There are some things that you don’t realize you want until you actually have them, and for me this mobile port of Konami’s classic Castlevania: Symphony of the Night ($2.99) is one of them. This is one of my favorite games of all-time, one that I obsessed over for a couple of years following its release on the PlayStation in 1997. I found every item, uncovered every secret, and squeezed out every last percentage point of map exploration. I’ve replayed it time and again on various platforms and have written numerous pieces about it, with the most recent being less than a month ago.
Through all of this, I never really thought about having it on my iPhone. Why would Konami, a company that has traditionally been hot-and-cold with mobile, do something like that" Even when they were riding high on mobile, they mostly focused on new games rather than ports of classics. And would it even work" Symphony isn’t the most difficult of games, but it still requires quite a few buttons and some measure of dexterity in certain sections. We’ve all lived through Tomb Raider mapped to virtual buttons, and it wasn’t pretty. And how much would they charge for it, anyway" A bargain-bin buck like the aforementioned Tomb Raider, or a sassy twenty along the lines of Square Enix’s PlayStation RPG ports"
Well, here we are. Seemingly thanks to the third season of Netflix’s Castlevania animated series, Konami dropped a mobile port...