Let's dissect Symphony of the Night
I know we've hit the "turn retronauts.com into a daily blog" Patreon tier, but I hope it's OK if — as with our other plans and ambitions for expansion — it doesn't take full effect until February. It takes a while to ramp up into these seismic life changes, you know? Also, I'm still with USgamer until the end of the month, so I kinda feel obligated to make that my main focus for now.
HANDILY! The piece I published at USG today should be of great interest to Retronauts readers, since it involves a game we've covered here on the podcast (more than once, I'd say): Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. (That's a link to the column, by the way.)
This article is actually the first in what I intend to be an ongoing weekly column for USG, something I'll continue writing after I depart from the site. I'll be tackling a different game each month, and examining its different aspects across a series of four or five posts. Something kind of tells me that I won't be able to explore some games in proper depth with just four entries, so there may be some spillover here as well. I intend to alternate classic and current games from month to month; I'm tackling Symphony for January, but next month I'll be exploring The Last Guardian. Later this year I'll delve into Final Fantasy VII, Mass Effect: Andromeda (unless it turns out to be terrible), and who knows what else. I'll be sure to cross-link the classics from here.
Canny observers may recognize this as an offshoot of my old Anatomy of Games series; less canny observers will have realized this connection since I mentioned it in the column prelude. I sort of lost the plot with Anatomy of Games and put the site to rest, but I'm hoping this format will keep things brisk and more interestingly generalized while still interestingly analytical. Anyway, I hope you enjoy, and I will be over here in stunned disbelief that it's somehow been 20 years since I had my PlayStation modded so I could import and play a little game called Gekka no Nocturne....
