What a terrific game. The best of the Castlevanias, though I haven't played the supposedly similar Circle Of The Moon.

This game took the theme and atmosphere of the Castlevania series and combined it with the gameplay of Super Metroid--a huge, mapped world that could only fully be explored through lots of backtracking as you acquired more and more powerful items (though, of course, you could cut straight to the end boss and miss most of the fun).

One unique twist was the reverse castle, which, simply being an inverted version of the map you'd just played through, seeming wouldn't be very entertaining. But instead the reverse castle was a joy to play through, not at all boring or repetitive. And of course, it was only there that you could fight the toughest bosses and get the best items.

While many people wax rhapsodic about the music in this game, I didn't care for it all that much myself. Atmospheric and nice, but nothing I'd want to listen to separately. The graphics, however, were very good; a simple, clean 2D feel that did everything right, without too much "flash". If this were a movie, it would be one where the special effects, rather than selling the movie, are totally unnoticeable and therefore enhance the experience that much more.

It was possible to play this game with the goal of exploring everything and getting every item, in which case dozens of hours were required; or to try and beat it as Richter, in which case you needed a lot of skill; or to do both at the same time, in which case you were insane (fighting Galamoth (sp?) as Richter... AUGH).

This game did have negative points. Way too many items/weapons were useless or similar. Yes, please, give me a sword with negative bonuses! How about a single-use item that des a tiny bit of damage? And the weapon/item placement was terrible. For most of the game, you could either (a) find items that were already horribly underpowered and useless by the time you could get them at all,or (b) not find the really good items unless you wanted to kill the same enemy 32745324 times, because they were rare drop items. You could use the luck code, but even so, this was the one place where SOTN's gameplay got really repetitive and boring.

Bad points aside, this was a stellar game, one that tried to be GOOD (and succeeded), instead of trying to join the (at the time) "new wave" of platformers going 3D "because they could". I've played through this game from start to finish multiple times and greatly enjoyed it every single time. I once read in my friend's copy of EGM (I think) a feature which asked people what five games they would choose to have with them if stranded on a desert island. Castlevania: SOTN was on more than one of those lists, and it's on mine.