Castlevania: Curse of Darkness; or: It’s Just Like Symphony of the Night, Except Not At All!
Critical and personal thoughts on the last genuine 3D title of the Castlevania series
Released in November of 2005, Konami’s Castlevania: Curse of Darkness is a big old mixture of misunderstandings: misunderstanding your audience, misunderstanding the series you’re contributing to, misunderstanding criticisms (positive and negative), and just generally misunderstanding game design. Two years prior, and despite all of its missteps, Castlevania: Lament of Innocence — the series’ reattempt at 3D after its 1999 foray — suggested a sort of directorial rejuvenation for the series, acting as a decent beat ‘em up set in a castle environment where exploration was downplayed. Level design was the most common complaint: aside from a dearth of vertical layouts, rooms were copied and pasted and made to seem different by shifting palettes and the types or groupings of monsters. One might’ve thought that, were the next game’s team to worry less about sheer size, focus on making its places’ layouts as memorable as their themes, and nix the badly integrated explorative elements, maybe we would have something exciting, or at least admirable, on our hands.
Castlevania: Curse of Darkness was spat out from an alternate universe where players and critics detested Lament of Innocence because it wasn’t big enough, and where Symphony of the Night was adored most of all because there were familiars to collect and level up, and a lot of numbers dotting the statistical backboard.1 In certain respects, Curse is a confused videogame — it doesn’t understand what made another thing work, or malfunction, really — but, in other respects, it does exactly what it aims to do. Far and away its greatest failure is its flat, huge, monotonous landscape that bears closest resemblance to a musou game, were it confined to hallways and courtyards. Yet there is such an unswerving dedication to this monotony that it cannot be anything other than intentional design. Three-dimensional space is treated as the accoutremented, enemy-dotted line between one door and the next.
This puts Curse’s world of the Romanian region of Wallachia in a strange, unsatisfying spot, neither videogamey or realistic. It feels instead like a museum, right down to your inability to interact with anything outside of looking at it. You can’t explore the houses of Cordova Town; you can’t go up the little hills near the dirt paths in the Forest of Jigramunt; you can’t agitate the windows’ drapes lining the Abandoned Castle. You can’t even knock over candelabras unless they’ve been designated as destructible variants. This is a world of off-limits corridors, and you are its passive admirer, or detractor. The very sight of a staircase, a scalable tier, a depression in a road, anything that establishes the topography as something other than an eternal flatland with nothing to do but slap ghouls, even if it’s only for a moment, is a blessing.
For me, this raises one major question: why is there verticality and lite platforming in the handheld games, like Dawn of Sorrow, released the same year as Curse, while next to none in the former? Sure, by every account, getting platforming right is much tougher to do in 3D space than 2D space; but Curse didn’t need explicit platforming challenges to assert itself. At the very minimum, it just needed more than sequences of neat paths the structures and details of which are all pushed to either side, as one might do when designing a theme park. It needed noticeable constrictions and expansions of space — little obstacles like trees, boulders, or wagons, distinct path geometry, annexes and recesses that would’ve let you momentarily deviate from the main path while not having you enter an entirely new room. It needed an understanding that the power of a place is not derived from appearance alone.
Although critics and players observed these deficiencies in both Lament of Innocence and Curse of Darkness, the concept of a good 3D Castlevania was still treated by many as a subtle and arcane formula — as though all of the right elements could be there yet still require the mysterious, vitalizing touch of a master visionary-designer to be activated. I’d know, since I frequented two of the most heavily trafficked Castlevania forums for years, these being the Castlevania Dungeon and the (now long-defunct) Chapel of Resonance, and saw the whole gamut of opinions.
If you cut Curse of Darkness’ places in half, you’d only stand to gain something — a mass of material that could be somewhat manageably worked into meaningful space, or an approximation of meaningful space. In my first time through, autumn of 2005, I spent about an hour navigating the first area. This is insane, when the videogame you’re playing isn’t difficult at all and has no architectural complexities to speak of. Lament of Innocence takes a little less than ten hours to complete if you know what you’re doing. Curse takes between fifteen and twenty hours. It’s much bigger, but it’s a bigness executed under the impression that greater square footage is directly correlative with an increase of adventurous sensibility.
Your conduit for running, running, and . . . running through Wallachia’s overcast zones is silver-haired Hector, who has retained the ability to double jump from his console forebear Leon Belmont. This mechanic has no real combative/tactical application and is never, or almost never,2 demanded by the environment. Like the 2D games, starting with Harmony of Dissonance, continuously hanging onto the sliding mechanic after Circle of the Moon introduced it, Curse of Darkness has a double jump seemingly because the developers thought that omitting it would be a back-step. This is a peculiar view of game design — one which sees progress as linear as long as the mechanics’ quantity is retained or increased. This makes Lament’s absence of leveling up and its restriction of primary weapons to a handful of whips, one of which you use for the majority of the game, all the more surprising.
Unlike Lament of Innocence, Curse’s camera is controllable. You can better see incoming threats, whether they’re projectiles or the enemies themselves. Now lost, though, is how Lament’s fixed camera was often positioned far enough away from surfaces, or angled in such a way, to lend textures a handsome appearance and give your progression through rooms a directed flow. There is no equivalent in Curse of Darkness to the hallway leading to Lament of Innocence’s first boss: dim, agitated by a slight red glow, and echoing with the loud footsteps of a creature you can’t yet see. To me, Curse’s answer of giving over complete control of the camera is the easy but misunderstood one. Why not keep the fixed angles and have the camera zoom out for fights? And, selective screenshots aside, this isn’t that attractive of a game. Being able to get so close to all the textures only magnifies their muddy quality.
What was initially exciting about Curse of Darkness to many upon its revealing was that it would take place right after the events of Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse, and feature at least one of its protagonists. Conversely, what was disappointing upon Curse’s release was that it didn’t do much with that derivative material. Trevor Belmont is back, more gorgeous than ever, and entertaining to watch and listen in the melodramatic cutscenes; but where are Sypha or Grant? Certain visited areas do feel like analogs to those in Dracula’s Curse, such as the Mortvia Aqueduct and Sunken City of Poltergeists, respectively — so why weren’t those connections made explicit? It is odd that Curse of Darkness is set within a series that is all about obviously cross-referencing itself to give its world a sense of continuity, and is linked to one of that series’ most popular games, but somehow ends up being so self-contained.
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Why did producer Koji Igarashi bother to establish Curse as a direct sequel to Dracula’s Curse — Igarashi’s favorite Castlevania, as he’s said many times — if so little about it makes use of the prequel’s stuff? If Curse expresses any kind of admiration for a prior work (and this is said without assigning explicit blame to Igarashi, as was/is often done), that admiration extends only to a surface level appreciation of setting, tone, or atmosphere. Dracula’s Curse was the game it was just as much for its environments’ level designs as for their backdrops and musical themes. Curse of Darkness treats fictional worlds as enormous, wallpapered dead spaces where one navigates them as slideshows, passively delighting in gloomy fetish objects of the Gothick variety and periodically acting out violence for the sake of some interaction.
You may be curious, if you’ve not played it, as to how Curse’s replacement of Lament’s hub design with an “open world” structure plays out, and the answer is: not very convincingly. Each locale still more or less stands on its own; you’re just running from one to the next now, rather than returning to the hub upon defeating a boss. You can find a handful of side routes that link one area to the other (the Abandoned Castle, for example, can be re-accessed through the late-game Aiolon Ruins), but there’s no persuasive reason to use them when you have access to teleporter rooms (a feature Lament should have had). Moreover, the game is so bad at establishing a sense of individual or intersecting geography, thanks largely to sites’ multiplicity of interchangeable paths, that the shortcuts don’t even have the aesthetic function of explaining how one place relates to another, outside of a vague reference to the Wallachian map that hangs in each plan’s upper-left corner.
Nothing guided my anticipation for Curse of Darkness’ release as much as the promise of a soundtrack by Michiru Yamane, the singular composer for two Castlevania titles preceding Curse, these being Castlevania: Bloodlines and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. And, I have to say — back then, it really delivered. I even ordered a physical copy of the OST alongside one for Lament of Innocence. It’s difficult to remember precise moments from that first playthrough, eighteen years ago, but I do recall one late night and hearing Yamane’s theme for the Garibaldi Temple, a hollowed-out baroque-gothic complex flooded with rainbow moonbeams, and feeling a rush of physically compelling excitement when the track rolled into those recognizably baroque cyclical passages of fifths. Years later, I understand that the excitement derived from that very recognizability; as if, in its formal evocation of centuries-old pieces, Yamane’s composition demonstrated a power of legitimacy within a format, that of videogame music, so often thought of as lesser-than.
Today, it’s difficult for me to get enthusiastic about more than a handful of tracks from this truly gargantuan score: fifty-six tracks in total. Sure, some of the pieces are incidental blips written for cutscenes. Even so, this was a significant undertaking. Consider also that Curse of Darkness was released the same year as two other games’ with scores composed by Yamane: Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (co-composed with Masahiko Kimura) and Over Zenith, or OZ (the OST to which is nearly as large as Curse’s). The pressure to produce on merely the quantitative level must have been crushing. This is perhaps what led to a less experimental soundtrack, relative to the previous CD-based Castlevania game Yamane scored, Lament of Innocence. However, it’s just as possible that Lament’s musical inventiveness was a consequence of that general uncertainty about what making a jump from 2D to 3D meant after the N64 Castlevania titles.3 The newness of that transition, led by KCET rather than KCEK, did produce a variety of exciting results, even if the overall product was lacking.
Actually, I believe what we hear in Curse of Darkness’ score, in addition to an aesthetic orthodoxy (relative, again, to Lament of Innocence), is a Yamane-led standardization of musical tropes for the series. Instead of a strange ambient piece with sparse, nonsensical vox samples and no melody for the file selection menu, we’re given a classical keyboard and chorus piece. Take note, then, of the subsequent menu themes for Portrait of Ruin and Order of Ecclesia. You could also compare the standard combat themes for Lament and Curse: whereas the former’s themes read as weird jazz-orchestral hybrids, at times escaping even that stylistic designation, the latter’s are orchestral rock, and seem like deliberate attempts to reference or recall the only combat theme from Symphony of the Night most people seem to remember,4 much like how Curse’s overall design — its interconnection, wider array of weaponry, familiars, leveling-up, etc. — strives for overt associations with Symphony.
As a place, the Garibaldi Temple is a thematic burgeoning of Lament of Innocence’s House of Sacred Remains, but the impact of this plenitude can never be realized, constrained as it is by the utterly stock level design. Yamane’s track is quite a bit better than the setting it’s been matched to, yet there is a parallel between the two. Rather than the sharp, poly-melodic figures of “Wood Carving Partita”, or the distinct musical evolution of “House of Sacred Remains”, “Garibaldi Temple” opts for endless cloudy pomp, where no one part stands out from the other, and every constituent is swimming among a sunken arena of strings, choirs, and harpsichords. Again, like the area’s visual bombast, this could be a persuasive virtue if the track had “set-pieces” besides the endless zig-zags of pretty standard baroque passages.
If we’re to continue on this path of associations, I’d observe that, as the game’s settings progressively lose their veneer, so too does the soundtrack turn disjointed and assume a wearied blandness. “The Forest of Jigramunt” has a promisingly unusual opening that is in no time undermined by a main body best described as plodding; and then there is its environmental partner, “The Cave of Jigramunt”, an unbearably elongated and meager reformulation of Symphony of the Night’s “Rainbow Cemetery.” This plodding quality returns for tracks like “Cordova Town” — melodic quotations from earlier Castlevania soundtracks rise up as if on awkwardly isolated pedestals and then just leave — and “Aiolon Ruins”, the lopsided melodies of which, slightly enlivened elsewhere by the waltz rhythm of Aria of Sorrow’s “Dance Hall”, accrue dust in quadruple time, and is paired with the puzzling, singular resurgence of a motif used throughout Lament of Innocence. No tracks, however, disinterest or irritate on the level of an offense like “Infinite Corridor” and “Dracula’s Castle”: each hypothetically functional as brief novel sounds for brief novel places; each, in reality, a maddening fit for two of the worst designed and hugest places from the game.
Even the best tracks here don’t really sit among Yamane’s high points; but why ignore them? “Mortvia Aqueduct”, thanks to its rhythmic brevity, bouncy basslines, and vaguely oceanic feel is the most exciting environmental theme. “Abandoned Castle” and “Baljhet Mountains”, for being longer compositions, have a coherent sense of an arc to their durations — something that can’t be said for “Mortvia Fountain.” Boss themes tend to be Yamane’s weak spot, but the half-silly, half-serious “The Visitor in the Silk Hat” and vigorous, highly likable “A Toccata into Blood-Soaked Darkness” — marred by plain percussion and the strange lack of any identifiable lead instruments after the long intro — make lasting impressions. There’s also “True to Your Dreams”, the melodramatic credits theme employing tenor Russell Watson’s voice for operatic effect. For an anomalous lyrical finisher, it’s far better than “I am the Wind”, having a formal precedent in the rest of the soundtrack; and, as someone inclined to stand up for maligned lite-jazz, I can say that “I am the Wind” is some flimsy shit, as depressing as a meal of icicles and saltines.
But, all things about Curse of Darkness’ soundtrack considered, what makes me saddest about its role as a musical standardizer — qualitative judgments aside — is that it was the Japanese-helmed series’ death knell for environmental themes with minimal or no percussion. To personally consider Lament of Innocence’s music is to recognize the subdominant trend of relative quietness, and the in-game friction of that artistic decision: the player character’s combative motions swathed in a type of faintness. “Prologue to the Black Abyss”, “Rinaldo’s Cabin”, “Fog-Enshrouded Nightscape”, “Dark Palace of Waterfalls”, “Ghostly Theater”, “Nightmare Aria” — all of these, in their restraint, seem like calls to notice one’s environment, to linger and admire; in the space their instrumentation allows, suggestions of the castle’s own space, seen and unseen — enormous, venerable, and echoing.
When asked by someone recently if Curse of Darkness is good, I answered: no. But, I’ve played through the game numerous times. So, on a subjective level that can’t really be transmitted to other people by telling them what to focus on (although I’ll try to enumerate what I focus on), there is something here that — huh, I just like.
Difficulty isn’t what I go to videogames for; but what makes Curse of Darkness work best for me is its hard mode, accessed by finishing the game once and then inputting “@CRAZY” for your file name on a new file (the same goes for Lament of Innocence). The norm for the Castlevania series and iterative challenge has been loops: clearing the game once and then having it roll over automatically to a new game, whereupon enemies deal more damage and are perhaps more numerous and/or newly appearing. Although these adjustments have provided an extra challenge, the presence of new material, of differing enemies or enemy placements, has tended to be relatively minimal. The first Castlevania, for example, halts its modifications on stage four on subsequent loops. Curse’s hard mode is remarkable in that pretty much every area has been edited for enemy type and occurrence. It’s also, at least on some hypothetical level, the toughest of any Castlevania hard mode. Hours in, you’ll still be easily slain in just a few hits. Your curative capacity is strict, and money is tight. What all of this means is that Curse of Darkness becomes a sort of brutal dungeon crawler. The endurance which the level design, by default, asks of the player better matches what you need to do in order to survive until the next save point.
What it also means is that you might be motivated to more intentionally curate your familiars, called Innocent Devils. Normally, these critters are peripheral to the extreme, excepting a handful of spots where one’s ability is required for progress. On hard mode, having the right familiar in the right situation, using the right abilities, is an enormous help — sometimes, the difference between life and death. If I could retroactively magically redirect all of the labor poured into the Innocent Devils to the level design, of course I’d do it in a heartbeat; but the variety that effort produced — the physical distinctions between a Devil’s evolutionary forms, their skills, and the descriptions for each (two of my favorites: “A star motif graces the rod of this mage. Its owner dreams of one day becoming one with the stars”, and “Pure rage in corporal form, it is chaos with wings. Many find its anguished form hard to look at”) — has its place among the rest of the game’s marginalia. Without them, too, Curse of Darkness would perhaps be an overly lonely experience.
Curse of Darkness has something in common with KCET’s Nintendo DS Castlevania titles (most of all Order of Ecclesia), which is that its bosses are fun to look at and fun to fight, especially on hard mode, where some level of precise mechanical execution is mandatory. The downside is that returning to the game as usual after each can be especially deflating. Just as fun are the narrative interludes featuring some wonderfully on-point voice acting by, best of all, Liam O’Brien (as Isaac) and Adam D. Clark (as St. Germain); and, somehow, some of the subtlest facial expressions found on the console. To be sure, the characterizations are limited, caricatures more than characters, but what they lack in humanistic texture (something perhaps not to be sought from Castlevania) they make up for in flair.
Some people have disparaged the Lords of Shadow sub-series for resembling high-fantasy ersatz with weak doses of Castlevania jabbed in. While that is a fair criticism, just as unpleasant was the games’ relentlessly grieving tone, as if a suffocating sense of dourness were what the material needed for effect. Curse of Darkness’ tonal strain — reverential, obscurantist, and funny — could not be more unlike it. There is the rendering of Trevor Belmont, after we first fight him to no avail, as a near-saintly figure; the inscrutable, fanfiction-like logic guiding the major plot beats; the way Hector, as protagonist, slams between ridiculous shrieks of vengeance and introspective “Indeed”s. It is, all in all, maybe the best-relayed story a Castlevania videogame has ever gotten, and maybe will ever get.
And, for as often as Curse of Darkness’ visuals compare unfavorably to Lament of Innocence’s, its world does have an ambient luminescence of its own, albeit one thinned out by the issues with the scope and camera, and several stale settings. In a fashion seemingly particular to PlayStation 2 releases, scores of exterior and interior spots are clothed with polychromatic, sourceless lighting, such that a wall’s surface might go from a deep blue to a brown-green to a purplish red. Taken as a sum, Curse of Darkness’ Wallachia is dim and gray-faced; taken particularly, it is, in fact, abounding with colorful dispersions. Especially delightful for its brazenness is the pause menu/status screen, centralized by a pillar of neon-green stamps, headlined by a teal and an orange ocher banner, and itemized on the right by a stack of iconographic boxes. As coloration and organization go, compared to Lament of Innocence’s screen, it’s sloppy. But as a chunk of graphic design to linger in, it’s delicious, and happily recalls Harmony of Dissonance’s palettes — also directed by Takashi Takeda.
With at least one major transformation in store for my life next year, I’ve been reflecting more often on how videogames can serve as spaces for memory, similar to real-life sites holding moods and memories for each of us, shared by no one else.
For myself, videogames can be nearly neck and neck with music for being able to suddenly and potently activate the qualities of a bygone situation or condition — a time, place, and frame of mind which we wouldn’t have anticipated as anything worth memorializing. As I write this, Steely Dan’s 1980 record, Gaucho (as far as I’m concerned, the last record they made), comes to mind for expressing the lonely, unfulfilling, and dreary struggle of my day-to-day life during 2016 and 2017. I’d never want to return to those conditions; but there is a peculiar, bluesy pleasure to how the memory and music have combined to form a landscape which includes, but transcends, the mere emotional facts of depression or malaise.
Castlevania: Curse of Darkness represents something a little similar: my first semester at college — autumn of 2005 — prior to my transferring to a different school. Retrospection reveals this timeframe to have been one of deep depression: finding little in common with the university’s art program, being sequestered to the campus’ northern and most distant area, carrying on a long-distance relationship with a girlfriend who I was loathe to introduce to my family (and with whom I really had very little in common), and using instant messenger programs and forums for the primary sources of conversation. Curse of Darkness released during this time of alienation, and when I was most engaged to the Castlevania series. I dove right in, playing it on a small TV in my dorm room after my roommate had gone to bed, into the earliest AM hours, with a fan on and a hot-pot boiling for cups of instant chai tea. Similar to the game’s puzzling commitment to bad form, Curse of Darkness was, at the time, as an experience, unavoidably disappointing — yet exactly what I was looking for.
It’s been long enough for whatever counts as public perception of Curse of Darkness to have well shifted from the most tepid of appreciation to something approaching a nostalgia-warmed passion. The first results on YouTube are a couple of videos entitled “Curse of Darkness is the Best 3D Castlevania Game” (not the greatest of accolades) and “I Love Castlevania: Curse of Darkness.” Most of the people leaving comments appear to share that enjoyment. “I didn't know until recent years that folks hated Curse of Darkness. I personally loved it. Felt like the closest thing we'll ever get to a 3D SoTN,” one person writes. Another: “Curse of Darkness is so criminally slept on. The aesthetics and the vibes of this game are immaculate.” Still, neither of these video titles quite express what I find to be true: that I have a fondness for this game unlike the fondness I have for other inept titles within the series, such as its console forebear; that there is some weird, fitted relationship between the game’s hollow, meandering quality and the psycho-temporality it symbolizes that’s caused it to be wedged into my brain as a timeless piece of media.
It was about six years ago when I initiated a photographic project, inspired by a similar one for Dark Souls and its sequel, which involved photographing Curse of Darkness as seen on a CRT TV, with all other lights turned off. Each moment spent with this project — its fuzzy lights and recollective spots; its glimmerings within hazes of color and shadow — brought me back, just a bit, to those late nights of 2005. It seems that the game’s title reflects my connection to it: haunted, against my will, by an object of dingy, inky aspect. The more overt curse of Dracula — a years-long obsession with the series — may have lifted long ago, but its phantom lingers among the deeper and timeworn regions of sentimentality, perhaps never to be driven out.
Lament, rather boldly, ditched leveling up and restricted primary weapon usage to the whip.
There may be a ledge or two that can only be grabbed onto with a double jump.
Several of the tracks on the second disc for Lament’s OST seem to be unused pieces for an earlier build of the game.
As the constant, incorrect characterization of that score as “symphonic rock” attests to.