![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yukie((crossposted from LJ; I feel like archiving this here too.))
Yeah, at a loss of a better title so let's be the DC Tribute Band!
I haven't put a big nerdy informal fandom-y essay up in a while (I'm still working at the meme post, don't worry ^^) so I figured hey, why not.
Hokay. So.Here's de erfno no no no wrong introductory sentence. *donk* Most people are probably familiar with Super Castlevania 4, even if they haven't played it. Released in 1991, ostensibly the fourth game in the series (it's actually the seventh released game), oddly marketed as a sequel to the original Castlevania though in actuality it's a re-imagining of that game.
Weirdness 1: The English opening title crawl makes it seem as if Simon's been around for 100 years on account of some seriously funny wording. This isn't present in the Japanese one. There are other differences as well - you can find a list of them on Mr P's site, or here. But anyhow! No, Simon isn't 100 years old (we think XD) in Super Castlevania IV; if he were that'd put the game in 1791 and then we'd have Richter and Simon squabbling over the map trying to work out how best to proceed and Simon calling Richter a young rapscallion1 and Richter snickering at that and then you'd have a large Belmont squabble that lasted the whole quest and no one wants that.
Ahem. Srs tiem nao. I promise.
THAR BE SPOILERS HYARR for SCV4, CV2 and 3, and CoD among other games. So yeah.
Simon bears the distinction of being the Belmont whose game is/was most often remade, and whose hair colour is the most mutable2 - he's been a blond, a brunet, black (blue?)-haired, and redheaded. It's the redhead design that sticks in my brain most (I have a thing for Kojima) but YMMV. He's probably the most familiar Belmont, though Richter and Trevor are up there too. Simon cameos in a ton of games, and he gets the most action figures (though, alas, none of them are great). He's also something of a tabula-rasa. The only things we know about his personality, we have to deduce by ourselves. He's determined, that's for damn sure, and brave (going to kick Dracula's ghost in the harbl while he's literally dying by inches form a curse - yeah, that takes serious chutzpah there), but not foolhardy - he's smart enough to be a bit concerned about Dracula's power level (this is taken from the SCV4 Japanese manual), but that doesn't stop him trying. From Kojima's depiction of him, and other art, we know he's got that hot-blooded thing going, and no shortage of confidence. The Captain N cartoon influenced some people's views of Simon, so I've heard people say they imagine Simon as having a slight vain streak, though nothing near as ridiculous as Lt. South Burning lookalike Simon. (Aside: IGA, you could have cashed in on Western nostalgia a lot by making Simon be the swaggery one in Castlenote Justasplanned. His design suggests that he, more than Trevor, has a bit of an ego on him. He looks like a J-Rocker, whereas Trevor just kind of looks like he lost a fight with Lulu and Xigbar's respective closets. XD) In short, Simon is who the player decides he is based on their own interpretations, for the most part. My observations about him here are based on my own deductions, and the opinions of others that I've heard or discussed. I don't disagree with the views of anyone I know, because any and all of us can be right. I'd probably snorf cola if I ever read something where Simon's just an utter jackass, or a cruel person, because Belmonts AREN'T - they're the opposite of Drac, compassionate where he's ruthess, accepting where he's intolerant, forgiving where he kills 'em all for the lulz (or evulz, if you will).
This semi-blank-slate thing is part of what makes SCV4 as effective as it is.
Effective at what?
Well, at conveying a sense of solitude, or even loneliness. Isolation.
Mr P says that SCV4 is "competely silent". He's right. Sure, there are sound effects aplenty (and good ones - listen to the water-flow-reverse noise in the aqueduct, or the noise the coins make in the treasure room), ambient noises and ambient music - which I'll discuss in a bit - but there is no dialogue. CV2 had spoken dialogue in text; so did CV3. SCV4 has - nothing like that. Simon isn't spoken to by anyone; he has no one to talk to. This is, in a way, worse than even those annoying Drac fanboy goons in CV2 who give you crappy info to screw you over. Yeah, they're annoying Drac fanboy goons, and yeah, they really think it'd be awesome if Simon fucking snuffed it and Dracula bodyjacked him to resurrect (this is only hinted at in the NA CV2, but the JP version does NOT beat around the bush - you, Simon, are Dracula's intended vessel) but they are people and you can talk to them. Of course, there's nobody out at night but zombies - this is a nice contrast. In daylight, you have contacts. At night, you don't. It makes sense.
In contrast, the farm you start out at in SCV4 is abandoned. It's a deserted area. There WERE people here, and not too long ago, but they've all bailed out on account of Vlad. There were people here, and now there are not. You will not see another living person throughout the whole game. Sure, there are humanlike enemies - Frankenstein, the waltzing ghosts, the armour knights, Drac himself - but Simon is the only ordinary (kinda) human being in the game. No one to talk to, nothing to say. Simon is one guy, and he is alone.
Creepily there is evidence of another human being having been in the palace and having failed it. In the rotating room, the one where you have to hook onto the little ring and wait, you will see a little skellington on the spike floor (or sploor, if you will - sorry, stole that blatantly off MalusCalibur, stopping). This is not one of Dracula's frisky little bonechuckers. This was a person! Now he is dead! He has been dead for an indeterminate amount of time! (It's hard to say how long. Maybe he's been there since the 1470s and he just vanishes and rematerializes with the palace; maybe he's a recent casualty and critters et his non-bony bits - ew uh, getting off this train of thought...) So yeah. There was another living person here, but he failed it. Drac 1, skeleton guy 0. Watch your ass, Simon.
Incidentally the rotating room has some seriously unnerving sound effects. The damn thing creaks. Oil the gears, Dracula, you lazy ass! ...Uh. Yes. right. Segue - sound effects and music. I fansqueed at the sound effects a bit above, and now I'll do so at length. Ditto the music. You can hear both for yourself if you look up any LP on youtube (Turmio1 and Valis77's are especially good for being hilarious). Sound and music have a lot to do with gaming, and 'Vania has been badass with regard to both since the beginning. I mentioned the reversing-water-flow noise from the latter half of stage 2 - it really is GOOD, very splooshy for the SNES sound chip. Valis77 said it made him thirsty; one friend of mine said it made her have to pee. The jingly coin sounds in the treasury stand out as well, as does the collapsing floor at the end of the Long Library stage.(As an aside, for some reason, that floor failing just freaks me out. It just seems very PLANNED. Damn it Dracula.) The sound effects rock.
The music is amazing. It's not like the music in the other games for the most part; the closest comparisons I can really think of from other games are Anxiety and Nightmare from CV3, and some of the HoD soundtrack's more ambient themes. SCV4 has very atmospheric music. it's more ambient than it is thematic (for all the sense that makes). It's not 'elevator music' by far, but it's more as if the music is part of the scenery. I don't know if that makes any sense either. Anyhow. SCV4 has a completely different musical feel than do its predecessors, and its successors. While it's true that Bloody Tears shows up in the Clock Tower, and that Simon's trademark theme plays in the first stage, they have that same ethereal kind of quality as the rest of the music. Even Room of Close Associates, which starts off with this thunderous harpsichord of doom, and the chandelier room theme, are more like setpieces than theme music. This doesn't make the soundtrack of SCV4 any worse than that of the other games, or any better, but it is very different. This ambiance, too, contributes to the whole one-guy-against-all-odds feeling. Even the music is kind of distant from you. Simon has a theme song, but it's not this pomp-and-circumstance thing. It's stately, and definitely hopeful, but Simon does not have an epic marching band or full orchestra going. Compare the SCV4 music to the original CV, or to the Sharp X68000 soundtrack, or to Fujimori Sota's remix work for Chronicles. It's a very different set of tunes following Simon around in SCV4. I don't quite have the right vocabulary to spell out why and how it's different, but have a listen for yourself and you'll get my drift.
Speaking of scenery and setpieces, I think the colour themes and colour choices in the game add to the solitary feeling of it. Curse of Darkness brought back a little bit of this - there are not very many saturated colours, and you get the feeling that you're wandering around in the late evening and at night. Why? Well, we don't see saturated colour at night; it's not stupid or bad when games show bright red tapestries in the night even though we don't see red too well in the dark, but avoiding those colours or desaturating them adds to the immersion factor because it makes the surroundings close to our perceptions of how they would/should be, if we were standing behind Hector or Simon. The desaturation also puts me in mind of plants that are fading, or things worn down and neglected. Where Dracula pops up, badness follows. He tends to curse things, places, and people; where the curse settles in, things go into decline: land, prosperity, sanity. Walking around in a world where not everything is extremely colourful - and where Simon himself is coloured in such a way that fits the general palette for the entire game - feels different than walking around in Rondo's world. The catacombs in SotN have a similar colour harmony and theme to SCV4. Greens, browns, earth and stone colours. SCV4 is hardly a world without colour, though. Look at the stage that leads to the castle entrance. Beautiful greens, and some lovely foreground/background contrast (this, again, adds to the immersion thing). The SNES wasn't as limited in palette as was the NES; the crew who'd go on to become Treasure! didn't have to keep Simon's colours close-ish to the background and scenery and setting palettes. They did, however, because this means Simon exists as a part of the world he's walking around in. The NES games had a Simon whose palette was similar to his surroundings because of graphical limitation; SCV4 is different. Note that Simon does not get lost in the background in either game, though. While he's a part of this reality, he doesn't blend in. Since he doesn't blend in or fit in, by extension, he has nowhere to hide.
I really like the colour choices in SCV4. I think they're amazing, and that the scenery is beautiful. Plus, choosing more unsaturated and earthy colors much of the time means that Simon, with his warm skin tone and blue-silver armour, stands out. You don't lose him. He doesn't stick out like whoa and look alien compared to his surroundings, but he's distinct. CV3 sees this happen with Trevor - he's coloured in earth tones but does not get lost in his surroundings because of HOW the colours are used. (Kojima kept this in his CoD design, and kept where his clothing is darker and lighter with respect to his sprite, which is why he reads as 'Trevor' much more there and in his SotN doppelganger's sprite than he does in many other redesigns I've seen. Like that one image where he's got the silver breastplate and red scarf - it's COOL, but doesn't have a lot of relation to Trevor in-game, and Obata's Trevor has no contrast. Whether it's due to digital limitations (some colours and variances do not come across when scanned, no matter how you fiddle with things - I know this from experience) or poor colour choices, I don't know. But Obata gives us a rather monochromatic Trevor whose colours look muddy to me - like what happens when you try to watercolour when your rinse water is dirty (or if you were daft like me and stuck your brush in your teacup without thinking). And before anyone gets up my nose and says Trevor always was one shade of tan/brown in CV3: no, he wasn't. Those are three distinct colours. A deep brown, a red-brown, and a tan. Kojima's colour scheme is slightly different: tan, dark brown, and a warm grey, BUT every colour is distinct. Judgment-Trevor appears to be expecting something more like the Rebellion of 1857 in India. Between the choice of skin tone for him and the strange lack of variance in the shades of brown, it comes across like all the other markers ran out and Obata was like SHIIIIT--. When things are almost exact but not quite, our brains get irritated. If two colours are almost exact but not quite, it doesn't register as variety, but monotony. It gets even more complicated if you're dealing with hereditary colour-blindness or deficiency.) Simon's skin tone also gives him a very strong LIVING PERSON HERE marker. Dracula, in contrast, is bluish-grey. The ghosts are peach in complexion...but they're also TRANSLUCENT. They flicker in and out. They are not here. Simon is very much present in reality - his blink effect when he chugs the invisibility potion is different from the ghosts' flickering. Simon belongs in this setting but he is set apart.
(As a side note, no, I do not hate Takeshi Obata and want him to die. I liked his HikaGo and DN designs. However, his Judgment ones are not up to scratch at all. Hence my yowling. When you know an artist can do better and they cop out - looking at you too, Nomura - it's annoying. I'm not the only one I know with this opinion either. The consensus among CV-fan friends of mine seems to be 'they're nice designs but not for Castlevania.' The way the characters dress and present themselves has little to do with any of their prior incarnations - no, I do not expect exact copying, I will burn your straw-man now, but if a design diverges too much from its predecessors then we stop reading it as/relating it to that character (KH2 Kairi veers into this territory, since Nomura switched her theme colour from purple to pink and completely changed the general feel and design of her clothing) - or who they are supposed to be in personality. Judgment Trevor doesn't look like he's going to be all Captain N. He looks confident and a bit cocky, but not like a raging egotist. Simon, however, looks a bit more like your typical punkass young know-it-all wise-ass (I'm not trying to be nasty here - I WAS THAT KIND OF PERSON AT THE AGE SIMON IS SUPPOSED TO BE). From his stance to his clothing, that's the impression you get. ...Anyhow. I found it very interesting that I was not the only one who thought Trevor looked more like a Grant-type, or that Sypha was supposed to be Yoko, or that Shanoa might have been Tera. Two guys I know have capslocked to me that Maria is wearing entirely the wrong pink and that they are going blind from the magenta and what the fuck is up with the staff. I quote one dude here: "How fucking difficult is it to make projectiles in a fighting game. DARKSTALKERS? STREETFIGHTER? ANYONE? BUELLER? GUILTY GEAR?" tl;dr less than a year isn't enough time to make a game that works the way it's supposed to. And there's no excuse for animating neither Dracula's robe nor the wings of Maria's owl in a cut-scene, or for the Weird Floating Simon Effect (I suspect this is caused by a lighting error in rendering). I get annoyed at SaGa Frontier for the same 'FUCKING WHY DID YOU NOT FINISH IT PROPERLY?' reasons. Looking at YOU, Bleu's ending.)
Okay, now that the SEGUE THE SIZE OF GALAMOTH is done with! Colours: important! Colour choices: can make or break design! In the case of SCV4, it made it. The cooler desaturated colours have the effect of making the higher-key and saturated and light colours really POP. You can see how it works here. Look how the gold rings in the clock tower stick out. How the deep indigo sky and the green moss on the ledge below the lockface jump out from the greys and metal colours. How that BLOODY DAMN SPIKY GEAR stands out against the sandstone coloured wall - and how it's so similar in colour to Simon. That relates the two, and enhances the OH FUCK IT'S AFTER ME of the thing. Some of the glittery bits in the treasury are purple - the complement to gold. That makes them stand out and makes the bling look blingier. How blue the water is in stage 3 at the end. Those beautiful greens in stage 1, 2 and 5. How Drac himself has similar colouring to the room in the castle keep, and that sudden flare of warm colours when he cape-flings fireballs at you. (Geeky aside: it's this version of Dracula who partially inspired Kinoko Nasu's Night of Wallachia; the other inspiration for Wala-kun is Castlevania: Legends Alucard.) The colour design of the game is amazing. Hell, even the conversion of the blood in the JP stage 8 to poison in the NA version doesn't wreck the look of the stage since both red and green pop out from the background very well. I'm hard pressed to say which I like better. The blood is certainly creepy, but the poisonous water makes the dungeon seem darker - again, this is because we don't see bright reds in low light. We can see greens and blues long after the l-o-n-g wavelengths of light that we need to perceive red have gone the way of the sunset.
I honestly class SCV4 up with FF6 in the 'god that's pretty' category of SNES games. Hell, the atmosphere in SCV4 puts me strongly in mind of the World of Ruin, in many ways. Simon is not native to this joint. he is a stranger - even an intruder - and everything treats him like that. The only place he's WELCOME is the dungeon.
It seems.
Oddly, there are doors and gates that open for Simon. I was confused by this until I recalled Alucard's 'creature of chaos' remark in SotN. If the castle is an extension of Dracula's will and magic, then wouldn't it stand to reason that blood spilled in the castle is as good to him as blood he's actually nommed from someone's carotid? Therefore, allowing hunters into the castle can only benefit him! (Dracula is an egotist and we know this; he doesn't consider that someone will MAKE IT to own him for the most part.) And, hell, if Belmont snuffs it en route, he gets THAT blood. Things allowing Simon access also kind of enhance the creepy intimacy level between Dracula and Simon. ...Stop running, damn you, bear with me here. Drac is not afraid to get up close and personal with Belmonts. We know this. He abducts Annette to piss Richter off and then messes with Richter's brain using Shaft as a proxy, tries to curse Christopher's son Soleil into fighting on HIS side, partially-possesses Maxim and asshats at Juste, attempts to claw Trevor's eyeball out3 and shanks him by proxy by possessing Isaac (you CANNOT TELL ME that 'enough talk' business wasn't an anvil hint - and watch Trevor's face before and after he makes eye contact with apparently-Isaac), gives Julius amnesia (though that might've been by mistake)...but Simon - ah, Simon is the only Belmont whom Dracula actively seeks to take over. I shit you not, my friends. Some transations heavily imply that the curse on Simon's back injury is supposed to make him die so Dracula can inhabit the body when Simon's soul rings up the curtain and joins the choir invisible.
...Give me a second to stop twitching.
(...Dracula has a thing about redheads, doesn't he? Simon, Isaac - )
Uh yeah. Look at me run a tangent from HELL!
SCV4 does what it does VERY well. It doesn't have the phenomenal music or multiple paths of CV3 or the free-roaming capability of CV2. But that doesn't mean it's without merit. Of all the 'Vanias, it's one of the most atmospheric - hell, it's one of the most atmospheric games I've seen, and that does include modern console ones - and it does the best job I've seen thus far of making you aware of how alone you-as-Simon are against Dracula and his cronies. That feeling returns in some parts of AoS, and the Cordova level of CoD strikes me as a spiritual heir to SCV4, with the unsaturated colours occasionally spiked with saturated or high-key ones.4 SCV4 does show its age now, but it's still a very good game. It'd be awesome if Simon's Tarzan impressions returned in later games (LoI tried but it kinda - ehn) and the eight-direction wipping rocks. The only thing I find odd is that Simon jumps like a very graceful brick - it's very odd to contrast his stoic, steady pace to his agile jumping, and when I try to play it's like FAIL. I make the same errors with him as I do when I try to play as Grant (password skipping is FUN XD I am such a fail gamer, oh god, but CV3 is sadistically hard) - LEAP INTO SPAAAAACE ohgodwhy. FGSFDS aside, and silliness, it's a lovely game, and am amazingly atmospheric game. You do not need VA work and dialogue and hints o' anvil to build atmosphere. SCV4 proves that. If I wanted to point out a game that really drives home the aloneness of the player, I'd flail at this one. Without SCV4, we wouldn't have similar phenomena in Resident Evil - you are one and they are many and you are human and they are not and they all want to eat you. And you are alone.
Loneliness can be terrifying, but it can also be tranquil, and SCV4 plays this amazing balance between the two. On the one hand it all wants to eat you, but in the moments of respite you see the beauty of this place you're fighting for. It's kind of amazing, and it makes the game stand out. For sheer immersiveness, only SotN stands out as better, just because it's so fucking ridiculously good. (SotN also likes owning you with reverse dramatic irony. "WhAT THE FUCK ANOTHER CASTLE!?" and YOU didn't know about it, but Richter did, and Alucard seems unhappy about it but resigned o it, like he was afraid this would happen.) But nothing that came after SCV4 could have really been the way it is without that game. So yes. Fangirling of it: I does some.
---
1 Oyaji Leatherdaddy Rescuer of Kittens Simon is a denizen of Kyl's brain XD ILU Kyl.
2 Eric Lecarde runs a close second; Alucard ties with him - the black hair doesn't totally count since as Genya he's probably dyeing it, but the funny purple of Castlevania: Legends does.
3 This is one of the reasons I tend to write disregarding the retcon; if Trevor has the same eyes as Adrian, OR LISA, Dracula would be extremely fucking pissy.
4 As an interesting aside, Hector really stands out in CoD because of his blue. So does Trevor - his earthtones are quite different from those around him - but Hector is very sticky-out. The red sash ties (hurr hurrr notfunny) him to his past with Drac, since red and black are heavily associated with Drac - and to contrast, Isaac's completely coloured red and black (or dark brown, depending on how bright your screen is). ...It kind of surprises me how many people don't seem to see the anvil hints about who's really pulling the strings. Whether Isaac is entirely possessed or not is up to interpretation, but for me the signs point to 'yes'. Watch him in the scene with Trevor. Watch carefully. He does not talk with his hands like usual. He has very little vocal inflection. He drops that 'enough talk' when he catches himself monologuing. Trevor goes from 'oh shut the eff up XP' to '...ohfuckfuckfuckfuck D:' in expression not after the dagger gets jiggled, but after he makes eye contact with the person who is apparently Isaac. If the eyes are the window to the soul - well, how would YOU react if you looked at someone expecting THEM and saw someone else looking back from their face? More hint dropping happens in the second battle with Isaac. Abel, who's Isaac's strongest familiar and his close companion, is nowhere to be seen. Trevor got him a good one with daggers before that fight, but healing him is a matter of getting hearts, isn't it? Well, if Abel is loyal to ISAAC, he may not obey anyone else. Also telling is the bizarre inconsistency in Isaac's movements. In the Cordova battle he jumps around like a dragoon on crack, tries to jump on you, laughs his little red head off - and then suddenly in the second battle you get these strange intervals. Oh, he still jumps around like a dragoon on crack, but he sometimes loses his preoccupation with keeping enemies at a distance. This happens after a particular animation. On occasion you'll see him do this arched-back thing that looks like a grounded cross-crush pose. After doing this, he will start very very s-l-o-w-l-y stalking. After. Hector. When I first saw that it scared the shit out of me. That doesn't look like anything we've seen Isaac do before, ever. The final anvil hint, to me, comes with his low-energy attack. He'll grab Hector and start draining his HP at an alarming rate. I've never seen this attack clearly, he was always way across the arena when he did it to Hector in JDub's game, but I've heard some gamers say it looks like biting. Compare this to Drac going NOM NOM NOM on your guy in his first stage and you have the reason why I flail a lot. Hell, Hector even spells it out for us. 'Isaac's madness and Rosaly's death were caused by Dracula', verbatim. We see Hector freak out when Drac starts getting into HIS head, and his stabbiness and sudden disregard for honourable tactics...and now I can hear people going WATE WUT ISAAC HAS HONOUR? Yes, yes he does (though in a very wacked out way), he wants a REAL fight with Hector and sets things up so that a fair fight is possible, and in Kojima's Prelude to Revenge comic he brings TWO swords to the duel, not just one. In spite of their boss, these guys are knights. A common theme in a lot of manga featuring samurai is 'once knight, always knight' and the way Isaac defers to Drac is extremely reminiscent of the famous bushidou code. He does not want to go kill his friend, but since his daimyo wants it, etc. He's not BLAMELESS and certainly not a woobie, fuck, claiming that would make me all kind of on crack - a lot of traditional lore about possession posits that it cannot truly occur unless the host is willing and allows it. Which Isaac would, and probably did. Not an innocent woobie, but not the mastermind or wirepuller by a long shot. You can even tell that by looking at the name of his main ID, and by looking at his own name. Think biblical: Genesis and then Abraham.
LONGEST FOOTNOTE IN THE WORLD.
In closing I really fucking hate the birds.
Yeah, at a loss of a better title so let's be the DC Tribute Band!
I haven't put a big nerdy informal fandom-y essay up in a while (I'm still working at the meme post, don't worry ^^) so I figured hey, why not.
Hokay. So.
Weirdness 1: The English opening title crawl makes it seem as if Simon's been around for 100 years on account of some seriously funny wording. This isn't present in the Japanese one. There are other differences as well - you can find a list of them on Mr P's site, or here. But anyhow! No, Simon isn't 100 years old (we think XD) in Super Castlevania IV; if he were that'd put the game in 1791 and then we'd have Richter and Simon squabbling over the map trying to work out how best to proceed and Simon calling Richter a young rapscallion1 and Richter snickering at that and then you'd have a large Belmont squabble that lasted the whole quest and no one wants that.
Ahem. Srs tiem nao. I promise.
THAR BE SPOILERS HYARR for SCV4, CV2 and 3, and CoD among other games. So yeah.
Simon bears the distinction of being the Belmont whose game is/was most often remade, and whose hair colour is the most mutable2 - he's been a blond, a brunet, black (blue?)-haired, and redheaded. It's the redhead design that sticks in my brain most (I have a thing for Kojima) but YMMV. He's probably the most familiar Belmont, though Richter and Trevor are up there too. Simon cameos in a ton of games, and he gets the most action figures (though, alas, none of them are great). He's also something of a tabula-rasa. The only things we know about his personality, we have to deduce by ourselves. He's determined, that's for damn sure, and brave (going to kick Dracula's ghost in the harbl while he's literally dying by inches form a curse - yeah, that takes serious chutzpah there), but not foolhardy - he's smart enough to be a bit concerned about Dracula's power level (this is taken from the SCV4 Japanese manual), but that doesn't stop him trying. From Kojima's depiction of him, and other art, we know he's got that hot-blooded thing going, and no shortage of confidence. The Captain N cartoon influenced some people's views of Simon, so I've heard people say they imagine Simon as having a slight vain streak, though nothing near as ridiculous as Lt. South Burning lookalike Simon. (Aside: IGA, you could have cashed in on Western nostalgia a lot by making Simon be the swaggery one in Castlenote Justasplanned. His design suggests that he, more than Trevor, has a bit of an ego on him. He looks like a J-Rocker, whereas Trevor just kind of looks like he lost a fight with Lulu and Xigbar's respective closets. XD) In short, Simon is who the player decides he is based on their own interpretations, for the most part. My observations about him here are based on my own deductions, and the opinions of others that I've heard or discussed. I don't disagree with the views of anyone I know, because any and all of us can be right. I'd probably snorf cola if I ever read something where Simon's just an utter jackass, or a cruel person, because Belmonts AREN'T - they're the opposite of Drac, compassionate where he's ruthess, accepting where he's intolerant, forgiving where he kills 'em all for the lulz (or evulz, if you will).
This semi-blank-slate thing is part of what makes SCV4 as effective as it is.
Effective at what?
Well, at conveying a sense of solitude, or even loneliness. Isolation.
Mr P says that SCV4 is "competely silent". He's right. Sure, there are sound effects aplenty (and good ones - listen to the water-flow-reverse noise in the aqueduct, or the noise the coins make in the treasure room), ambient noises and ambient music - which I'll discuss in a bit - but there is no dialogue. CV2 had spoken dialogue in text; so did CV3. SCV4 has - nothing like that. Simon isn't spoken to by anyone; he has no one to talk to. This is, in a way, worse than even those annoying Drac fanboy goons in CV2 who give you crappy info to screw you over. Yeah, they're annoying Drac fanboy goons, and yeah, they really think it'd be awesome if Simon fucking snuffed it and Dracula bodyjacked him to resurrect (this is only hinted at in the NA CV2, but the JP version does NOT beat around the bush - you, Simon, are Dracula's intended vessel) but they are people and you can talk to them. Of course, there's nobody out at night but zombies - this is a nice contrast. In daylight, you have contacts. At night, you don't. It makes sense.
In contrast, the farm you start out at in SCV4 is abandoned. It's a deserted area. There WERE people here, and not too long ago, but they've all bailed out on account of Vlad. There were people here, and now there are not. You will not see another living person throughout the whole game. Sure, there are humanlike enemies - Frankenstein, the waltzing ghosts, the armour knights, Drac himself - but Simon is the only ordinary (kinda) human being in the game. No one to talk to, nothing to say. Simon is one guy, and he is alone.
Creepily there is evidence of another human being having been in the palace and having failed it. In the rotating room, the one where you have to hook onto the little ring and wait, you will see a little skellington on the spike floor (or sploor, if you will - sorry, stole that blatantly off MalusCalibur, stopping). This is not one of Dracula's frisky little bonechuckers. This was a person! Now he is dead! He has been dead for an indeterminate amount of time! (It's hard to say how long. Maybe he's been there since the 1470s and he just vanishes and rematerializes with the palace; maybe he's a recent casualty and critters et his non-bony bits - ew uh, getting off this train of thought...) So yeah. There was another living person here, but he failed it. Drac 1, skeleton guy 0. Watch your ass, Simon.
Incidentally the rotating room has some seriously unnerving sound effects. The damn thing creaks. Oil the gears, Dracula, you lazy ass! ...Uh. Yes. right. Segue - sound effects and music. I fansqueed at the sound effects a bit above, and now I'll do so at length. Ditto the music. You can hear both for yourself if you look up any LP on youtube (Turmio1 and Valis77's are especially good for being hilarious). Sound and music have a lot to do with gaming, and 'Vania has been badass with regard to both since the beginning. I mentioned the reversing-water-flow noise from the latter half of stage 2 - it really is GOOD, very splooshy for the SNES sound chip. Valis77 said it made him thirsty; one friend of mine said it made her have to pee. The jingly coin sounds in the treasury stand out as well, as does the collapsing floor at the end of the Long Library stage.(As an aside, for some reason, that floor failing just freaks me out. It just seems very PLANNED. Damn it Dracula.) The sound effects rock.
The music is amazing. It's not like the music in the other games for the most part; the closest comparisons I can really think of from other games are Anxiety and Nightmare from CV3, and some of the HoD soundtrack's more ambient themes. SCV4 has very atmospheric music. it's more ambient than it is thematic (for all the sense that makes). It's not 'elevator music' by far, but it's more as if the music is part of the scenery. I don't know if that makes any sense either. Anyhow. SCV4 has a completely different musical feel than do its predecessors, and its successors. While it's true that Bloody Tears shows up in the Clock Tower, and that Simon's trademark theme plays in the first stage, they have that same ethereal kind of quality as the rest of the music. Even Room of Close Associates, which starts off with this thunderous harpsichord of doom, and the chandelier room theme, are more like setpieces than theme music. This doesn't make the soundtrack of SCV4 any worse than that of the other games, or any better, but it is very different. This ambiance, too, contributes to the whole one-guy-against-all-odds feeling. Even the music is kind of distant from you. Simon has a theme song, but it's not this pomp-and-circumstance thing. It's stately, and definitely hopeful, but Simon does not have an epic marching band or full orchestra going. Compare the SCV4 music to the original CV, or to the Sharp X68000 soundtrack, or to Fujimori Sota's remix work for Chronicles. It's a very different set of tunes following Simon around in SCV4. I don't quite have the right vocabulary to spell out why and how it's different, but have a listen for yourself and you'll get my drift.
Speaking of scenery and setpieces, I think the colour themes and colour choices in the game add to the solitary feeling of it. Curse of Darkness brought back a little bit of this - there are not very many saturated colours, and you get the feeling that you're wandering around in the late evening and at night. Why? Well, we don't see saturated colour at night; it's not stupid or bad when games show bright red tapestries in the night even though we don't see red too well in the dark, but avoiding those colours or desaturating them adds to the immersion factor because it makes the surroundings close to our perceptions of how they would/should be, if we were standing behind Hector or Simon. The desaturation also puts me in mind of plants that are fading, or things worn down and neglected. Where Dracula pops up, badness follows. He tends to curse things, places, and people; where the curse settles in, things go into decline: land, prosperity, sanity. Walking around in a world where not everything is extremely colourful - and where Simon himself is coloured in such a way that fits the general palette for the entire game - feels different than walking around in Rondo's world. The catacombs in SotN have a similar colour harmony and theme to SCV4. Greens, browns, earth and stone colours. SCV4 is hardly a world without colour, though. Look at the stage that leads to the castle entrance. Beautiful greens, and some lovely foreground/background contrast (this, again, adds to the immersion thing). The SNES wasn't as limited in palette as was the NES; the crew who'd go on to become Treasure! didn't have to keep Simon's colours close-ish to the background and scenery and setting palettes. They did, however, because this means Simon exists as a part of the world he's walking around in. The NES games had a Simon whose palette was similar to his surroundings because of graphical limitation; SCV4 is different. Note that Simon does not get lost in the background in either game, though. While he's a part of this reality, he doesn't blend in. Since he doesn't blend in or fit in, by extension, he has nowhere to hide.
I really like the colour choices in SCV4. I think they're amazing, and that the scenery is beautiful. Plus, choosing more unsaturated and earthy colors much of the time means that Simon, with his warm skin tone and blue-silver armour, stands out. You don't lose him. He doesn't stick out like whoa and look alien compared to his surroundings, but he's distinct. CV3 sees this happen with Trevor - he's coloured in earth tones but does not get lost in his surroundings because of HOW the colours are used. (Kojima kept this in his CoD design, and kept where his clothing is darker and lighter with respect to his sprite, which is why he reads as 'Trevor' much more there and in his SotN doppelganger's sprite than he does in many other redesigns I've seen. Like that one image where he's got the silver breastplate and red scarf - it's COOL, but doesn't have a lot of relation to Trevor in-game, and Obata's Trevor has no contrast. Whether it's due to digital limitations (some colours and variances do not come across when scanned, no matter how you fiddle with things - I know this from experience) or poor colour choices, I don't know. But Obata gives us a rather monochromatic Trevor whose colours look muddy to me - like what happens when you try to watercolour when your rinse water is dirty (or if you were daft like me and stuck your brush in your teacup without thinking). And before anyone gets up my nose and says Trevor always was one shade of tan/brown in CV3: no, he wasn't. Those are three distinct colours. A deep brown, a red-brown, and a tan. Kojima's colour scheme is slightly different: tan, dark brown, and a warm grey, BUT every colour is distinct. Judgment-Trevor appears to be expecting something more like the Rebellion of 1857 in India. Between the choice of skin tone for him and the strange lack of variance in the shades of brown, it comes across like all the other markers ran out and Obata was like SHIIIIT--. When things are almost exact but not quite, our brains get irritated. If two colours are almost exact but not quite, it doesn't register as variety, but monotony. It gets even more complicated if you're dealing with hereditary colour-blindness or deficiency.) Simon's skin tone also gives him a very strong LIVING PERSON HERE marker. Dracula, in contrast, is bluish-grey. The ghosts are peach in complexion...but they're also TRANSLUCENT. They flicker in and out. They are not here. Simon is very much present in reality - his blink effect when he chugs the invisibility potion is different from the ghosts' flickering. Simon belongs in this setting but he is set apart.
(As a side note, no, I do not hate Takeshi Obata and want him to die. I liked his HikaGo and DN designs. However, his Judgment ones are not up to scratch at all. Hence my yowling. When you know an artist can do better and they cop out - looking at you too, Nomura - it's annoying. I'm not the only one I know with this opinion either. The consensus among CV-fan friends of mine seems to be 'they're nice designs but not for Castlevania.' The way the characters dress and present themselves has little to do with any of their prior incarnations - no, I do not expect exact copying, I will burn your straw-man now, but if a design diverges too much from its predecessors then we stop reading it as/relating it to that character (KH2 Kairi veers into this territory, since Nomura switched her theme colour from purple to pink and completely changed the general feel and design of her clothing) - or who they are supposed to be in personality. Judgment Trevor doesn't look like he's going to be all Captain N. He looks confident and a bit cocky, but not like a raging egotist. Simon, however, looks a bit more like your typical punkass young know-it-all wise-ass (I'm not trying to be nasty here - I WAS THAT KIND OF PERSON AT THE AGE SIMON IS SUPPOSED TO BE). From his stance to his clothing, that's the impression you get. ...Anyhow. I found it very interesting that I was not the only one who thought Trevor looked more like a Grant-type, or that Sypha was supposed to be Yoko, or that Shanoa might have been Tera. Two guys I know have capslocked to me that Maria is wearing entirely the wrong pink and that they are going blind from the magenta and what the fuck is up with the staff. I quote one dude here: "How fucking difficult is it to make projectiles in a fighting game. DARKSTALKERS? STREETFIGHTER? ANYONE? BUELLER? GUILTY GEAR?" tl;dr less than a year isn't enough time to make a game that works the way it's supposed to. And there's no excuse for animating neither Dracula's robe nor the wings of Maria's owl in a cut-scene, or for the Weird Floating Simon Effect (I suspect this is caused by a lighting error in rendering). I get annoyed at SaGa Frontier for the same 'FUCKING WHY DID YOU NOT FINISH IT PROPERLY?' reasons. Looking at YOU, Bleu's ending.)
Okay, now that the SEGUE THE SIZE OF GALAMOTH is done with! Colours: important! Colour choices: can make or break design! In the case of SCV4, it made it. The cooler desaturated colours have the effect of making the higher-key and saturated and light colours really POP. You can see how it works here. Look how the gold rings in the clock tower stick out. How the deep indigo sky and the green moss on the ledge below the lockface jump out from the greys and metal colours. How that BLOODY DAMN SPIKY GEAR stands out against the sandstone coloured wall - and how it's so similar in colour to Simon. That relates the two, and enhances the OH FUCK IT'S AFTER ME of the thing. Some of the glittery bits in the treasury are purple - the complement to gold. That makes them stand out and makes the bling look blingier. How blue the water is in stage 3 at the end. Those beautiful greens in stage 1, 2 and 5. How Drac himself has similar colouring to the room in the castle keep, and that sudden flare of warm colours when he cape-flings fireballs at you. (Geeky aside: it's this version of Dracula who partially inspired Kinoko Nasu's Night of Wallachia; the other inspiration for Wala-kun is Castlevania: Legends Alucard.) The colour design of the game is amazing. Hell, even the conversion of the blood in the JP stage 8 to poison in the NA version doesn't wreck the look of the stage since both red and green pop out from the background very well. I'm hard pressed to say which I like better. The blood is certainly creepy, but the poisonous water makes the dungeon seem darker - again, this is because we don't see bright reds in low light. We can see greens and blues long after the l-o-n-g wavelengths of light that we need to perceive red have gone the way of the sunset.
I honestly class SCV4 up with FF6 in the 'god that's pretty' category of SNES games. Hell, the atmosphere in SCV4 puts me strongly in mind of the World of Ruin, in many ways. Simon is not native to this joint. he is a stranger - even an intruder - and everything treats him like that. The only place he's WELCOME is the dungeon.
It seems.
Oddly, there are doors and gates that open for Simon. I was confused by this until I recalled Alucard's 'creature of chaos' remark in SotN. If the castle is an extension of Dracula's will and magic, then wouldn't it stand to reason that blood spilled in the castle is as good to him as blood he's actually nommed from someone's carotid? Therefore, allowing hunters into the castle can only benefit him! (Dracula is an egotist and we know this; he doesn't consider that someone will MAKE IT to own him for the most part.) And, hell, if Belmont snuffs it en route, he gets THAT blood. Things allowing Simon access also kind of enhance the creepy intimacy level between Dracula and Simon. ...Stop running, damn you, bear with me here. Drac is not afraid to get up close and personal with Belmonts. We know this. He abducts Annette to piss Richter off and then messes with Richter's brain using Shaft as a proxy, tries to curse Christopher's son Soleil into fighting on HIS side, partially-possesses Maxim and asshats at Juste, attempts to claw Trevor's eyeball out3 and shanks him by proxy by possessing Isaac (you CANNOT TELL ME that 'enough talk' business wasn't an anvil hint - and watch Trevor's face before and after he makes eye contact with apparently-Isaac), gives Julius amnesia (though that might've been by mistake)...but Simon - ah, Simon is the only Belmont whom Dracula actively seeks to take over. I shit you not, my friends. Some transations heavily imply that the curse on Simon's back injury is supposed to make him die so Dracula can inhabit the body when Simon's soul rings up the curtain and joins the choir invisible.
...Give me a second to stop twitching.
(...Dracula has a thing about redheads, doesn't he? Simon, Isaac - )
Uh yeah. Look at me run a tangent from HELL!
SCV4 does what it does VERY well. It doesn't have the phenomenal music or multiple paths of CV3 or the free-roaming capability of CV2. But that doesn't mean it's without merit. Of all the 'Vanias, it's one of the most atmospheric - hell, it's one of the most atmospheric games I've seen, and that does include modern console ones - and it does the best job I've seen thus far of making you aware of how alone you-as-Simon are against Dracula and his cronies. That feeling returns in some parts of AoS, and the Cordova level of CoD strikes me as a spiritual heir to SCV4, with the unsaturated colours occasionally spiked with saturated or high-key ones.4 SCV4 does show its age now, but it's still a very good game. It'd be awesome if Simon's Tarzan impressions returned in later games (LoI tried but it kinda - ehn) and the eight-direction wipping rocks. The only thing I find odd is that Simon jumps like a very graceful brick - it's very odd to contrast his stoic, steady pace to his agile jumping, and when I try to play it's like FAIL. I make the same errors with him as I do when I try to play as Grant (password skipping is FUN XD I am such a fail gamer, oh god, but CV3 is sadistically hard) - LEAP INTO SPAAAAACE ohgodwhy. FGSFDS aside, and silliness, it's a lovely game, and am amazingly atmospheric game. You do not need VA work and dialogue and hints o' anvil to build atmosphere. SCV4 proves that. If I wanted to point out a game that really drives home the aloneness of the player, I'd flail at this one. Without SCV4, we wouldn't have similar phenomena in Resident Evil - you are one and they are many and you are human and they are not and they all want to eat you. And you are alone.
Loneliness can be terrifying, but it can also be tranquil, and SCV4 plays this amazing balance between the two. On the one hand it all wants to eat you, but in the moments of respite you see the beauty of this place you're fighting for. It's kind of amazing, and it makes the game stand out. For sheer immersiveness, only SotN stands out as better, just because it's so fucking ridiculously good. (SotN also likes owning you with reverse dramatic irony. "WhAT THE FUCK ANOTHER CASTLE!?" and YOU didn't know about it, but Richter did, and Alucard seems unhappy about it but resigned o it, like he was afraid this would happen.) But nothing that came after SCV4 could have really been the way it is without that game. So yes. Fangirling of it: I does some.
---
1 Oyaji Leatherdaddy Rescuer of Kittens Simon is a denizen of Kyl's brain XD ILU Kyl.
2 Eric Lecarde runs a close second; Alucard ties with him - the black hair doesn't totally count since as Genya he's probably dyeing it, but the funny purple of Castlevania: Legends does.
3 This is one of the reasons I tend to write disregarding the retcon; if Trevor has the same eyes as Adrian, OR LISA, Dracula would be extremely fucking pissy.
4 As an interesting aside, Hector really stands out in CoD because of his blue. So does Trevor - his earthtones are quite different from those around him - but Hector is very sticky-out. The red sash ties (hurr hurrr notfunny) him to his past with Drac, since red and black are heavily associated with Drac - and to contrast, Isaac's completely coloured red and black (or dark brown, depending on how bright your screen is). ...It kind of surprises me how many people don't seem to see the anvil hints about who's really pulling the strings. Whether Isaac is entirely possessed or not is up to interpretation, but for me the signs point to 'yes'. Watch him in the scene with Trevor. Watch carefully. He does not talk with his hands like usual. He has very little vocal inflection. He drops that 'enough talk' when he catches himself monologuing. Trevor goes from 'oh shut the eff up XP' to '...ohfuckfuckfuckfuck D:' in expression not after the dagger gets jiggled, but after he makes eye contact with the person who is apparently Isaac. If the eyes are the window to the soul - well, how would YOU react if you looked at someone expecting THEM and saw someone else looking back from their face? More hint dropping happens in the second battle with Isaac. Abel, who's Isaac's strongest familiar and his close companion, is nowhere to be seen. Trevor got him a good one with daggers before that fight, but healing him is a matter of getting hearts, isn't it? Well, if Abel is loyal to ISAAC, he may not obey anyone else. Also telling is the bizarre inconsistency in Isaac's movements. In the Cordova battle he jumps around like a dragoon on crack, tries to jump on you, laughs his little red head off - and then suddenly in the second battle you get these strange intervals. Oh, he still jumps around like a dragoon on crack, but he sometimes loses his preoccupation with keeping enemies at a distance. This happens after a particular animation. On occasion you'll see him do this arched-back thing that looks like a grounded cross-crush pose. After doing this, he will start very very s-l-o-w-l-y stalking. After. Hector. When I first saw that it scared the shit out of me. That doesn't look like anything we've seen Isaac do before, ever. The final anvil hint, to me, comes with his low-energy attack. He'll grab Hector and start draining his HP at an alarming rate. I've never seen this attack clearly, he was always way across the arena when he did it to Hector in JDub's game, but I've heard some gamers say it looks like biting. Compare this to Drac going NOM NOM NOM on your guy in his first stage and you have the reason why I flail a lot. Hell, Hector even spells it out for us. 'Isaac's madness and Rosaly's death were caused by Dracula', verbatim. We see Hector freak out when Drac starts getting into HIS head, and his stabbiness and sudden disregard for honourable tactics...and now I can hear people going WATE WUT ISAAC HAS HONOUR? Yes, yes he does (though in a very wacked out way), he wants a REAL fight with Hector and sets things up so that a fair fight is possible, and in Kojima's Prelude to Revenge comic he brings TWO swords to the duel, not just one. In spite of their boss, these guys are knights. A common theme in a lot of manga featuring samurai is 'once knight, always knight' and the way Isaac defers to Drac is extremely reminiscent of the famous bushidou code. He does not want to go kill his friend, but since his daimyo wants it, etc. He's not BLAMELESS and certainly not a woobie, fuck, claiming that would make me all kind of on crack - a lot of traditional lore about possession posits that it cannot truly occur unless the host is willing and allows it. Which Isaac would, and probably did. Not an innocent woobie, but not the mastermind or wirepuller by a long shot. You can even tell that by looking at the name of his main ID, and by looking at his own name. Think biblical: Genesis and then Abraham.
LONGEST FOOTNOTE IN THE WORLD.
In closing I really fucking hate the birds.
