Premium Diamond Gold VIP ticket for all of the Formula 1 Grands Prix, including travel. I’d give the missus a few mill of course, I’m not that miserly. But above anything else, I’d immediately go out and buy a European castle.
Could you imagine having a castle all to yourself? Well, before getting into it, it’d need to have a few modern conveniences installed. Electricity would be nice. Sanitation, probably worth considering. A games room certainly, and obviously dungeons and hanging chambers for my enemies.
I’ll need it staffed as well - no problem when you’ve got a near infinite wage budget. But the problem, as always, is getting the right staff. You can keep your butlers and your servants - I’m after a batman. Several batmen actually, who exude excellence, can fix everything and inspire 110% confidence, all the time. One could be my cordon-bleu cook. The next, my chauffeur. Another, my sexual mentor. Oh yes, I’d be well looked after.
Just imagine the warm feeling of coming home blind-drunk to your castle, trying to get through the hedge maze, with a real possibility of dogs jumping through the bushes at you, Resident Evil style. You would have to be dead careful not to set off any of the deathly booby traps. In your drunken state, you'll need to steer clear of your lava chambers. And which of the 50 master bedrooms will you fall into and sleep in tonight?
Yes, how wonderful it would be. But a big luxurious castle is plainly not good enough for Alucard, main character of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Ever the lazy teenager (well, lazy tricentenarian, but you know what I mean), Alucard had been busy having a very long sleep of several years.
However, Alucard’s estranged father, who so happens to be Count Dracula, is terrorising the world again from his humongous castle, dubbed Castlevania. It’s up to Alucard to commit patricide and destroy the castle to put an end to his father’s madness.
You will have heard of the term Metroidvania. I remember being bitter that Castlevania had found a way to piggyback off Metroid’s unique genre. That was until I played Symphony of the Night for myself, years after its release. I had to download the game of course, as a physical, UK copy of SOTN is as rare as hen’s teeth.
Honestly, if you want a primo copy, it's definitely north of 400 bones. Not exactly chicken feed, know what I mean? Maybe one day, when I get that long-awaited lotto win. But for now, it’s a wee bit out of my price range.
Still, what I played on the PSN was a masterpiece. Symphony of the Night went against conventional wisdom of the time, that every game had to be made up of horribly blocky polygons. Instead it delivered graphics that are luscious even to this day. The spritework in this game is Walk Like An Egyptian-era Susanna Hoffs, probably my favourite 2D graphics ever.
Even better than that is the music. It’s yet another triumph for female game composers - for my money, my lottery money even, this game contains one of the best soundtracks in all of gaming. Step into the castle’s library section and you could be forgiven for thinking that you’re listening Bach.
Then you head to the classic Castlevania clock tower, and the electric guitar gets shredding. One overused track aside, the score is incredible. It creates such a wonderful atmosphere, putting the game firmly alongside Super Metroid in the ambience stakes.
The castle is enormous as well. As Alucard, you’ll be jumping, falling, swinging swords, equipping armour, battling horror-inspired enemies, using items, even turning into a dog, a bat or mist… and you’ll do this across hundreds of distinct rooms. It certainly dwarves Super Metroid in size, any Metroid game in fact.
And just when you think you’ve got to the end, you visit an upside-down carbon copy of the castle. There’s not much plot left at this point, unfortunately, so the Inverted Castle can be a bit of busywork by this stage. But still, just like that, the game’s size doubles.
I’ve got to reserve a note for the voice acting. It’s not as if the game is as story-based as Konami’s other PlayStation 1 masterpiece, Metal Gear Solid. But there are occasional scenes in this game with enchantingly hammy acting. I imagine this was a dry-run before the madness of Metal Gear’s story.
I love Alucard’s deep, baritone voice, and it was a pity that this was changed in subsequent releases. But then, when you have a high-pitched, almost incredulous Count Dracula shouting about a man being a miserable little pile of secrets, perhaps this change was for the best… No, I won’t have that: if you’re going to play Symphony of the Night, stick to the original, with its shoddy acting. It’s a lot more charming.
Alucard caps off one of the best games of all time by leaving the castle in ruins. Pity really, because I was eyeing up that castle for myself, after my eventual lotto win. Still, it would have been a bit of a wretch to move into my new castle, only to find that Frankenstein’s Monster, Medusa, the Grim Reaper and Beelzebub and many more monsters were all there waiting for me. Maybe Alucard, quite literally, is the batman I’ve been looking for.
19 September 2025