Yahtzee misses another detail that makes identifying the health counter more confusing: You start the game playing as Richter, recreating the final battle in Rondo of Blood, since SotN takes place 5 years later. And as a nod, they use the hud from that game, that has a actual health bar. Can't blame people for mistaking the mana bar from the health when the very first few minutes and boss battle features an actual bar to measure your health.
As strange as it might sound, I think it was intentional. I'm not saying it was a good chose, but their was probably some thought as to WHY? Hearts from the vary begging represent "sacrifice" of will, Hearts for Alucard and Richter are used for the sub-weapons. The coders made Richter health Alucards' magic, implying where magic comes from and why vampires "need" blood to sustain themselves.
I could guess the blue bar wasn't health and felt really smart until it turns out the hearts ALSO aren't health and then I felt really dumb for feeling smart
I made the opposite mistake since even Castlevania on the NES had the common sense to use a graduated bar for health, not some nondescript number off to the side with some letters above it too tiny and faded for my admittedly horrible eyes to see at all without focusing squarely on them, even though it was practically a series tradition to use a heart symbol to represent ammo or currency or whatever other BS the devs had on their spinner wheel as long as it wasn't for health.
As someone of French ancestry, the opinions of perfidious Albion carry no weight, but that particular insult of those accursed isles beloved of Napoleon Bonaparte is evergreen.
I'll point out two things in the much-maligned Sega Saturn version: 1. The blue magic bar is actually red. So it looks even more like a health bar. and 2. Alucard has a third hand JUST for healing/recovery items. It's "helpfully" mapped to the L button on the Saturn controller, but there is no dedicated map button. To view the map, you have to get into the pause screen (which takes 6 seconds), then you press L to see it. It is madness.
@@Allerka I played the Saturn version in an emulator, I didn't know it was that bad on original hardware too. I didn't find it that annoying, but I didn't use the map much, since I'd already played the PS1 version.
@@henryfleischer404 It's even worse. During the Richter/Dracula fight, the framerate drops to about 10 FPS when Dracula transforms. Certain enemies/effects also do in the framerate. There's also a cool new load time between areas, which the PS1 didn't really have.
Well, no, Dracula can't very well heal by walking over food with his Feet, he uses his Teef. BUT! Did you know that Feet is Teef backwards? Just like Alucard is... OH MY GOD!!
I think Igarashi himself commented on the UI having been a place holder that was just put there with the idea of being finished later and then it never was. So from this the team figured that in the next game they should finish the UI right from the start, not throw in some placeholder or it might stay forever. He might've said this in a speedrun by Romscout in which the speedrunner even taught him some tricks. Edit: Seems like I misremembered. It was mentioned in a Devs Play Special video by DoubleFineProd instead. The romscout video is still an interesting watch since it has Igarashi present to witness his own game getting broken by a speedrunner.
@@prcervi I've heard of a strategy to make temporary solutions intentionally look terrible and broken, to force your future you into actually fixing them. For example by making the UI a bright turquoise square with Comic Sans text. No idea where I got this from, though.
Also interesting to note is that the mobile port of SotN actually features completely reworked menu assets, more in line with the series' later games. Partly from necessity of touch screen obviously, but interesting nonetheless with that trivia in mind.
The food mechanic was weird, but at least it was fun to eat peanuts. Had to throw them upward, step forward like 2 pixels, and then tap up on the right frame to catch them in your mouth.
The game was packed full of little details like that. It's like they finished it but still had a year left before the deadline, so they just went around sprinkling in whatever random ideas they came up with. It really added a lot to the game. Like, did we need "secret boots" to "discreetly increase" Alucard's height by 1 pixel? No. But it was good for a laugh.
@@ToyKeeper Or the Joseph's Cloak, which straight up let you alter the RGB values of both the inside and outside of your cape. Want to go all black while you listen to linkin park? Barbie pink so you can laugh and call Alucard a sissy? Go for it!
It is normally a heart symbol you read for health not a shadowy HP hidden in the place I think would be ammo/extra information... a gauge if often used as well for it at times
the glut of english words in RPGs probably stems from D&D stats. A lot of Early Japanese developers were not quiet about being inspired by D&D, which already had baked in shorthands like STR, EXP, HP, etc.
"Decorative english" has been a thing for a very long time, apart from localization not existing AT ALL to begin with, back in the days of having to fit all your graphics in a 32 KB EEPROM sticking to the latin alphabet was attractive because it's got a lot less total characters than having hiragana, katakana AND any special kanji you need all taking up graphics memory.
@@slothfulcobra A lot of classic D&D stats are slightly obscure/fancy words anyway, Dexterity, Constitution and Charisma and all, so they probably left them in because they sounded cool and exotic.
My first castlevania was Circle of the Moon, which I rented. This is important, because I didn't have the instruction manual to explain anything to me. So, I'm looking at the GUI, thinking that the Hearts were HP, but then I realized that the red bar would decrease when hit and the Hearts would not budge. My thought process from that point was "Since we have vampires, is this how much BLOOD I have left? And that's somehow separate from the standard health?" MP was pretty straight forwardly the blue bar. But you don't get a subweapon right away, nor did I realize that using the sub weapon cost hearts for quite some time. I went on to fall in love with the series from then on (until Lords of Shadow), but that will always be a stand out moment of confusion.
The crowning moments of confusion for me was my entireh Symphony of the Night first playthrough. No manual and on a PS1 emulator, playing it....was interesting
"Guess which of this is the health" I've never played castlevania, so I'll go with the circle that says HP. "Only stupid people would put it in this circle" Oh.
I immediately picked out the "HP" as well. But then, we were both primed by Yahtzee's leadup to look past the eye-catching obvious choices. If I hadn't had that, I probably would've gone with the heart. Why in God's name would an *ammo counter* be labeled with a heart? And he did have a point that the HP could be taken as saying "XP", particularly on a somewhat blurry monitor.
@@ChrisMattern-oh6wx >Why in God's name would an ammo counter be labeled with a heart? Just Castlevania doing Castlevania things, nobody really knows why they did it this way but it's got franchise precedent. Having recently played this on original hardware and a tube TV, I never once thought it could have said XP. The edges on the H get a little fuzzier but they don't change geometry and suddenly get angled. Even if you don't know what the UI elements mean, the game starts with a fight you cannot lose (if you die you get filled back to full HP by a side character with a lot of fanfare, you absolutely cannot miss it) where you accumulate heart ammo and get to use subweapons.
@@roguebanshee They're just talking about the Hearts. Since the prelude fight has a more intuitive HP bar, its very obvious that Hearts is not HP but is instead ammo for Richter's subweapons. So you take that knowledge with you into the main game. Unfortunately, you also take the knowledge that bar means HP, so it primes you into expecting the MP bar to be health at first.
Akshually, Kid Icarus uses hearts as currency instead of health. As you reference in the video, maybe it was more reasonable back during the NES era when “heart=health” wasn’t the real standard it became later, but by the time the Game Boy game came out it would likely have been very confusing. Thankfully, Uprising on 3DS keeps the heart currency mechanic while making it very very obvious that they do not in fact restore health.
It's funny what people fixate on, none of the UI things mentioned here bothered me at all but I always disliked how dashing backwards is slightly faster than just running, so the quickest way to get around is to face backwards and spam backdash. It was fun for the first 5 minutes but after that it's just a super tedious thing that is just effective enough to make me feel like I aught to be doing it all the time. I am SURE some people are going to say they love the backdash movement, and I am in favor of it being there for combat, but running should be faster for getting around the map.
Agreed multiple times over. It shouldn’t be the default for going fast. Boots of God Speed could’ve solved that, but they were exclusive to the Saturn Version.
Agreed, the UI never bothered me. The gameplay was too fun and engaging for me to even worry about it. Also, it's amusing to think that the backdash was obviously intended as a dodge mechanic, but it pretty much became the universal way to travel around the map faster. I've played SotN a lot over the years and never used it to try to dodge an attack.
Considering the many beautifully animated frames in-between you changing direction on your controller and the character doing it in-game (when you're currently walking in the other direction at least), it could've been balanced with that. Dash is better for avoiding attacks, but maybe you could have a "cooldown" for it, or imagine in older Castlevanias with bottomless pits, you could dash to avoid an enemy, but the dash doesn't let you drop down from a platform if it has enough space for you to DO the dodge and avoid the attack. But then, would it not activate if you didn't have space? Or would it just let you fall to your death? Maybe it should have a threshold where it doesn't go as far back, so you don't fall, but knowing if you have enough space for the dash would be about skill, requiring you to memorize with practice what's the space you need.
As you joked about how improving bad elements in games in remasters of games takes away from the game's charm, I immediately thought about the way you use items in SotN, so I'm glad you touched on that part toward the end of the video. I'm really torn on "improving" that system, and I think the way it's handled in the Saturn version is close to about as far as I'd want to go in improving item use in SotN for two reasons: 1. it'd ruin the Peanut item and the joke to using it, and 2. getting the Duplicator and fully exploring the Underground Caverns while minimizing backtracking by having Alucard continually throw Turkeys in front of himself to restore health until he later picks up the Holy Symbol to prevent water damage is really funny.
that kind of improvement would probably push up on remastering, which basically is just creating a whole new game, and with those it's up in the air whether the new thing will manage to recreate all the wonder of the old thing. Usually it doesn't erase the old thing from existence, but original SotN already isn't easy to to get and play (legally). It's a similar issue with the upcoming Metal Gear Solid triangle, MGS3 isn't very easily available. And then MGS Twin Snakes is a remake that's sorta been wiped away in its own right, with the original being the only one that gets ported to new systems. Weird.
And You Will be respected for it Because WOW that is certainly A W o r d I Mean it's No German Spelling But It makes my Finger's hurt looking at it Then again I'm American so it most likely isn't
Funny enough, America totally does a simular thing, but with Spanish, like "amigo", "mi casa es su casa", "Como estas?" Etc. Sometimes people just like saying things in other languages.
There's another game in that 0.1%: Kid Icarus. Hearts are the currency in that game. I'm pretty sure uprising made fun of it as part of it's 4th wall breaking, but I don't remember how. They got the UI right, though, and have a bar show your health.
The letters HP being centered in that circle confuses things further by being adjacent to the mana bar, making it unclear whether its indicating the number or the bar is your health.
According to a Japanese friend of mine, Japanese games use English text partially as a convention and partially because it's seen as stylish. Japanese has a ton of loanwords (the Japanese word for "computer" is コンピューター, pronounced "konpyuutaa" with syllable breaks before the p and t), and the roman alphabet is widely known, so it's much less of a barrier to entry than the other way around would be. As for the food items, if you put a gun to my head and made me guess, I'd ask you not to, but aside from that, my guess would be that earlier technical decisions made implementing them in another way disproportionately hard. "Hard" in software typically equates to "likely to introduce bugs", which would have been especially undesirable before games could be easily patched. (Even today, it's not unusual to retrofit an existing code path that's already well-tested rather than introducing a new one that would need its own testing and debugging.) That said, if my guess is right, that suggests some unusual or hacky decisions were made elsewhere in Symphony of the Night's code... which is also not unusual, because software is hard.
5:15 The strafefox video on the development of this game explained that basically the game was kind of rushed in its last cycle of development and they did not have any time to update that menu, so they had no other choice, but to use the one created by the programmers during the prototype stage of development.
Really, the menu layout is the only real issue I agree with and he didn't even mention the worst part of it, which is that they never actually tell you how to sort your equip-able inventory. You can do it, but it's very much an instance of just pressing buttons until a hidden menu pops up. I usually get halfway through my playthrough and then remember it can be done, and then spend like 5 minutes mashing all the face buttons in different places until it happens. It's entirely possible he never figured it out so he didn't even know he could complain about it!
ive never played symphony of the night but upon seeing that menu for the first time i thought "oh thats literally a programmer menu thrown together" ive worked on a game thats debug ui looks a lot like symphony on the night's stats screen hahaha
It would be interesting to have a Semi-Ramblomatic just talking about GUIs and what could be considered a good one. Legend of Zelda comes to mind for me. Top left is your health and magic, bottom left is your map, top right is your equipped items, and bottom right is your money. Important stuff at the top, semi-important stuff at the bottom, and wordless told to the player without a tutorial.
Like all games of its era this one came with a printed instruction manual that told you how it worked. One of the reasons that modern games have to rely on common design elements like the whole blue/purple/yellow items thing is because you don't get instructions any more.
Yeah, but how many eager kids actually opened the fucking things? I've had games since the NES era, all with wonderfully colorful manuals, and I only ever looked through one if I got stuck, which was quite rare.
@@Craxin01 I've had games since the N64 era and I always read the instruction booklet, both to learn how to play the game and also because they sometimes had cool artwork in them.
@@Craxin01 Not to mention if you rented the game, which was a huge part of the videogame market back then, and you only had some text file crappy basic controls with blurb on the rental box.
@@Craxin01 Aye. I'd always read the manual during the car ride home from buying/renting the game. It was the next best thing to being able to play the game immediately.
Yes, that is pretty much why japanese culture throws in english. They had to learn it from terrible english classes so they might as well use it. Though I think in the case of gui's it's also because english text requires soooo many less pixels to show, especially when abbreviating. Even the simple characters that aren't actual kanji use like twice the resolution to be readable.
But also represent (roughly) twice the letters, and katakana at least is fairly readable at typical 8-bit resolutions. Most games in the early days had the opposite problem - localizers having to stuff four syllables of kana into four letters of English, and if you've played the original Final Fantasy 1 for example, this rarely went well.
My favorite tidbit about using food items to recover health is that when you "equip" peanuts and press the button, a peanut is thrown into the air. You have to have Alucard walk under it, and press 'Up' to eat it as it falls back down. All for an absolute pittance of HP recovered too.
It recovers the same amount as a normal health potion, so I would call that a pittance. You DO have to hit the peanut exactly on alucard's head though. What's even funnier is if you do pull that off and get the 50 rather than the 1, he pumps his fist in victory.
Even as a kid, I thought the HP was represented with numbers because of the non-linear nature of the game. Alucard doesn't die from making 4-6 mistakes like Richter Belmont. Alucard typically dies from getting nicked down while exploring too carelessly, and often has to judge his numbers and do risk assessment on what section of the castle lies ahead. They might've wanted players to be more careful about exactly how much health they had. Not that a bar would've prevented this, mind you. This only gets post-modern when you've played the game enough to just know the layout of the castle, so that "exploration-survival" element disappears.
Let's not forget a bar is only truly useful if the numbers remain small. When you start getting up there and your health goes from 80-100 to 500-750, then that bar becomes exceedingly meaningless.
6:13 Yeah pretty much. Many japanese people just think it's cool, like your example of french but also like how many from the west like the look of chinese characters
I can say even as a kid in the NES era, the hearts as weapon energy in Castlevania 1 made no sense. Many other NES games used hearts as health pickups at that point.
I like to think that in the mirror universe the mustached Yahtzee is arguing the opposite point. He's reminiscing how much he misses HP being tracked in how full an orb is.
I was wondering if someone would ever bring up the food system. In a game where running into an enemy while at low HP is almost certain death, you wonder why potions are immediate, but food is not. REALISM!
But then you have to make an argument of Alucard picking up anything by just walking over it. Something old as time when it comes to video games. SotN did it right by making some of the food interesting and only because you throw it. My favorite is the peanut where you toss it straight into the air. You need to get under it and hold up to catch it in your mouth.
I just think in-combat versus out-of-combat healing. It makes sense to me! Potions are rare, saved for bosses and emergencies. If you're traveling and need some insurance to get to the next save point, start eating those 15 cheese wheels.
The number is much more important in my view than having a bar. It's harder to estimate how many hits you can take based on how much of the meter vanishes, but if you took 32 damage from a monster you know 65 will allow you two more hits before you're in kill range.
tl;dr: the U.S. kicked Japan's butt twice, and Japanese culture sorta goes by the rule "if they beat you, copy them" so they have a lot of English loanwords. Japan's tendency to borrow English words is mostly due to three major events: the Sakoku, in which Japan isolated itself from essentially the rest of the world from 1603 to 1868, and (United States) Admiral Perry's expedition to Japan, which basically ended with "open the country. stop having it be closed." thanks to the fact that he had very big ships with very big guns. We'll get to the third in a bit. So there were several very important (from a technological, sociological, scientific, etc.) centuries of world progress that Japan sorta missed out on, and then they tried to play catch-up when they realized that a (relatively weak) foreign country was able to force them into some extraordinarily unfavorable treaty terms due to the fact that katana aren't nearly as useful against cannons and Gatling guns as anime would have you expect. So, after a bit of good, old-fashioned revolution (which was the sorta stupid kind, in that it overthrew a military dictatorship and restored the Emperor), Japan needed to modernize -- and who better to emulate than the people who just made them look like complete asses (and their mother country, England)? So Japan imported every piece of technology, scientific knowledge, and political ideology (hello ethnocentric imperialism) they could get their hands on, and most of it came with an English name attached (since inventing new words is generally more work than anyone wants to do). (Side note: these much older concepts tended to get kanji -- Chinese characters used for Japanese -- assigned to them. I mention this because the older name for the U.S. is 米国 -- beikoku -- which literally means "rice country". Japan calling another country "rice country"... yeah) So yeah, there's lots of older things that have English loanwords. THEN, all that imperialism led to a bit of a war... a World War... the second one (Japan technically helped the allies in WWI, if by "helped" we mean conquered German overseas territories). I assume I don't need to explain WWII, so that ended with Japan being occupied by the U.S. for sevenish years. The U.S. was surprisingly nice during this time (compared to what the USSR did to the places it occupied), so the Japanese ended up deciding to keep borrowing the U.S.'s culture/tech/etc. without all that British baggage. So that led to EVEN MORE cultural exchange in English -- especially in regards to media, which most of the world has to put up with but Japan actually enjoys -- so not only did various concepts and technologies keep being named with English loanwords, a lot of slang ended up being derived from English. Combine all that with the fact that Japanese's THREE writing systems are not sufficient when it comes to writing foreign words, so they just said "to hell with it, we can have a fourth" and took the Latin alphabet (called romaji), and the fact that every Japanese student takes at least six years of English (though most can't speak it -- it's not a very good program), and around 90% of loanwords in Japanese (not including Chinese words from centuries ago, which would be like including Old Norse as English loanwords) are English, totaling about 15% of the total language (and more in regards to commonly used words). For context, English is about 30% French loanwords (they just tend to not sound very French anymore). (This is massively oversimplified and is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it's accurate enough)
this is the most 100 IQ video i've ever watched. thank you for padding the bell curve really, i say "watched," but i should be saying "clicked off of," because there's nothing you could possibly say to convince me you don't have a significant portion of your brain missing either you've never played another castlevania game before in your life, or you're being intentionally obtuse. hearts have been used for the sub-weapon since before you had to append the 1 to Castlevania 1 in order to know which one you're referring to. if you couldn't tell your HP was the number that quite literally had HP written right above it, which the damage numbers went to every time you got hit, your parents were most likely related to each other. or maybe the fact that the gigantic blue bar staying at full despite you getting hit a dozen times should have clued you in, at some point, that it's not the health bar. after writing this, i watched 6 and a half minutes of the video, and the script genuinely reeks of ChatGPT. and that's not to say it is, in fact, i doubt it is. it's just low-brow Bri'ish humour that falls completely flat when the viewer is actually a sentient being who is aware that everything you're saying is complete made-for-content nonsense. but that's not a problem considering the average TH-cam viewer is a soulless clump of cells reacting to the stimuli placed before it
As someone trying to learn Japanese... the constant use of English words seems to stem from them (and other Asian countries) thinking that speaking English makes someone smart. To be fare, the opposite is a trope of Western media as someone whipping out some Chinese or Japanese is also a sign of intelligence. Which might have something to do with us not being able to read Chinese (kanji) characters and them not being able to pronounce half our words. We also use each other's written language as decoration to the amusement of anyone who understands the gibberish or naughtiness that someone is proudly displaying on their body.
I found the health thing particularly annoying because there was't even much clue if it was a good number or bad number. Most other games using a number for health would at least give you a 13/15 or 13/100 rather than just 13 health. A vampire who feeds through foot-mouths sounds like an old straight-to-video parody-horror.
I just finished Symphony of the Night yesterday and as someone who was born years after it released it really suprised me how well it holds up (other than the baffling UI and some of the bosses).
It _is_ a masterpiece, but also the gaming industry collectively decided it was the gold standard of 2D Metroidvanias (half the origin of the genre's name, in fact) so it's what every Metroidvania since aims for. Yahtzee also had a Zero Punctuation retro review of it years ago that noted it came out while everyone else was taking advantage of the PS1 hardware and disc space to make primitive 3D polygon games that are largely forgotten, while SotN is basically a throwback to the era of 16-bit platformers, but using the new hardware to really polish the platforming mechanics and pixel art to a higher form.
@@digitaljanusI've moved onto Aria of Sorrow now and it's crazy how much literally every metroidvania basis itself off of these games, I suppose it's in the name but from the power ups, the bosses, the shadow doors (looking at you Hollow Knight), and the enemies. They were really ahead of their time. So far (53% completion) i think AoS is quite lacking in music and overall aesthetic compared to SoTN. All the areas feel very generic when they don't have that gothic vibe and music. I miss my backdash cancels too.
Warms my heart that old games are not forgotten by the younger generation. Even though I am sure you can spot the flaws all over and don't have that nostalgia goggles fogging up the reality of old games. Personally I can barely appreciate games before my time, namely 80s Atari games, they are almost all terrible, but the arcade games of the era are great.
I think it’s kind of an unbalanced mess with lots of worthless areas, especially in the inverted castle. The game constantly gives you items and gear that you often will never use, something that is sadly also present in the Souls games. I also don’t know if it’s hilarious or sad how easy it is to break this game and defeat most bosses in under 5 seconds. Personally I’ve always preferred Metroid to the Igavanias, especially Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission.
Hey Second Wind. Gamespot just ditched their "expert reacts" series, ending their partnership with Jonathan Ferguson of the Royal Armouries. It might not be Second Wind's kind of thing as it's not particularly creative but it was a series with a strong following with Jonathan becoming quite a beloved personality through it.
2:03 just a little footnote on ui for fighting games, notice how remaining health is in the center and damage is at the sides. This is so that the lower the life you have, it gets closer to the center to make it easier for your eyes to see both the remaining time and your opponent's health in comparison to your health. It's a very simple way of giving the most amount of information on the two elements needed for a round win or loss (health and time). Street fighter 1, mortal kombat (1992) and infamously Shaq Fu don't do this basic thing and makes their UI's so much worse.
fun thing we found out from iga and curry themselves, the pause menu was so unembellished is because it was the dev placeholder, later games youd get the fancy pause menu as intended
To be fair, the second you get hit, which part of the UI is your health becomes very obvious very quickly. It's the only thing that changes when you get hit. That does leave players unfamiliar with Castlevania games left baffled for a while yet as to what the heck the hearts are, but I would argue that's less a problem with the UI itself and more a general problem of "why the heck would you ever use hearts to represent weapon ammunition, you weirdo." Also, I'm not sure I agree with Yahtzee that health is better represented as a bar rather than a number. Enemies in SOTN do consistent damage every time they hit you, so knowing whether you are at 20 or 21 health can be very relevant when you know the enemy type near you always does 20 damage, for instance. Of course, you could always do both (like Aria of Sorrow does), but that does take up more space and imo isn't really necessary. Meanwhile, I think the mana bar is a bar because it constantly regenerates, so knowing the precise number it's at isn't terribly important and imo it's less distracting having a bar that gradually fills rather than a constantly changing number. EDIT: Also, the fact that the mana bar is so prominent on the UI despite spells being a relatively minor part of the game imo adds to the coolness factor once you do discover spells. It's like "oh, THAT'S what the big glowing blue bar is. I was starting to wonder if it was just decoration."
Ok my first SOTN playthrough (like 2 years ago) I literally had to Google why my health wasn't going up despite collecting hearts. I was able to figure out the big number was my health pretty quickly by getting hurt a lot, but the subweapon mechanic isn't very intuitive
On the subject of bars vs. numbers, one other thing to keep in mind is that some things are best engaged with as a sort of formless quantity (usually when you need to make snap decisions based on roughly how much of something there is) while others are best engaged in as discrete numbers (usually when you either need to engage with them thoughtfully, such as comparing two numbers or planning how to use a finite resource, but also when you want to create a satisfying feeling of progression to something good that mostly goes up like XP or money). Of course, this only exacerbates the complaint because even aside from relative importance, health would have been better served by the bar and mana by the number. Hilariously, even the text could have been left unaltered because at that resolution it could just as well be read as "MP" instead of "HP"
Don't forget that the items to see enemy names and damage dealt are adjacent to the game's critical path but not ON it. So if you didn't know better you could play the entire game without even knowing those features exist.
I mean, if you're playing a Metroidvania and remain only on the critical path, you're quite frankly just playing the game wrong. May as well try to beat Spyro without gliding and saying it's unfair how some items are out of your jumping range.
@ 1:45 Um... the part that clearly says HP. I get what you are saying but that is kinda nit picky. Maybe it came more easily to me from playing RPGs. And I never realized that was a magic bar, i thought that was a soul steal bar. *shrugs*
Before the video: It's the number as a health indicator rather than a bar right? After the video: It was indeed that, among other stuff In any cases, pass a nice day/evening, Yatzee
Symphony completely passed me and alot of people by, despite loving Castlevania series especially 4 on SNES. During that mid 90s era, almost nobody was investing money in 2D platformers because everyone wanted to see what wild 3D games the new consoles could do. We'd had decades of 2D games already and even if the animation was smooth, it couldn't override the outrageous hype for 3D which likely resulted in Symphony having poor sales for most gamers but becoming a cult classic, making it quite rare.
I rented Symphony for the hell of it one day,thinking it was going to be a normal Castlevania platformer. As soon as I started playing it I was pleasantly surprised,as a couple years earlier I was floored by Super Metroid. I wish SOTN sold better.
It's funny because it's basically just SOTN that has a health counter. Every Classicvania has a health bar and a heart count, and every Igavania after SOTN had a health bar and a heart counter and then a mana or stamina bar. SOTN is the only one.
I think Iga confirmed that it was one of several casualties of rush to get the game out the door along with the inverted castle's pacing (or lack there of). The UI was just sorta thrown together into something technically functional. They never got the chance to go back through and polish it.
Small bit about the food, I think they were trying to emulate picking up a wall chicken in older Castlevanias? you could find food items in the level and walk into them to heal you. I guess in SOTN it's like, well now you can take these items with you, so you can spawn them anywhere you want!
5:15 I have long been irrationally trigged by the way the stats on the left overlap the character portrait. It just looks so SLOPPY. Hell, there's even ways of making overlapping elements look cool, but this sure ain't it.
Alucard's portrait covering STR is so funny, because there's room for his entire portrait above and it's clear the designers just moved his portrait down so his face wouldn't get cut off by CRTs
That last bit about absorbing nutrients through feet reminded me of another very '90s IP: "Animorphs". The Andalites, the aliens behind the morphing power, (but not that *other* even more '90s IP, "Power Rangers,") the main characters use, are basically blue centaurs with no mouths that absorb nutrients through their hooves, so they basically eat while running. They don't actually *taste* anything though, which is notable when "Ax," the younger brother of the alien who gave the main characters the morphing power, joins them, gets a human form and hilariously loses. his. *shit.* from his newfound sense of taste! It's like going from "Spock" to "The Great Cornholio". Cinnabon was his absolute favorite, but he was even trying to eat cigarette butts before the others had to drag him out of the mall before he continues making a scene.
I've watched YZ for over a decade and I never knew that when he said "GUIEWY" it was an acronym of G.U.I. for Graphical User Interface. I thought it was just a made up, placefiller, word which was refering to UI.
@@TheGoukaruma I've heard "User Interface" but never "Graphical User Interface". The "Graphical" part seems redundent, to me. Also because Yahtz sounds like he is saying "GUIEWY" which sounds close to "Gluey" which would be a good "placefiller" word. I remember Yahtzee used to pronounce the X.B.L.A. (X Box Live Arcade) as "The Kesblahh~", which was funny by it being an acronym prounanced as the word, which was obvious because of the context of him talking about it.
Eh, it was their first in the line of "IGAvania" / "metroidvania" Castlevanias. I chalk any weirdness up to it being a strange new evolution. Further entries corrected any little fiddly bits after all. Also, the original EN voice acting was great, I'll brook no complaints over it.
I never knew that the health thing was A and not B, as I initially believed. BTW, this brings back memories like when Alucard eats food that is anachronistic, such as the hamburgers, New York-style pizza and hot dogs. And the weirdest part of all... going to the confession booth sometimes earns you sparkling grape juice that is modified from the Japanese version's wine! Strange. Now I'm so getting MindCop on Switch sometime. It's going on my wishlist.
And you didn't even touch on the insane inventory management, where everything you pick up is just organized in a giant list completely haphazardly, or the fact that if you die the game shows a "Game Over" screen and then dumps you back to the main menu. I've been hoping for a SOTN remaster for 15 years *just* to fix these issues. Just give me the same game, with widescreen support and a fixed UI/inventory management screen that doesn't dump me back to the main menu if I die, and you can HAVE ALL MY MONEY.
I can actually explain the Pause Menu. The Pause Menu for SOTN is actually what they used in the development build They didn't have enough time to implement the actual menu they wanted to use which would have been closer to the file select menu on gold-bordered window panes. The menu panes can be found in the sprite sheets and even icons for how they planned on denoting certain things. I'm not saying the actual menu they planned would have been better, but it would have been different.
I played the absolute candlesticks outta this on the 360, version. UI seemed fine to me, the only problem I ever had was getting that final 0.1 percent map exploration.
I didn’t really care for Symphony of the Night while growing up. But when I watched a friend play it I was drawn in by the overacting of the voices used for the characters. Now I enjoy it for that reason only, still fun gameplay but the campiness is why I play.
As someone that played SoTN back when it first came out on a CRT I can confirm I didn't even know the letters above the HP bar said HP until many years after when I played it on a higher definition TV. And even then I still had to kind of squint to see it. I think it was more visible in the manual.
The sega saturn version actually had a third equipment slot used exclusively for items. Food, potions, and I think even consumable weapons see way more use because you don’t have to do as much menu navigation to use them. The compromise is that the map is only accessibly through the pause screen, which might’ve been a worthwhile trade-off if not for the terrible load times of the version
Igarashi has admitted that the interface was a placeholder and they just forgot to make the real version until they'd ran out of time to fix it. (Another fun fact related to this: all the fancy animations in the shop menu were intended to be randomly picked each time you opened the pause menu, but "taking a screenshot" of the game for the effect texture took too long and made the experience unbearable)
2:07 - "It's better practice in interface design to represent the most crucial numbers, such as health, in some kind of easily readable visual form like a bar, as numbers are less immediately intuitive, especially in high-stress situations." This is very true, and bars have one very important trait that a single number doesn't have which is chiefly responsible for that intuitiveness; they show the relationship between the current _and maximum_ levels for a value. For example, a bit earlier in this vid I can see you have 83 HP, and... what does that mean? If your max is ~100 health or less then, that's fine, you haven't taken many hits and probably shouldn't be that concerned. But maybe your max is several hundred/thousand/million, you're one or two good hits away from death from the enemies in that area, and you need to get back to a savepoint or use some healing items ASAP. From just the info on screen, there's no way to tell; if you haven't got your current max memorised, even telling how close you are to death demands a trip to the stat screen. A bar makes that obvious; "oh gosh, my health is almost empty, best toss some peanuts in the air and try to catch them in my mouth, which is an actual gameplay mechanic in Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night". I will give SoTN one small bit of credit for some aspects not mentioned in this video; while it was weird that it locked things like enemy names and knowing how much damage you were causing behind collectable "Relics", allowing you to switch them on and off after collection was a nice touch. Feels like it's only in the past decade that giving players any significant control over what HUD elements to show has started to became standard, but SoTN was laying the groundwork in the last millennium. So, y'know, that's something?
Fun fact: the other major example of a game series using hearts to represent a resource that isn’t health also originated on the NES in 1986, being Kid Icarus which uses hearts as currency. Both the GameBoy game and Uprising continue that tradition too.
Watching the little ad at the end and Im reminded of code monkies there was an episode where a guy made a game called cock goblin (about a rooster goblin warrior) couldnt stop thinking about it every time he said mind cop.
The pause menu character stats are actually laid out like a Dungeons and Dragons Character sheet from the 90s if you look at one. Stats along the left side, book keeping (XP and gold) near the bottom. Level up at the top next to name.
Kid Icarus is the only other series which doesn't use Hearts ❤as health. They use it as currency, for some reason. Not ammo like Castlevannia but money to buy weapons at shops.
Cutting from yahtzee ranting and swearing about health bars, (I did not see the letters 'hp' on my crt) to an asmr ad for knit toys gave my ears whiplash. 😂
I guess I'm the outlier since I always loved this UI growing up BECAUSE HP is represented as a number, which gives me information I prefer over a percentage or bar. I've always adjusted UIs to show numbers in addition to or instead of bars whenever I can. Foe the non-HP bits, anyone who has played Castlevania knows hearts are for sub-weapons, and a blue bar just screams 'mana'.
Numbers for HP can be useful, but the way SOTN displays it is less so because without showing it in comparison to max HP, there's little context as to the portion of health you have outside of font color.
7:45 and then you have to wait for the animation for the sparkles to reach the HP numbers for the heal to actually count! Oh I remember dying so many times as a kid because of that, the longest seconds of my life.
...and yet it's still an amazing and beloved classic. Just goes to show how wasting time on these details prevents game developers on focusing on broader strokes of the game causing a lot of new games to look flashy and play boring...
If Dracula COULD eat food through his feet, he would be an Andalite from Animorphs. And yes, that probably WAS the activation code for a generation of YA novel sleeper agents.
This is one of mine most beloved games. I completed it numerous times on different platforms. BUT, only recently I noticed, that in library there is actually a "scrolls" of the spells for Alucard and they're telli5the player inputs for the player, I guess that makes much more sense why they're so OP, cause they're quite expansive and fact that you can use time from the start just knowing the input is really cool and (in theory, I guess) works for the replayability of the game. I think devs will through: If player bought spells on the first playthrough and got used to this mechanic - it would be nice to give it from the start and would make game much more interesting.
Symphony of the night is like if the best artists on the planet were given an unlimited budget to figure out how to make a game on their own. I fucking love it. If you haven’t played it, PLEASE do. Its a masterpiece. Seriously. Hand pixel animated 60fps running animation.
I never knew anyone had issues with the UI tbh. I first played it about 3 years ago at the ripe old age of 21 and I have to say I fell in love with the game pretty quickly. The combat, voice acting, and exploration all felt very novel and exciting to me. At this point I had already played Super Metroid and Prime 1 (and loved them) so the genre wasn’t absolutely foreign to me, but everything about it was just so fun.
I don't know how you got through this video without mentioning how fucking slow the menus are, especially if you die and have to reload a save. The clunky interface is most of why I don't like Symphony and only marginally tolerate it more than the spectacularly shit Harmony of Dissonance.
Surprised Yahtzee doesn't know that games made back then actually compensated for the CRT smear and actually made things look clearer and MORE readable. I hardly ever played my PS2 anymore until I grabbed a little like 12" screen CRT TV from my grandparents' house and found everything was suddenly much easier to see, and especially read than on a 60" 4K TV
That... doesn't make sense. Things aren't going to be "easier to see" on a blurrier screen, no matter how you design them. They can be smoother and more natural looking, but they cannot under any circumstances be more distinct.
@@stevethepocket Are you familiar with glasses? Apparently whatever causes the blur is a predictable phenomenon that can be accounted for. I've literally experienced it firsthand, when the image is pixel perfect text is a hard to read jumble of pixels. After it's been blurred they actually look like letters. A lot of text and big pixel art portraits will actually have like random red and green pixels in there to basically blend together in the blur to cheat more colors than the palette can actually support, and, in the case of text, basically trick your eyes with different levels of contrast.
@@N8Dawgg314 They do the same thing for transparency effects, and as you mentioned, to add colors to the palette that would otherwise be out of reach. Shading is smoother to boot. It's just better on the technology it was designed for. Pixel perfect reproduction deteriorates the experience by removing those nuances.
Yahtzee misses another detail that makes identifying the health counter more confusing: You start the game playing as Richter, recreating the final battle in Rondo of Blood, since SotN takes place 5 years later. And as a nod, they use the hud from that game, that has a actual health bar. Can't blame people for mistaking the mana bar from the health when the very first few minutes and boss battle features an actual bar to measure your health.
Huh! I never noticed the HUD was different and I've played the game a zillion times.
@@poulanthropein fairness, it's kind of hard to notice when you're playing a scripted battle you actually cannot lose in
Also true in Richter mode!
As strange as it might sound, I think it was intentional. I'm not saying it was a good chose, but their was probably some thought as to WHY?
Hearts from the vary begging represent "sacrifice" of will, Hearts for Alucard and Richter are used for the sub-weapons. The coders made Richter health Alucards' magic, implying where magic comes from and why vampires "need" blood to sustain themselves.
Damn that's a great point
I could guess the blue bar wasn't health and felt really smart until it turns out the hearts ALSO aren't health and then I felt really dumb for feeling smart
I did the same. 😂
I was thinking the same but his voice made me think a twist was coming so I just guessed it was and laughed when I was wrong.
Oh ye of little Castlevania playing
lmao
I made the opposite mistake since even Castlevania on the NES had the common sense to use a graduated bar for health, not some nondescript number off to the side with some letters above it too tiny and faded for my admittedly horrible eyes to see at all without focusing squarely on them, even though it was practically a series tradition to use a heart symbol to represent ammo or currency or whatever other BS the devs had on their spinner wheel as long as it wasn't for health.
Yahtzee, you grew up in England. Nobody expects you to have a high opinion of the French.
As someone of French ancestry, the opinions of perfidious Albion carry no weight, but that particular insult of those accursed isles beloved of Napoleon Bonaparte is evergreen.
Aaaaah, the French...
@@SimuLord “of French ancestry” phahahha come on lad 😭
@@LordToast to be fair, who would aside from the white-flag wavers themselves?
This is an incredible collection of american people jokes, in that they are a) very simple and b) not funny.
I'll point out two things in the much-maligned Sega Saturn version:
1. The blue magic bar is actually red. So it looks even more like a health bar.
and 2. Alucard has a third hand JUST for healing/recovery items. It's "helpfully" mapped to the L button on the Saturn controller, but there is no dedicated map button. To view the map, you have to get into the pause screen (which takes 6 seconds), then you press L to see it. It is madness.
@@Allerka I played the Saturn version in an emulator, I didn't know it was that bad on original hardware too. I didn't find it that annoying, but I didn't use the map much, since I'd already played the PS1 version.
@@henryfleischer404 It's even worse. During the Richter/Dracula fight, the framerate drops to about 10 FPS when Dracula transforms. Certain enemies/effects also do in the framerate. There's also a cool new load time between areas, which the PS1 didn't really have.
@@Allerka it was not optimized at all and kind of rushed. Such a shame
saturn's bar is only red when it is full. so its either blue or red.
I like how nobody is thrown by the third hand lol
Well, no, Dracula can't very well heal by walking over food with his Feet, he uses his Teef.
BUT! Did you know that Feet is Teef backwards? Just like Alucard is...
OH MY GOD!!
😁
how am I only now learning/noticing this fact?!
HAH
Gasp! 😱
Still finding secrets after 25+ years. Such a rich game.
I think Igarashi himself commented on the UI having been a place holder that was just put there with the idea of being finished later and then it never was. So from this the team figured that in the next game they should finish the UI right from the start, not throw in some placeholder or it might stay forever. He might've said this in a speedrun by Romscout in which the speedrunner even taught him some tricks.
Edit: Seems like I misremembered. It was mentioned in a Devs Play Special video by DoubleFineProd instead. The romscout video is still an interesting watch since it has Igarashi present to witness his own game getting broken by a speedrunner.
ah the fun and weird thing of the most permanent thing being a temporary fix
@@prcervi I've heard of a strategy to make temporary solutions intentionally look terrible and broken, to force your future you into actually fixing them. For example by making the UI a bright turquoise square with Comic Sans text.
No idea where I got this from, though.
He said it in a livestream with Double Fine Productions he did with Anna Kipnis. Look up "Devs Play" Special - Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Also interesting to note is that the mobile port of SotN actually features completely reworked menu assets, more in line with the series' later games. Partly from necessity of touch screen obviously, but interesting nonetheless with that trivia in mind.
@@Adam-zt4cn If a constantly flashing mana bar +
The food mechanic was weird, but at least it was fun to eat peanuts. Had to throw them upward, step forward like 2 pixels, and then tap up on the right frame to catch them in your mouth.
The game was packed full of little details like that. It's like they finished it but still had a year left before the deadline, so they just went around sprinkling in whatever random ideas they came up with. It really added a lot to the game. Like, did we need "secret boots" to "discreetly increase" Alucard's height by 1 pixel? No. But it was good for a laugh.
@@ToyKeeper What the secret boots did was actually stretch Alucard's whole sprite. It didn't add any new pixels.
@@ToyKeeper Or the Joseph's Cloak, which straight up let you alter the RGB values of both the inside and outside of your cape. Want to go all black while you listen to linkin park? Barbie pink so you can laugh and call Alucard a sissy? Go for it!
Went down here exactly for the peanuts comment 🥜
@@PhoenixUltima it is the coat of many colors....
Never, in my life, had I noticed that the HP circle had the letters “HP” in it.
@@BrazenScull I'm shaken tbh. beaten SOTN many times on multiple systems and never had a flippin clue.
It is normally a heart symbol you read for health not a shadowy HP hidden in the place I think would be ammo/extra information... a gauge if often used as well for it at times
I have never played Castlevenia, and it was the first thing I noticed😂
I still couldn’t see it even after he pointed it out!
@@Gjaltebrammaybe because you were looking for it. I've also completed the game multiple times and never noticed it haha
I think it would be more apt to refer to it as a HUD than a GUI since GUI implies the user will be interacting with it.
Heads Up Disaster
Head up Despair
Heels Up Depravity
Case of "all HUDs are GUIs, but not all GUIs are HUDs".
Plus a GUI is typically the _entire_ interface, not just the overlay. So the game itself would be included in it.
the glut of english words in RPGs probably stems from D&D stats. A lot of Early Japanese developers were not quiet about being inspired by D&D, which already had baked in shorthands like STR, EXP, HP, etc.
Though most of them are picking up Western RPG jargon via early PC RPGs like Wizardry, which got them from D&D.
"Decorative english" has been a thing for a very long time, apart from localization not existing AT ALL to begin with, back in the days of having to fit all your graphics in a 32 KB EEPROM sticking to the latin alphabet was attractive because it's got a lot less total characters than having hiragana, katakana AND any special kanji you need all taking up graphics memory.
although that still leaves in question why japanese D&D didn't translate the stats
@@slothfulcobra A lot of classic D&D stats are slightly obscure/fancy words anyway, Dexterity, Constitution and Charisma and all, so they probably left them in because they sounded cool and exotic.
@@GameDevYal Yeah, during NES/Famicom time, a lot of Japanese games would only have katakana to save graphic's memory space
My first castlevania was Circle of the Moon, which I rented. This is important, because I didn't have the instruction manual to explain anything to me.
So, I'm looking at the GUI, thinking that the Hearts were HP, but then I realized that the red bar would decrease when hit and the Hearts would not budge. My thought process from that point was "Since we have vampires, is this how much BLOOD I have left? And that's somehow separate from the standard health?" MP was pretty straight forwardly the blue bar. But you don't get a subweapon right away, nor did I realize that using the sub weapon cost hearts for quite some time.
I went on to fall in love with the series from then on (until Lords of Shadow), but that will always be a stand out moment of confusion.
Hah, I had *exactly* the same experience!
The crowning moments of confusion for me was my entireh Symphony of the Night first playthrough. No manual and on a PS1 emulator, playing it....was interesting
"Guess which of this is the health"
I've never played castlevania, so I'll go with the circle that says HP.
"Only stupid people would put it in this circle"
Oh.
I immediately picked out the "HP" as well. But then, we were both primed by Yahtzee's leadup to look past the eye-catching obvious choices. If I hadn't had that, I probably would've gone with the heart. Why in God's name would an *ammo counter* be labeled with a heart? And he did have a point that the HP could be taken as saying "XP", particularly on a somewhat blurry monitor.
@@ChrisMattern-oh6wx >Why in God's name would an ammo counter be labeled with a heart?
Just Castlevania doing Castlevania things, nobody really knows why they did it this way but it's got franchise precedent. Having recently played this on original hardware and a tube TV, I never once thought it could have said XP. The edges on the H get a little fuzzier but they don't change geometry and suddenly get angled. Even if you don't know what the UI elements mean, the game starts with a fight you cannot lose (if you die you get filled back to full HP by a side character with a lot of fanfare, you absolutely cannot miss it) where you accumulate heart ammo and get to use subweapons.
@@poulanthrope Except in that prelude fight, the entire UI is different and you do have a bar for your health instead of some number in a circle.
@@roguebanshee They're just talking about the Hearts. Since the prelude fight has a more intuitive HP bar, its very obvious that Hearts is not HP but is instead ammo for Richter's subweapons. So you take that knowledge with you into the main game.
Unfortunately, you also take the knowledge that bar means HP, so it primes you into expecting the MP bar to be health at first.
...yeah, I dunno. I saw the letters saying "HP" with the numbers next to it and immediately knew what it was lol.
Akshually, Kid Icarus uses hearts as currency instead of health. As you reference in the video, maybe it was more reasonable back during the NES era when “heart=health” wasn’t the real standard it became later, but by the time the Game Boy game came out it would likely have been very confusing. Thankfully, Uprising on 3DS keeps the heart currency mechanic while making it very very obvious that they do not in fact restore health.
I posted a similar comment but you did it with the "Akshually", so I now feel ashamed & silly. You've earnt my respect.
At least they very clearly establish that floor ice-cream gives you health.
I was going to bring that. I guess there are enough games for 0.1% of them to be more than one.
I was gonna say this, castlevania does have a TINY bit of company in that 0.1% of the gaming space
@@pickyphysicsstudent201You didn't say "actually", so you don't get a point.
It's funny what people fixate on, none of the UI things mentioned here bothered me at all but I always disliked how dashing backwards is slightly faster than just running, so the quickest way to get around is to face backwards and spam backdash. It was fun for the first 5 minutes but after that it's just a super tedious thing that is just effective enough to make me feel like I aught to be doing it all the time.
I am SURE some people are going to say they love the backdash movement, and I am in favor of it being there for combat, but running should be faster for getting around the map.
Shield dashing feels a bit less tedious but it's still weird
Agreed multiple times over. It shouldn’t be the default for going fast. Boots of God Speed could’ve solved that, but they were exclusive to the Saturn Version.
Agreed, the UI never bothered me. The gameplay was too fun and engaging for me to even worry about it.
Also, it's amusing to think that the backdash was obviously intended as a dodge mechanic, but it pretty much became the universal way to travel around the map faster. I've played SotN a lot over the years and never used it to try to dodge an attack.
Considering the many beautifully animated frames in-between you changing direction on your controller and the character doing it in-game (when you're currently walking in the other direction at least), it could've been balanced with that. Dash is better for avoiding attacks, but maybe you could have a "cooldown" for it, or imagine in older Castlevanias with bottomless pits, you could dash to avoid an enemy, but the dash doesn't let you drop down from a platform if it has enough space for you to DO the dodge and avoid the attack.
But then, would it not activate if you didn't have space? Or would it just let you fall to your death? Maybe it should have a threshold where it doesn't go as far back, so you don't fall, but knowing if you have enough space for the dash would be about skill, requiring you to memorize with practice what's the space you need.
Yeah I really liked how Aria of Sorrow added that one soul that lets you get around really fast
As you joked about how improving bad elements in games in remasters of games takes away from the game's charm, I immediately thought about the way you use items in SotN, so I'm glad you touched on that part toward the end of the video. I'm really torn on "improving" that system, and I think the way it's handled in the Saturn version is close to about as far as I'd want to go in improving item use in SotN for two reasons: 1. it'd ruin the Peanut item and the joke to using it, and 2. getting the Duplicator and fully exploring the Underground Caverns while minimizing backtracking by having Alucard continually throw Turkeys in front of himself to restore health until he later picks up the Holy Symbol to prevent water damage is really funny.
that kind of improvement would probably push up on remastering, which basically is just creating a whole new game, and with those it's up in the air whether the new thing will manage to recreate all the wonder of the old thing.
Usually it doesn't erase the old thing from existence, but original SotN already isn't easy to to get and play (legally). It's a similar issue with the upcoming Metal Gear Solid triangle, MGS3 isn't very easily available. And then MGS Twin Snakes is a remake that's sorta been wiped away in its own right, with the original being the only one that gets ported to new systems. Weird.
As soon as Yahtzee said "slip into French" I knew there was a 'je ne sais quoi' coming (and yes I did have to google the right spelling of that)
And You Will be respected for it Because WOW that is certainly A W o r d I Mean it's No German Spelling But It makes my Finger's hurt looking at it Then again I'm American so it most likely isn't
@@blackholeJ_Media Speaking of language, why did you Capitalise random words in your comment?
I see someone didn't just turn on the subtitles for the spelling.
@@polkadi you know me. I'm not that smart
Funny enough, America totally does a simular thing, but with Spanish, like "amigo", "mi casa es su casa", "Como estas?" Etc. Sometimes people just like saying things in other languages.
There's another game in that 0.1%: Kid Icarus. Hearts are the currency in that game. I'm pretty sure uprising made fun of it as part of it's 4th wall breaking, but I don't remember how. They got the UI right, though, and have a bar show your health.
Castlevania II also did this. I remember playing that game and farming hearts a night for a damn crystal ball because enemies dropped more.
The letters HP being centered in that circle confuses things further by being adjacent to the mana bar, making it unclear whether its indicating the number or the bar is your health.
@GameAnGrog Pretty sure the first time you take damage, you'll figure it out.
You can see the division there. I hate how pseudo game designers and designers make problem without problem over there.
According to a Japanese friend of mine, Japanese games use English text partially as a convention and partially because it's seen as stylish. Japanese has a ton of loanwords (the Japanese word for "computer" is コンピューター, pronounced "konpyuutaa" with syllable breaks before the p and t), and the roman alphabet is widely known, so it's much less of a barrier to entry than the other way around would be.
As for the food items, if you put a gun to my head and made me guess, I'd ask you not to, but aside from that, my guess would be that earlier technical decisions made implementing them in another way disproportionately hard. "Hard" in software typically equates to "likely to introduce bugs", which would have been especially undesirable before games could be easily patched. (Even today, it's not unusual to retrofit an existing code path that's already well-tested rather than introducing a new one that would need its own testing and debugging.) That said, if my guess is right, that suggests some unusual or hacky decisions were made elsewhere in Symphony of the Night's code... which is also not unusual, because software is hard.
5:15 The strafefox video on the development of this game explained that basically the game was kind of rushed in its last cycle of development and they did not have any time to update that menu, so they had no other choice, but to use the one created by the programmers during the prototype stage of development.
Really, the menu layout is the only real issue I agree with and he didn't even mention the worst part of it, which is that they never actually tell you how to sort your equip-able inventory. You can do it, but it's very much an instance of just pressing buttons until a hidden menu pops up. I usually get halfway through my playthrough and then remember it can be done, and then spend like 5 minutes mashing all the face buttons in different places until it happens. It's entirely possible he never figured it out so he didn't even know he could complain about it!
ive never played symphony of the night but upon seeing that menu for the first time i thought "oh thats literally a programmer menu thrown together"
ive worked on a game thats debug ui looks a lot like symphony on the night's stats screen hahaha
@goatsoup yeah I know what it's like when working on games on your own haha. At least the future games in the metroidvania style improved the menus
Watching Yahtzee slowly reveal that the things I thought was HP bar weren't HP bars feels like watching a magic trick.
It would be interesting to have a Semi-Ramblomatic just talking about GUIs and what could be considered a good one. Legend of Zelda comes to mind for me.
Top left is your health and magic, bottom left is your map, top right is your equipped items, and bottom right is your money. Important stuff at the top, semi-important stuff at the bottom, and wordless told to the player without a tutorial.
Like all games of its era this one came with a printed instruction manual that told you how it worked. One of the reasons that modern games have to rely on common design elements like the whole blue/purple/yellow items thing is because you don't get instructions any more.
Yeah, but how many eager kids actually opened the fucking things? I've had games since the NES era, all with wonderfully colorful manuals, and I only ever looked through one if I got stuck, which was quite rare.
@@Craxin01 I've had games since the N64 era and I always read the instruction booklet, both to learn how to play the game and also because they sometimes had cool artwork in them.
@@Craxin01 Not to mention if you rented the game, which was a huge part of the videogame market back then, and you only had some text file crappy basic controls with blurb on the rental box.
@@Craxin01 Aye.
I'd always read the manual during the car ride home from buying/renting the game. It was the next best thing to being able to play the game immediately.
@ Sometimes you got lucky and got a crappy photocopy of the manual, not that it’s much better.
Yes, that is pretty much why japanese culture throws in english. They had to learn it from terrible english classes so they might as well use it. Though I think in the case of gui's it's also because english text requires soooo many less pixels to show, especially when abbreviating. Even the simple characters that aren't actual kanji use like twice the resolution to be readable.
But also represent (roughly) twice the letters, and katakana at least is fairly readable at typical 8-bit resolutions. Most games in the early days had the opposite problem - localizers having to stuff four syllables of kana into four letters of English, and if you've played the original Final Fantasy 1 for example, this rarely went well.
My favorite tidbit about using food items to recover health is that when you "equip" peanuts and press the button, a peanut is thrown into the air. You have to have Alucard walk under it, and press 'Up' to eat it as it falls back down. All for an absolute pittance of HP recovered too.
It recovers the same amount as a normal health potion, so I would call that a pittance. You DO have to hit the peanut exactly on alucard's head though. What's even funnier is if you do pull that off and get the 50 rather than the 1, he pumps his fist in victory.
@@roetemeteor Oh, guess I just never timed it right then lol
4:33 - ....wait. *squints* OH, MY GOD, I NEVER SAW THAT BEFORE, WHY DID THEY EVEN BOTHER?!
If Fully-Ramblomatic getting a Blu-ray, will Semi-Ramblomatic be an extra on it?
No, but To quote yahtzee from Windbreakers, since its a bi-weekly show, there's half as many so there may be one after 2 years
It comes in a novelty tiny disk instead.
@@rodsk8dude731- finally, a use for leftover GameCube disks.
In a separate MiniDisc taped to the back?
123L
Even as a kid, I thought the HP was represented with numbers because of the non-linear nature of the game. Alucard doesn't die from making 4-6 mistakes like Richter Belmont. Alucard typically dies from getting nicked down while exploring too carelessly, and often has to judge his numbers and do risk assessment on what section of the castle lies ahead. They might've wanted players to be more careful about exactly how much health they had. Not that a bar would've prevented this, mind you. This only gets post-modern when you've played the game enough to just know the layout of the castle, so that "exploration-survival" element disappears.
Let's not forget a bar is only truly useful if the numbers remain small. When you start getting up there and your health goes from 80-100 to 500-750, then that bar becomes exceedingly meaningless.
6:13 Yeah pretty much. Many japanese people just think it's cool, like your example of french but also like how many from the west like the look of chinese characters
I'm sorry, but I can't believe that at 6:58, when he showed a whole second game tacked on at the end, the second box wasn't upside down.
I can say even as a kid in the NES era, the hearts as weapon energy in Castlevania 1 made no sense. Many other NES games used hearts as health pickups at that point.
I like to think that in the mirror universe the mustached Yahtzee is arguing the opposite point.
He's reminiscing how much he misses HP being tracked in how full an orb is.
7:25 dont tell him about the peanuts kekw
TH-cam doesn't have bttv emote integration so there is no kekw emote hurr hurr
I was wondering if someone would ever bring up the food system. In a game where running into an enemy while at low HP is almost certain death, you wonder why potions are immediate, but food is not. REALISM!
But then you have to make an argument of Alucard picking up anything by just walking over it. Something old as time when it comes to video games. SotN did it right by making some of the food interesting and only because you throw it. My favorite is the peanut where you toss it straight into the air. You need to get under it and hold up to catch it in your mouth.
I just think in-combat versus out-of-combat healing. It makes sense to me! Potions are rare, saved for bosses and emergencies. If you're traveling and need some insurance to get to the next save point, start eating those 15 cheese wheels.
I remember being confused by the HUD because there was a magic bar, but health was only indicated by a number.
The number is much more important in my view than having a bar. It's harder to estimate how many hits you can take based on how much of the meter vanishes, but if you took 32 damage from a monster you know 65 will allow you two more hits before you're in kill range.
My biggest complaint is how come he can carry a thousand swords but then he can only have one sub weapon?
tl;dr: the U.S. kicked Japan's butt twice, and Japanese culture sorta goes by the rule "if they beat you, copy them" so they have a lot of English loanwords.
Japan's tendency to borrow English words is mostly due to three major events: the Sakoku, in which Japan isolated itself from essentially the rest of the world from 1603 to 1868, and (United States) Admiral Perry's expedition to Japan, which basically ended with "open the country. stop having it be closed." thanks to the fact that he had very big ships with very big guns. We'll get to the third in a bit.
So there were several very important (from a technological, sociological, scientific, etc.) centuries of world progress that Japan sorta missed out on, and then they tried to play catch-up when they realized that a (relatively weak) foreign country was able to force them into some extraordinarily unfavorable treaty terms due to the fact that katana aren't nearly as useful against cannons and Gatling guns as anime would have you expect.
So, after a bit of good, old-fashioned revolution (which was the sorta stupid kind, in that it overthrew a military dictatorship and restored the Emperor), Japan needed to modernize -- and who better to emulate than the people who just made them look like complete asses (and their mother country, England)? So Japan imported every piece of technology, scientific knowledge, and political ideology (hello ethnocentric imperialism) they could get their hands on, and most of it came with an English name attached (since inventing new words is generally more work than anyone wants to do). (Side note: these much older concepts tended to get kanji -- Chinese characters used for Japanese -- assigned to them. I mention this because the older name for the U.S. is 米国 -- beikoku -- which literally means "rice country". Japan calling another country "rice country"... yeah)
So yeah, there's lots of older things that have English loanwords. THEN, all that imperialism led to a bit of a war... a World War... the second one (Japan technically helped the allies in WWI, if by "helped" we mean conquered German overseas territories). I assume I don't need to explain WWII, so that ended with Japan being occupied by the U.S. for sevenish years. The U.S. was surprisingly nice during this time (compared to what the USSR did to the places it occupied), so the Japanese ended up deciding to keep borrowing the U.S.'s culture/tech/etc. without all that British baggage. So that led to EVEN MORE cultural exchange in English -- especially in regards to media, which most of the world has to put up with but Japan actually enjoys -- so not only did various concepts and technologies keep being named with English loanwords, a lot of slang ended up being derived from English.
Combine all that with the fact that Japanese's THREE writing systems are not sufficient when it comes to writing foreign words, so they just said "to hell with it, we can have a fourth" and took the Latin alphabet (called romaji), and the fact that every Japanese student takes at least six years of English (though most can't speak it -- it's not a very good program), and around 90% of loanwords in Japanese (not including Chinese words from centuries ago, which would be like including Old Norse as English loanwords) are English, totaling about 15% of the total language (and more in regards to commonly used words).
For context, English is about 30% French loanwords (they just tend to not sound very French anymore).
(This is massively oversimplified and is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it's accurate enough)
It has taken me until this video to even realise that the HP bubble says HP inside it
This is probably my favorite game ever but the fact that you can't sell anything other than gemstones is a real killer.
this is the most 100 IQ video i've ever watched. thank you for padding the bell curve
really, i say "watched," but i should be saying "clicked off of," because there's nothing you could possibly say to convince me you don't have a significant portion of your brain missing
either you've never played another castlevania game before in your life, or you're being intentionally obtuse. hearts have been used for the sub-weapon since before you had to append the 1 to Castlevania 1 in order to know which one you're referring to.
if you couldn't tell your HP was the number that quite literally had HP written right above it, which the damage numbers went to every time you got hit, your parents were most likely related to each other.
or maybe the fact that the gigantic blue bar staying at full despite you getting hit a dozen times should have clued you in, at some point, that it's not the health bar.
after writing this, i watched 6 and a half minutes of the video, and the script genuinely reeks of ChatGPT. and that's not to say it is, in fact, i doubt it is. it's just low-brow Bri'ish humour that falls completely flat when the viewer is actually a sentient being who is aware that everything you're saying is complete made-for-content nonsense. but that's not a problem considering the average TH-cam viewer is a soulless clump of cells reacting to the stimuli placed before it
6:15 Yahtzee's final form
As someone trying to learn Japanese... the constant use of English words seems to stem from them (and other Asian countries) thinking that speaking English makes someone smart. To be fare, the opposite is a trope of Western media as someone whipping out some Chinese or Japanese is also a sign of intelligence. Which might have something to do with us not being able to read Chinese (kanji) characters and them not being able to pronounce half our words. We also use each other's written language as decoration to the amusement of anyone who understands the gibberish or naughtiness that someone is proudly displaying on their body.
8:19 Oh, so it's a Psychonaut. Got it. 😁
7:47 he actually can do that in Hellsing and they also thought "Alucard" was a clever name so who knows
Mom: we have "Juding by the Cover" at home
The "Judging by the Cover" at home:
I found the health thing particularly annoying because there was't even much clue if it was a good number or bad number. Most other games using a number for health would at least give you a 13/15 or 13/100 rather than just 13 health.
A vampire who feeds through foot-mouths sounds like an old straight-to-video parody-horror.
I just finished Symphony of the Night yesterday and as someone who was born years after it released it really suprised me how well it holds up (other than the baffling UI and some of the bosses).
It _is_ a masterpiece, but also the gaming industry collectively decided it was the gold standard of 2D Metroidvanias (half the origin of the genre's name, in fact) so it's what every Metroidvania since aims for. Yahtzee also had a Zero Punctuation retro review of it years ago that noted it came out while everyone else was taking advantage of the PS1 hardware and disc space to make primitive 3D polygon games that are largely forgotten, while SotN is basically a throwback to the era of 16-bit platformers, but using the new hardware to really polish the platforming mechanics and pixel art to a higher form.
@@digitaljanusI've moved onto Aria of Sorrow now and it's crazy how much literally every metroidvania basis itself off of these games, I suppose it's in the name but from the power ups, the bosses, the shadow doors (looking at you Hollow Knight), and the enemies. They were really ahead of their time.
So far (53% completion) i think AoS is quite lacking in music and overall aesthetic compared to SoTN. All the areas feel very generic when they don't have that gothic vibe and music. I miss my backdash cancels too.
Warms my heart that old games are not forgotten by the younger generation. Even though I am sure you can spot the flaws all over and don't have that nostalgia goggles fogging up the reality of old games. Personally I can barely appreciate games before my time, namely 80s Atari games, they are almost all terrible, but the arcade games of the era are great.
I think it’s kind of an unbalanced mess with lots of worthless areas, especially in the inverted castle. The game constantly gives you items and gear that you often will never use, something that is sadly also present in the Souls games. I also don’t know if it’s hilarious or sad how easy it is to break this game and defeat most bosses in under 5 seconds. Personally I’ve always preferred Metroid to the Igavanias, especially Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission.
Morbidly curious which bosses you're talking about, especially since it's well over a decade since I played it myself.
Hey Second Wind.
Gamespot just ditched their "expert reacts" series, ending their partnership with Jonathan Ferguson of the Royal Armouries. It might not be Second Wind's kind of thing as it's not particularly creative but it was a series with a strong following with Jonathan becoming quite a beloved personality through it.
3:50 Not quite the only thing. Kid Icarus. Hearts are currency.
2:03 just a little footnote on ui for fighting games, notice how remaining health is in the center and damage is at the sides. This is so that the lower the life you have, it gets closer to the center to make it easier for your eyes to see both the remaining time and your opponent's health in comparison to your health. It's a very simple way of giving the most amount of information on the two elements needed for a round win or loss (health and time).
Street fighter 1, mortal kombat (1992) and infamously Shaq Fu don't do this basic thing and makes their UI's so much worse.
fun thing we found out from iga and curry themselves, the pause menu was so unembellished is because it was the dev placeholder, later games youd get the fancy pause menu as intended
To be fair, the second you get hit, which part of the UI is your health becomes very obvious very quickly. It's the only thing that changes when you get hit. That does leave players unfamiliar with Castlevania games left baffled for a while yet as to what the heck the hearts are, but I would argue that's less a problem with the UI itself and more a general problem of "why the heck would you ever use hearts to represent weapon ammunition, you weirdo."
Also, I'm not sure I agree with Yahtzee that health is better represented as a bar rather than a number. Enemies in SOTN do consistent damage every time they hit you, so knowing whether you are at 20 or 21 health can be very relevant when you know the enemy type near you always does 20 damage, for instance. Of course, you could always do both (like Aria of Sorrow does), but that does take up more space and imo isn't really necessary. Meanwhile, I think the mana bar is a bar because it constantly regenerates, so knowing the precise number it's at isn't terribly important and imo it's less distracting having a bar that gradually fills rather than a constantly changing number.
EDIT: Also, the fact that the mana bar is so prominent on the UI despite spells being a relatively minor part of the game imo adds to the coolness factor once you do discover spells. It's like "oh, THAT'S what the big glowing blue bar is. I was starting to wonder if it was just decoration."
"Which part of this display would you assume measures the players health?" I don't know, the one that says HP, maybe?!
Ok my first SOTN playthrough (like 2 years ago) I literally had to Google why my health wasn't going up despite collecting hearts. I was able to figure out the big number was my health pretty quickly by getting hurt a lot, but the subweapon mechanic isn't very intuitive
On the subject of bars vs. numbers, one other thing to keep in mind is that some things are best engaged with as a sort of formless quantity (usually when you need to make snap decisions based on roughly how much of something there is) while others are best engaged in as discrete numbers (usually when you either need to engage with them thoughtfully, such as comparing two numbers or planning how to use a finite resource, but also when you want to create a satisfying feeling of progression to something good that mostly goes up like XP or money).
Of course, this only exacerbates the complaint because even aside from relative importance, health would have been better served by the bar and mana by the number.
Hilariously, even the text could have been left unaltered because at that resolution it could just as well be read as "MP" instead of "HP"
U forgot to mention that u could know when you had full HP by the numbers being slightly more white when u did, but barely more white hahahaha
Don't forget that the items to see enemy names and damage dealt are adjacent to the game's critical path but not ON it. So if you didn't know better you could play the entire game without even knowing those features exist.
I mean, if you're playing a Metroidvania and remain only on the critical path, you're quite frankly just playing the game wrong.
May as well try to beat Spyro without gliding and saying it's unfair how some items are out of your jumping range.
True, but as one of the most popular, and easiest, and oldest Metroidvanias it was the first for a lot of people.
If they don't explore, they deserve to miss it.
I always turned (at least) the names off, anyhow. It was just excess visual clutter; there was the bestiary in the library shop for that
@ 1:45 Um... the part that clearly says HP. I get what you are saying but that is kinda nit picky. Maybe it came more easily to me from playing RPGs. And I never realized that was a magic bar, i thought that was a soul steal bar. *shrugs*
6:30 I'm not sure if you can be racist against the French. I think making fun of the French just makes you British 😛
Before the video: It's the number as a health indicator rather than a bar right?
After the video: It was indeed that, among other stuff
In any cases, pass a nice day/evening, Yatzee
Symphony completely passed me and alot of people by, despite loving Castlevania series especially 4 on SNES. During that mid 90s era, almost nobody was investing money in 2D platformers because everyone wanted to see what wild 3D games the new consoles could do. We'd had decades of 2D games already and even if the animation was smooth, it couldn't override the outrageous hype for 3D which likely resulted in Symphony having poor sales for most gamers but becoming a cult classic, making it quite rare.
I rented Symphony for the hell of it one day,thinking it was going to be a normal Castlevania platformer. As soon as I started playing it I was pleasantly surprised,as a couple years earlier I was floored by Super Metroid. I wish SOTN sold better.
It's funny because it's basically just SOTN that has a health counter. Every Classicvania has a health bar and a heart count, and every Igavania after SOTN had a health bar and a heart counter and then a mana or stamina bar. SOTN is the only one.
When even IGA agrees that SOTN's character menu is bad, it's hard to say it's salvageable.
I think Iga confirmed that it was one of several casualties of rush to get the game out the door along with the inverted castle's pacing (or lack there of). The UI was just sorta thrown together into something technically functional. They never got the chance to go back through and polish it.
I've been trying to find the source of that claim, but so far found other reddit posts without a citation....
@@daemonwhite3740 It's come up in various places, but there's a video on Double Fine's TH-cam channel in which Iga mentions it, I believe.
The mobile version of SotN does make some changes/improvements to the menu, and it also makes them usable via touch.
Small bit about the food, I think they were trying to emulate picking up a wall chicken in older Castlevanias? you could find food items in the level and walk into them to heal you. I guess in SOTN it's like, well now you can take these items with you, so you can spawn them anywhere you want!
6:35 3D games looked like digital vomit, and made me motion sick. Graphics have improved since, but the motion sickness has never gone away.
5:15 I have long been irrationally trigged by the way the stats on the left overlap the character portrait. It just looks so SLOPPY. Hell, there's even ways of making overlapping elements look cool, but this sure ain't it.
Alucard's portrait covering STR is so funny, because there's room for his entire portrait above and it's clear the designers just moved his portrait down so his face wouldn't get cut off by CRTs
That last bit about absorbing nutrients through feet reminded me of another very '90s IP: "Animorphs". The Andalites, the aliens behind the morphing power, (but not that *other* even more '90s IP, "Power Rangers,") the main characters use, are basically blue centaurs with no mouths that absorb nutrients through their hooves, so they basically eat while running. They don't actually *taste* anything though, which is notable when "Ax," the younger brother of the alien who gave the main characters the morphing power, joins them, gets a human form and hilariously loses. his. *shit.* from his newfound sense of taste! It's like going from "Spock" to "The Great Cornholio". Cinnabon was his absolute favorite, but he was even trying to eat cigarette butts before the others had to drag him out of the mall before he continues making a scene.
I've watched YZ for over a decade and I never knew that when he said "GUIEWY" it was an acronym of G.U.I. for Graphical User Interface. I thought it was just a made up, placefiller, word which was refering to UI.
G.U.I is a widely used acronym. It's not from Yahzee.
@@TheGoukaruma Well to be fair, OP said they've watched Yahtzee for over a decade; they said nothing about watching or hearing any other human being
@@TheGoukaruma I've heard "User Interface" but never "Graphical User Interface". The "Graphical" part seems redundent, to me. Also because Yahtz sounds like he is saying "GUIEWY" which sounds close to "Gluey" which would be a good "placefiller" word.
I remember Yahtzee used to pronounce the X.B.L.A. (X Box Live Arcade) as "The Kesblahh~", which was funny by it being an acronym prounanced as the word, which was obvious because of the context of him talking about it.
Eh, it was their first in the line of "IGAvania" / "metroidvania" Castlevanias.
I chalk any weirdness up to it being a strange new evolution. Further entries corrected any little fiddly bits after all.
Also, the original EN voice acting was great, I'll brook no complaints over it.
I never knew that the health thing was A and not B, as I initially believed. BTW, this brings back memories like when Alucard eats food that is anachronistic, such as the hamburgers, New York-style pizza and hot dogs. And the weirdest part of all... going to the confession booth sometimes earns you sparkling grape juice that is modified from the Japanese version's wine! Strange. Now I'm so getting MindCop on Switch sometime. It's going on my wishlist.
And you didn't even touch on the insane inventory management, where everything you pick up is just organized in a giant list completely haphazardly, or the fact that if you die the game shows a "Game Over" screen and then dumps you back to the main menu.
I've been hoping for a SOTN remaster for 15 years *just* to fix these issues. Just give me the same game, with widescreen support and a fixed UI/inventory management screen that doesn't dump me back to the main menu if I die, and you can HAVE ALL MY MONEY.
I can actually explain the Pause Menu. The Pause Menu for SOTN is actually what they used in the development build They didn't have enough time to implement the actual menu they wanted to use which would have been closer to the file select menu on gold-bordered window panes. The menu panes can be found in the sprite sheets and even icons for how they planned on denoting certain things.
I'm not saying the actual menu they planned would have been better, but it would have been different.
I played the absolute candlesticks outta this on the 360, version. UI seemed fine to me, the only problem I ever had was getting that final 0.1 percent map exploration.
I didn’t really care for Symphony of the Night while growing up. But when I watched a friend play it I was drawn in by the overacting of the voices used for the characters. Now I enjoy it for that reason only, still fun gameplay but the campiness is why I play.
Later re-releases of the game have replaced the voices with professional-sounding actors, and I think that's an unforgivable crime.
As someone that played SoTN back when it first came out on a CRT I can confirm I didn't even know the letters above the HP bar said HP until many years after when I played it on a higher definition TV. And even then I still had to kind of squint to see it. I think it was more visible in the manual.
The sega saturn version actually had a third equipment slot used exclusively for items. Food, potions, and I think even consumable weapons see way more use because you don’t have to do as much menu navigation to use them. The compromise is that the map is only accessibly through the pause screen, which might’ve been a worthwhile trade-off if not for the terrible load times of the version
Igarashi has admitted that the interface was a placeholder and they just forgot to make the real version until they'd ran out of time to fix it.
(Another fun fact related to this: all the fancy animations in the shop menu were intended to be randomly picked each time you opened the pause menu, but "taking a screenshot" of the game for the effect texture took too long and made the experience unbearable)
2:07 - "It's better practice in interface design to represent the most crucial numbers, such as health, in some kind of easily readable visual form like a bar, as numbers are less immediately intuitive, especially in high-stress situations."
This is very true, and bars have one very important trait that a single number doesn't have which is chiefly responsible for that intuitiveness; they show the relationship between the current _and maximum_ levels for a value.
For example, a bit earlier in this vid I can see you have 83 HP, and... what does that mean? If your max is ~100 health or less then, that's fine, you haven't taken many hits and probably shouldn't be that concerned. But maybe your max is several hundred/thousand/million, you're one or two good hits away from death from the enemies in that area, and you need to get back to a savepoint or use some healing items ASAP. From just the info on screen, there's no way to tell; if you haven't got your current max memorised, even telling how close you are to death demands a trip to the stat screen. A bar makes that obvious; "oh gosh, my health is almost empty, best toss some peanuts in the air and try to catch them in my mouth, which is an actual gameplay mechanic in Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night".
I will give SoTN one small bit of credit for some aspects not mentioned in this video; while it was weird that it locked things like enemy names and knowing how much damage you were causing behind collectable "Relics", allowing you to switch them on and off after collection was a nice touch. Feels like it's only in the past decade that giving players any significant control over what HUD elements to show has started to became standard, but SoTN was laying the groundwork in the last millennium. So, y'know, that's something?
Fun fact: the other major example of a game series using hearts to represent a resource that isn’t health also originated on the NES in 1986, being Kid Icarus which uses hearts as currency. Both the GameBoy game and Uprising continue that tradition too.
Watching the little ad at the end and Im reminded of code monkies there was an episode where a guy made a game called cock goblin (about a rooster goblin warrior) couldnt stop thinking about it every time he said mind cop.
The pause menu character stats are actually laid out like a Dungeons and Dragons Character sheet from the 90s if you look at one.
Stats along the left side, book keeping (XP and gold) near the bottom. Level up at the top next to name.
Kid Icarus is the only other series which doesn't use Hearts ❤as health. They use it as currency, for some reason. Not ammo like Castlevannia but money to buy weapons at shops.
Castlevania II on the NES does the hearts-as-currency bit as well.
Cutting from yahtzee ranting and swearing about health bars, (I did not see the letters 'hp' on my crt) to an asmr ad for knit toys gave my ears whiplash. 😂
I figured the health indicator was the number that went down when I took damage. I guess easy isn't easy for everyone.
I guess I'm the outlier since I always loved this UI growing up BECAUSE HP is represented as a number, which gives me information I prefer over a percentage or bar. I've always adjusted UIs to show numbers in addition to or instead of bars whenever I can.
Foe the non-HP bits, anyone who has played Castlevania knows hearts are for sub-weapons, and a blue bar just screams 'mana'.
Numbers for HP can be useful, but the way SOTN displays it is less so because without showing it in comparison to max HP, there's little context as to the portion of health you have outside of font color.
You're not alone on that. I guess some of these people just have never experienced other games to put "two and two" together.
I can’t believe the pause menu genuinely looks like all your text and formatting getting shifted and broken after dropping an image in a word document
7:45 and then you have to wait for the animation for the sparkles to reach the HP numbers for the heal to actually count! Oh I remember dying so many times as a kid because of that, the longest seconds of my life.
...and yet it's still an amazing and beloved classic. Just goes to show how wasting time on these details prevents game developers on focusing on broader strokes of the game causing a lot of new games to look flashy and play boring...
If Dracula COULD eat food through his feet, he would be an Andalite from Animorphs. And yes, that probably WAS the activation code for a generation of YA novel sleeper agents.
I'm so glad you made a video on this. It took me so long to figure what my health is
This is one of mine most beloved games. I completed it numerous times on different platforms. BUT, only recently I noticed, that in library there is actually a "scrolls" of the spells for Alucard and they're telli5the player inputs for the player, I guess that makes much more sense why they're so OP, cause they're quite expansive and fact that you can use time from the start just knowing the input is really cool and (in theory, I guess) works for the replayability of the game. I think devs will through: If player bought spells on the first playthrough and got used to this mechanic - it would be nice to give it from the start and would make game much more interesting.
Symphony of the night is like if the best artists on the planet were given an unlimited budget to figure out how to make a game on their own.
I fucking love it. If you haven’t played it, PLEASE do. Its a masterpiece. Seriously. Hand pixel animated 60fps running animation.
I never knew anyone had issues with the UI tbh.
I first played it about 3 years ago at the ripe old age of 21 and I have to say I fell in love with the game pretty quickly. The combat, voice acting, and exploration all felt very novel and exciting to me. At this point I had already played Super Metroid and Prime 1 (and loved them) so the genre wasn’t absolutely foreign to me, but everything about it was just so fun.
I love that Yahtzee's hilarious mean snark has survived the decades with just a smidge of tact.
I don't know how you got through this video without mentioning how fucking slow the menus are, especially if you die and have to reload a save. The clunky interface is most of why I don't like Symphony and only marginally tolerate it more than the spectacularly shit Harmony of Dissonance.
7:50 -- so, all this time, we thought Alucard was some kind of dhampir and it turns out, he's been an Andalite?
My favorite bit of the menu screen is how Alucard's stats overlap with his portrait.
Surprised Yahtzee doesn't know that games made back then actually compensated for the CRT smear and actually made things look clearer and MORE readable. I hardly ever played my PS2 anymore until I grabbed a little like 12" screen CRT TV from my grandparents' house and found everything was suddenly much easier to see, and especially read than on a 60" 4K TV
That... doesn't make sense. Things aren't going to be "easier to see" on a blurrier screen, no matter how you design them. They can be smoother and more natural looking, but they cannot under any circumstances be more distinct.
@@stevethepocket Are you familiar with glasses? Apparently whatever causes the blur is a predictable phenomenon that can be accounted for. I've literally experienced it firsthand, when the image is pixel perfect text is a hard to read jumble of pixels. After it's been blurred they actually look like letters. A lot of text and big pixel art portraits will actually have like random red and green pixels in there to basically blend together in the blur to cheat more colors than the palette can actually support, and, in the case of text, basically trick your eyes with different levels of contrast.
@@stevethepocket It is called over compensating. Fixing the slight blur issue by making it extra clear.
@@N8Dawgg314 They do the same thing for transparency effects, and as you mentioned, to add colors to the palette that would otherwise be out of reach. Shading is smoother to boot. It's just better on the technology it was designed for. Pixel perfect reproduction deteriorates the experience by removing those nuances.
It wasn't until halfway through the video of me staring at the top corner of the screen that I noticed the letters HP in the dark background