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Castlevania Requiem: Symphony of the Night & Rondo of Blood

Updated: Feb 7, 2023


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A week ago I obtained the #PlatinumTrophy for #CastlevaniaRequiem and I wanted to share my thoughts about the awesome games in this collection. #Konami brought together two of the best games in the franchise, one represents the classic #Castlevania era in #RondoofBlood and, the other represents what would become the future of the series with #SymphonyoftheNight


SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT: Castlevania's Literal Game-Changer.

This game is no joke. It is a time-consuming undertaking if you go in blind, I was only able to get the PlatinumTrophy in less than 13 hours because I completed SoTN when first released on #PSX in 1997, and back then I played this game so much that to this day felt like riding a bike. I was my own walkthrough guide.

Specifically, the first time I played SoTN was 20 years ago and after all this time still blows my mind. The gameplay still holds very well and it remains a Masterpiece. SoTN was the first time Castlevania introduce RPG elements and changed the main character to #Alucard and it sure paid off tremendously!


SoTN set the tone for later entries in the series, encouraging the player to roam free through Dracula's Castle instead of linear side-scrolling levels. With an amazing soundtrack and challenging Boss fights, SoTN is definitely a must-play for any gamer.

No doubt what really made this game a big deal was getting to what you thought was the ending and realizing you were only halfway because you still had to go through the more challenging and difficult Inverted Castle, the inverted colosseum sure gave me a headache during my first playthrough back in High School.

However, even though more complex, SoTN is a game way easier than it's predecessors, which focused more on challenging platforms and surgeon-accurate aim. That said, it is a more fun experience rather than a maddening platform nightmare.


RONDO OF BLOOD: The Merciful Castlevania.

Thanks to the #CastlevaniaRequiem compilation released on PS4 I was able to play for the first time #RondoofBlood. It was great playing the game preceding SoTN and was very awesome facing Dracula at the end as Richter Belmont and realizing that's actually how SoTN begins! Seriously, the last minutes of Rondo of Blood are, frame by frame, the opening scene in Symphony of the Night.

I appreciated the fact that Rondo of Blood allows you to choose the different stages, which made it considerably easier than most Castlevania games in the NES era with the unforgivable perma-death.


Even though #RichterBelmont is not very fast, lacks a dash, and has no double jump, the game is very fun to play and provides quite a variety of difficult challenges. It is a hard game but in a good way hard, not impossible hard, more like a spicy sauce that actually enhances the taste of your food instead of killing helplessly your taste buds.

By the way, if you want to finish #RondoofBlood fast, just rescue Maria Renard in stage 2 so you can start using her as a playable character. Once you rescue Maria, select her on the title screen and you will finish the game in no time because she is SO overpowered that it's ridiculous. Yes, I did that.


Hopefully someday #Konami will stop being Konami and resumes in delivering more entries to the Castlevania series and other great IPs they own, like MGS and SilentHill but that's the subject of another post.

Have you played any of these games? Did you complete the map in SoTN? Because if you don't know the "Wolf trick", those inverted Caverns can be a pain.

If you read all these posts you must really like these games! Please, comment something below, because you are awesome and definitely one of my own.

Let's talk #gaming


P.S. Yes, I got the #PlatinumTrophy at 3:51 AM, that's the right time to go out hunting vampires... Or maybe... I'm a vampire myself.



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