Castlevania 3: Symphony of the Night

After Castlevania 1, this is the second Castlevania I ever played because I didn’t get the chance to play the second chapter of the game which was released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System or SNES.
Castlevania 3: Symphony of the Night is my most favorite game in two dimensional, in the Playstation. When this game was released and I played it, it really swipes me off my feet. My teeth are grinding with excitement and my eyes were wide open with amazement as this game offers many innovations that will make Castlevania 1 seems like made in the Jurassic era.
Innovations include the protagonist’s ability to transform into a bat, a wolf, and a mist. He is also able to leap two times and many more. He is able to do magic too that is very powerful and helpful when fighting most enemies and bosses. This magic ability is deducted on magic points or MP and has the ability to restore as time passes so he doesn’t run out of magic power. The thing that run out of him is hearts which is the thing needed to use his sub weapon namely the axe, knife, holy water, cross, jewel, and many more. But this isn’t a problem anymore because he has a variety of items to choose from that can restore his health and magic power and even hearts. He also has a collection of weapons that has different ability depending on the weapon he is using. For example, the Mourneblade weapon is a blade that lets you damage your enemies and at the same time heals the character. Different weapons and items can be found in the game, rare kind of treasure in secret places in the map and enemies that have fallen will sometimes drop items or weapons. The background sound is superb and nicely done with an orchestra effect. The storyline is very good and I love it.
Recommended for those who loves art and adventure combine into one.

Castlevania 1

This is the first horror game I ever played because it has zombies, bats, monsters and many terrifying creatures in the dark that serve as your obstacles throughout the entire game. Castlevania 1 is first seen on the family computer. I really don’t like the controls on this game though, because the main character has limited amount of moves. He can only jump, whip, whip harder, do special tricks that require hearts to perform (which is very hard to get) and that’s it. The jump feature of the main character is not that high, and it is hard to control especially if you need to jump from cliff to cliff. I always ended up at the bottom of the cliff and dying at same the time or falling off a ledge over and over again and it is a very frustrating experience indeed. The character is so weak and only has whip that can be upgraded with another whip that has only an added length of one fourth of the normal whip. His special weapon which consists of the knife, axe, timer, cross and holy water are also known as his sub weapon. You can only equip one sub weapon aside from your primary weapon which is the whip. This sub weapons or special weapons do consume hearts though and are easily expended whenever you use them. For example, the knife weapon consumes one heart per usage and the cross weapon consumes four hearts per usage. This hearts can be obtained by breaking or whipping candles along the way. Most of the candles contain one heart each and least of them contain five hearts each. So you see, whenever you are in a boss fight, and you got low on hearts, you will have a hard time fighting them without the said sub weapons. So that is why when I played it on the family computer I only got up to level 2 stage and I got so frustrated I never played it again until its version on the Playstation portable (PSP) was released.

Recommended for those who love a two dimensional environment with a twist of a horror experience.