Wherefore the Love for MetroidVanias?

Were the original primary representatives of this pseudo-genre ever that great?

A couple of months ago, after getting just ten minutes into Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (2003), which videogame historian Jeremy Parish has called “a strong contender for the system's greatest game ever”, I was confronted with a once-unimaginable impression: that I was playing a really boring videogame.

Admittedly, this is an impression partly informed by having committed multiple playthroughs over the course of a decade. No piece of media can excite forever. Yet this boredom was unlike the disengagement afforded by what I would term “comfort food media.” The time spent having not played these games for a good while seemed to have opened me up to a reality that, on some level, I’d always downplayed. With each of these releases, beginning with Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (2001), and concluding with Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (2008), I was chasing the high of an initiatory experience with the 1997 title, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. For how many other people, I wonder, has that been the case?

To this day, Konami’s titles modeled on Symphony of the Night continue to draw impassioned opinions as to their perceived high quality. The so-called, and phonetically hideous, MetroidVania genre is one of the most pervasive on platforms like Steam. Many people are, apparently, endlessly hungry to be denied a double jump until a certain point, to fill out a map as one completes a color-in-the-lines book, to trade out one articled doodad for another. When Twitch streamer Macaw45 broadcast a playthrough of Aria of Sorrow four years ago and found it unattractive and dull, the chatroom’s tenor turned to one of outrage and incredulity.

Ever since this game-type acquired its categorical status, I don’t think there hasn’t been a time when I haven’t been critical of it. It’s always been fairly obvious how the typical MetroidVania game, quite unlike the Metroid half of its primordial genetic make-up, activates and preys upon obsessive-compulsive propensities. It’s not as if the Castlevania series has stood apart from such propensities either. When it came out, even at the peak of my devotion to the series, I found Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin (2006) to be a dire example of this kind of neurotic, inflated, collect-’em-all design; while, although not categorically different, its follow-up, Order of Ecclesia, struck me as a slight palette-cleanser, if only because its castle’s relative linearity wasted little time on lock-and-key obstructions. Still, half of Ecclesia’s exterior areas were reskins of the other half, and its quests, assigned by a hub’s village-folk, were gruel-thin busywork.

A peculiar and, as the years went by, increasingly common characteristic of critics’ reviews was a flat and mild disappointment that very little about the design was fresh, coupled with the notion that one could not help but dole out relatively high marks on some basis of, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” One found this sentiment on display here and there as early as Aria of Sorrow, as with GamePro’s dinky review: “Aria is a superior GBA adventure in every respect and a marked improvement on Harmony of Dissonance. Still, it is another Symphony of the Night clone—if you’re feeling a little sick of the same ol’ thing, this game may be the breaking point.” GameSpot’s conclusion for Dawn of Sorrow — “[It] sticks close to the tried-and-true formula, so it will be an instant hit with anyone with an affinity for the sort of explorative gameplay the series is known for. While it doesn't do much to distinguish itself as the first Castlevania on the DS, the updated look, excellent music, and added controls help to refine the series even further” — reads as nearly the same thing as Portrait of Ruin’s: “Portrait of Ruin […] doesn't mess too much with the formula, but the changes it implements are good ones. It may be more of the same, but nevertheless Portrait of Ruin succeeds in rekindling old flames for Castlevania veterans and sparking new ones for people who are just looking for a great 2D action adventure game.” Compare this with Nintendo Power’s bottom-line for Order of Ecclesia: “[It] may not have a wealth of newness to contribute, but the Castlevania formula still works like a charm…”

After a while, these sound like the same-brain murmurings of a huddled group of poor souls, all bound by the same addiction. “Well, it ain’t the prettiest thing,” one grunts to you, eyes watery and dim, “but, hell! — it gets the job done. Like a charm. Like a charm…” Critical consensus is, of course, the norm among whatever passes for the review industry, but the unwavering continuity of this thought — that, with each game, things became more boring yet as laudable as ever — always seemed to me especially strange, since Castlevania has never been in the same category of “prestige gaming” like the mainline titles making up The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, or Halo, where the series-moniker, rather than the genre per se, is treated as an inherent mark of quality. It was as if the Primordial Gamer Hive-Mind, once enlightened by the abundances of Symphony of the Night, had determined that “MetroidVania” was not a pseudo-genre but an ontological item possessing an absolute objective value of goodness: a value which could, perhaps, be watered down, but which was always fundamentally, inescapably, appreciably “valid.” Thus, today: no less than five-quadrillion MetroidVania releases on Steam. A blessed people we are.

Of course, I’ve ingested this media too, and even with Portrait of Ruin (to date, the only Castlevania game I’ve gotten rid of) there was something compelling me to squander more of life’s most precious resource, time, over the course of several replays, despite my dislike. I think that, in a way, each playthrough (re)submitted the question, “Is this truly that unexceptional?”, with Symphony of the Night as the implicit standard. Perhaps, on the third completion of a given game, I would recognize it as a worthier follow-up to the Miracle from ‘97 than I’d assumed. Here, my mind and heart go to those folks who have, over and over again, attempted to find a secret essence of greatness within the Star Wars prequel trilogy, to no avail.

More than that: for me, the Castlevania series, albeit with faltering steps, continued to represent an uncommon emphasis on an atmosphere neither describable as “gothic” nor “horror”, even when accounting for either’s pulpier variants. A lot could also be said on how these games served as the entry point, and as a big chunk of the cultural and social bedrock, for some of my earliest and longest lasting online communities, beginning with the Castlevania Dungeon forum. So enduring was this foundation that it wouldn’t surprise me at all if various people who have only ever communicated with me on Internet forums regard me as “the Castlevania guy.”

In some very mundane yet subtly inobvious way, though, I think that these games stuck like they did because they were highly accessible both in their design and their means of being played, via portable handheld devices. Simultaneous to this was, and is, the fact that this very advantage of what might be called “playability” limited the graphical possibilities of one half of the bunch — the Game Boy Advance releases — and severely disadvantaged all six titles’ audio departments. While Symphony of the Night’s soundtrack, its greatest asset, had full access to the capacities of a CD-ROM, each of its follow-ups had to wrestle with their platform’s inadequacies. It was only with the second lookalike, Harmony of Dissonance, where these limitations were harnessed by composer Soshiro Hokkai in a creatively appealing way: by opting to almost entirely utilize the Game Boy Advance’s PSG sound chip. The result is the punchiest, cleanest-sounding Castlevania soundtrack of the bunch. By comparison, Hokkai’s few tracks for Aria of Sorrow sound porous and flimsy.

Another way of stating the above might be that Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, for example, is a fine enough diversion for the subway commute, as a replacement for reading while on the toilet, as a final bite-sized bit of entertainment under the covers of one’s bed. To be sure, these games served all of those roles perfectly well. I can recall nights during my years at college spent on the upper or lower bunk of a bed, plugging away another half-hour — and how these games formed a marginal thread from one stage of life to the next, a kind of virtual home away from home.

Isn’t something like Candy Crush or Temple Run an equally fine diversion, though? It’s a question which could resurrect phantoms of the mid-00s discontent within videogame culture, manifesting as the “casual” and “hardcore” dichotomy — but it’s hard to think of a more perfect example of casual gaming than Dawn of Sorrow.

Sure, it could also be said that Dawn of Sorrow and its kin were continuing certain traditions of 2D game design long consigned to the wayside. Now that we’re wading through a permanent flood of technically comparable products, however — Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth, Dead Cells, Blasphemous, and Death’s Gambit being several — you can’t prop these Castlevania games up on the idea that they constitute some “noble resistance” against a hegemony of 3D design. If these games are most representative of anything, I’d say it is the simple fact of their being Castlevania games, and the ones which, to many longtime fans, felt like the last genuine releases. Whatever Konami may have done since Koji Igarashi went independent and Mercury Steam tried their hand at donning the moniker, audience perception of Castlevania is that its purgatorial state has rendered it as good as dead; and, given Konami’s fall from esteem over the past decade or so, it’s unclear if most people would even want the company to make an attempt at resuscitation.

When surveying Symphony of the Night as a work of any sort of consequence, I think what we’re really looking at is the sumptuousness of an aesthetic effect. If, as I’ve advanced elsewhere, the game’s level design can be coherently distinguished as standing above the others’, this quality is ultimately in service of the environmental themes. The harder aspects of design shouldn’t be discounted — indeed, with level design it’s somewhat difficult, if not at times impossible, to separate the feeling and form functions; even the pure geometries of positive and negative space are evocative — but they’ve clearly never been what’s mattered the most; or, rather, their import differs from that of the staged-based Castlevania titles (which depend upon tighter arrangements to produce continuous knots of spatial challenges). This is evidenced by Symphony of the Night’s continuing pull, despite all of the obvious technical superiorities of at least half of its copycats, including weapon differentiation, boss design, mechanical precision, and alternate character modes.

The unsatisfying reality we’ve been left with is that a seven-years-long attempt by multiple teams to emulate an accidental paragon for the medium (to say nothing of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which, by its very subtitle, announces the intent to outdo its immortal elder with a sort of fatigued desperation) seems to have only made Symphony of the Night appear all the stronger, immune to these fine-tunings which should have rationally made it an archaic object years ago.

Let’s retire a prior pseudo-provocation: Dawn of Sorrow is, by almost any standard, a “casual” videogame, but it is not the same as Candy Crush. Mindless, obsessive-compulsive game design is everywhere. Still, people can and do make discriminating (this is not to say informed) decisions, and I just don’t think that folks would have as good of memories as they do of these Castlevania games, nor would they have gravitated towards them in the first place, if they weren’t, well — Castlevania games. Decor can do a lot to distract from other vacuities. Dawn of Sorrow and the others more or less run on their combination of accessibility and set dressing.

The problem, in this sense, is not just that the sextuple’s set dressings lack their forebear’s sophistication; it’s that they’re also frequently boring — or outright ugly. Between the three Nintendo DS titles, only Dawn of Sorrow’s starter area, the Lost Village exhibits a graphical craft on the level of Symphony of the Night which encompasses a whole place (perhaps due to Hiroto Yamaguchi’s involvement), with its use of chiaroscuro for interiors, absence of digitized photos, relative lack of hard outlines for object surfaces, and wealth of interesting textural patterns and minute constructional details. Order of Ecclesia’s own team recognized the higher quality of this material, too, when reusing the Lost Village’s tile-sets for no less than three of the game’s environments, which are otherwise almost totally unremarkable.

Very nearly everything which recommends the Lost Village as the cream of the crop is found in an inverted form almost everywhere else among the DS trilogy. Portrait of Ruin’s entire castle, which veers between the competent but dull renderings of Koji Horie (producer and background artist for Circle of the Moon) and the rest of the team’s hideous, mealy mishmashes of digitized photos and gauche original material, is an especially disappointing example. Meanwhile, each GBA title seems to possess a graphical trait that’s lacked by another, with Harmony of Dissonance perhaps getting the closest to an atmospheric balance with its few most accomplished areas and the furthest with its profusion of spots featuring conspicuously copy-pasted imagery, a single static picture, or just plain bad pixel-work for the backgrounds.

I think it’s worth hammering on this point because, even if each GBA and DS title is, as a matter of fact, a “Castlevania game”, featuring and sharing certain traits such as a kind of setting and kind of bestiary, I find it very difficult to think of any of them serving, just on a strictly visual level, as an entry point into what we might very generally call the “gothic mood” like Symphony of the Night did for myself and others.

To use one comparative example: although cut from the same thematic cloth, Symphony of the Night’s Underground Cavern and Harmony of Dissonance’s Moss-Grown Cave are yet very different, to the extent that I’d describe the former as an atmospheric highlight and the latter as a low point. It’s a difference attributable, in part, to the level design — but, as noted, the level design is bound to visual expressions. The natural parts of the Underground Cavern include a stretch with rising water and fluted columns, platforms which see-saw according to your position, a lengthy waterfall, aquatic pockets occupied by fish, a transition to an icy-cold zone, and a boat ride courtesy of a Charon analogue; but there is virtually nothing to remark upon with the wrongly named (there is no moss!) Moss-Grown Cave, excepting a portion of its ethereal variant where a mechanism crushes a monster, flooding a shaft with its blood. And while Aria of Sorrow’s variant is more diverse with its features and thematic development (the large room having unmanned boats float down various channels is a nice touch), the game’s overall extreme brightness detracts from, if not outright negates, the sense of being among a deep, damp, and dark location.

Anyone who’s spent time with these titles knows that there are more favorable comparisons to be made outside of this theme. Similarly, repeat players of Symphony of the Night are under no spell which makes boat rides or a waterfall objects of a fascination always equal to that of the first playthrough. Again: no piece of media can excite forever. What I’m putting forward here is something that’s again paralleling the “problem” of Star Wars: that the official continuity between works might suggest an aesthetic continuity; but, really, the through-line from one thing to another, the supposition that an equivalent appeal will persist as long as the branding does, isn’t much more than that — a supposition. The Devil (or the Dracula) is in the details, and on the visual level alone, Symphony of the Night makes its mold-casts most of the time seem like crass, weekend morning cartoons; or, to risk exaggeration, like the difference between Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens.

With these setbacks, the level design would hypothetically have to make more of an effort to pick up the slack; and, usually — regrettably — it does not. The sextuple’s layouts overwhelmingly conform to a type of design that I’d describe as “monster closets” (different from the same slang term some people have used for sections of the DooM series): box-like rooms peppered with mechanically placed platforms and haphazardly stocked with monsters whose function, rather than to enhance the area’s theme or engage a player’s spatial negotiation, is most often to take up space or facilitate grinding (depending on the monster type).

If there are any general exceptions to this quality, they would be Circle of the Moon and Order of Ecclesia. Comparatively thoughtful with its arrangements, and having less of disparity between the maneuverability of the player avatar and that of the opposition, Circle of the Moon has tended to be regarded as, by default, the toughest of the bunch — although this has sometimes been hyperbolized. And, after five games the hard modes of which did nothing except amplify enemies’ damage output, Order of Ecclesia easily outdid Circle of the Moon’s challenge with its extra challenge mode by also making significant adjustments to its enemies’ attacks rates and speeds.

But these gradations never quite help the games revolve into wholes. Circle of the Moon might do more to make you stay on your toes when, say, jumping from platform to platform throughout its Machine Tower; but many of the game’s lengthiest and largest rooms ask players to proceed past the same pairings of enemies to the extent of tedium, whether that’s the Audience Room’s Axe Armors and Devil Towers, the Underground Gallery’s Killer Bees and Man Eaters, or the Chapel Tower’s Bloody Swords and Marionettes. On the other hand, the taut situations of Order of Ecclesia’s hard mode only seem to more pressingly ask for level designs which do something other than just facilitate “pure” action. No matter the area, it’s as if a readymade kit were used to set things up, to the impoverishment of anything organically suggested by a theme — such that something like the Skeleton Cave, with its dozen uniform halls, is structurally comparable to a tutorial-area church.

It’s conceivable that there are some people who’ve read past all of these heresies and may now say, “Fair enough; but haven’t you ignored the real star of these games — their option-heavy gameplay systems?” The critical consensus was that Aria of Sorrow’s “Tactical Soul System” — the statistical chance that each defeated monster might relinquish a unique ability which the player can then use to some active or passive purpose — was its crowning jewel, and that this was only improved by Dawn of Sorrow’s iteration. As IGN’s review for the latter states, “The ‘hook’ of Dawn of Sorrow is the same hook that Aria of Sorrow featured: Souls.” Yet neither of these games do anything to elevate their sub-systems beyond being a kind of incidental flavoring. The core design is just too damn loosey goosey, too inconsequential, too committed to a maximum of accessibility. Salt and pepper will boost countless dishes, but they’re not going to do much if you’ve boiled your brussels sprouts to a toothless oblivion.

With Aria of Sorrow, what you get is an easy game that merely becomes a very easy game once you settle on one of the handful of unmistakably superior abilities — provided that you’ve acquired any. Alternatively, Dawn of Sorrow’s Julius mode, which replaces the main protagonist with three others, each of whom has a set handful of several abilities, makes the gameplay experience slightly more engaging through its restriction of options. I am not going to dwell on how the chance-based terms of acquisition for these sub-systems feed into the aforementioned obsessive-compulsive design; although it’s striking that so many people determined Dawn of Sorrow’s system to be better, despite its intensified focus on grinding. In that alone I think we find a firm indictment of a common critical neurosis: one which celebrates the wasting of more time on trifling excesses as a brilliant and logical evolution of design. Happily, Order of Ecclesia scaled these sorts of mind-numbing things back with its own sub-system wherein magic and weapons are the same thing.

If these criticisms sound harsh enough to make it seem absurd that I could’ve ever been so attached to these creations, I would reiterate the incredibly powerful imaginative effect exerted by Symphony of the Night. There are very few videogames which I would describe as having any kind of profound impact on my mind and life, and Symphony of the Night — in some ways, the primary catalyst for my two-decades-long involvement with architecture — would be one of those few. That being the case, I think it’s just as reasonable as it was unfortunate that I remained bound for years to its lesser-thans, hoping that, with each new release, I would at last be reunited with the “thing”, the sensibility and sensation, that had been lost.

In another as yet unmentioned respect, and despite the decidedly non-medievalist soundtracks, the sextuple contented a medievalist preference on my part; and I think that this orientation towards a kind of setting is what greatly influenced the discrimination of other people. Inadequacies aside, the MetroidVania series did definitively occupy a niche of its own: a locational genre based on the exploration of an enormous castle that dramatically modulated its ambient disposition by dividing itself into distinct areas. And when what you’re looking for is niche, you’ll take what you can get — as when, before I was surprise-gifted a PlayStation 3 to play Dark Souls, I attempted to make up for this unavailability by delving into Vagrant Story for the first time on a backwards-compatible PlayStation 2.

All this being said, while seeking justifications for this former obsession, I’ve had to contend with an inescapable irony: that, while the handheld format for these games worsened their aesthetic possibilities (whether visual or audio), it also facilitated a sort of experience that’s lost when emulating these games on a computer, or playing them on a TV screen — an experience best represented by a prior expression: “a final bite-sized bit of entertainment under the covers of one’s bed.”

A month after releasing a so-called Turing test to collect data on people’s ability to distinguish between human-made and AI-made pictures, the Substack account Astral Codex Ten published a follow-up which listed the data results and talked a little more about people’s ability to differentiate and the future of art. I find the follow-up to be most interesting not for the data but for how the test and its supposed implications are talked about using “neutral” language — a parallel to the ostensibly “neutral” composition of the test itself. Max Read has pointed out, however, using different words, that there is a semantic trick, and a subsequent flattening and false equalization of visual experiences, when we categorize each visual item as a “picture” to be ingested through a singular mediating format. Read writes:

…we’re not technically comparing these A.I. images against “human art,” but against (in most instances) JPEGs of photographs of paintings. Not to get too undergrad about it but the materiality of painting is not some accident of its being; its form, its texture, its size, etc. all carry with them meaning and effect. Compare e.g., the heavily compressed and blown-out JPEG of Ingres’ The Apotheosis of Homer published in Alexander’s post with the actual painting, which measures something like 12’ by 16’, in situ in the Louvre, and suddenly questions of origin and preference are very different.

If everything about a work like Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow can be easily demeaned as insignificant to the creative and cultural landscape, it’s at least possible to claim that, within such a small and trivial world, there is an importance to engaging the game and its kin according to their native format. At the same time, it’s difficult to explain — more difficult to explain, I’d say, than with the example above — what the difference here is, outside of the literal reality of, at once, holding the game’s visual display, its audio output, and the controller between your hands. Maybe it’s something about how the “small” quality of Aria of Sorrow — its fuzzy and tinny soundtrack, and its curiously snug castle, so neatly arranged and perfumy with its colors — is better benefited when it’s being transmitted in a similarly “small” way.

Is this, as far as handheld games go, an anachronistic position? It could just as well be said that, until the advent of backlit screens, the handheld videogame experience was a continual battle of legibility. What kid on the playground could ever quite figure out what the hell was going on with those LCD screen Tiger handhelds? Half of Circle of the Moon’s original challenge came from the game having such dark palettes that, to make sense of what you were seeing, the unpleasant presence of a direct overhead light was pretty much necessitated. Even so, there’s a part of me that insists on the value of having different channeling and conveying mechanisms for different things — the part that’s never quite enjoyed playing videogames on PCs or laptops (which I nowadays already use to talk to people, write essays, watch videos, and compose music!); the part that prefers to listen to a given album on a record player; the part that likes making shorter trips with a bicycle rather than a car.

By accident, I dropped and broke my Nintendo DS on the cold-black ground of a parking lot in 2010, and it only seemed to register as a mildly disappointing fact: “That was then; this is now.” To answer this essay’s subtitle: no — Circle of the Moon, Harmony of Dissonance, Aria of Sorrow, Dawn of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin, nor Order of Ecclesia were ever that great. And yet they’ve come to represent a certain dynamic — a preference-courting, promise-teasing, and mediocre collective which becomes incommunicably meaningful through the accumulations of — how to put it? — habitual presence. Surely all of us have things like this. The comfort of middling, flavored coffee sipped during one’s morning route; a sweater with holes in it worn every fall; the car without a functioning AC that’s been there for a dozen road trips; or, after all other lights have gone out, the taxis fifteen stories below are wailing, and you are beside a roommate in a New York City hostel — the glow of a tiny, hand-framed screen, illuminating a reliable, insufficient fantasy.