Castlevania: Symphony of the Night/YMMV

Awesome Art: Even by Konami's standards, how excellently designed and detailed the sprite work in this game is could easily be considered to be absolutely unreal.
Awesome Music: Considered one of the best game soundtracks ever. The song at the entrance, "Dracula's Castle," is very popular.
- If you haven't heard (something as absurdly beautiful as) Lost Painting yet, then you quite-frankly haven't lived yet.
Broken Base: The English voice acting in this game is the most prominent aspect in this case. The PSP English voice work has this in spades as well... Is the PSP version's voice acting genuinely good and an unfortunate victim of the Nostalgia Filter from fans of the PS 1 version? Or did the PSP version try to take the game far too seriously? Or is it really not any better than the PS 1 version as they sound too generic? (At least the PS 1 version tried to sound a bit more European as just about everyone in the PSP version sounded too American.) It depends on what you felt about the voice work in the PS 1 version or if your a fan of Californian Anime English Dub VAs such as Yuri Lowenthal, Wendee Lee and Michelle Ruff. Voice acting aside, the game itself has this as well such as whether it should be praised or hated for being known as the cause of Metroidvania as a lot of other Castlevania games tried to be like Symphony of the Night, at the expense of the former deliberate action platformer style the series used to be known for. Egoraptor discussed the latter in his first Sequelitis video.
Demonic Spiders:
- Azaghal, the strongest sword enemy in the game, who not only is hard to hit, but will probably hit you during his knockback animation, dealing high (about 60-80 when you first meet him) damage.
- Valhalla Knights. Especially when you first encounter them in the Colosseum.
- Blue Venus Weed can also be this.
Disappointing Last Level: The second castle. The same background music plays in six different areas (see Ear Worm above), very little if any story happens here (save for the final two bosses), and the game suddenly goes from linear to having minimal sense of direction. Not to mention that you can snag some Game Breakers here on your first playthrough, given enough grinding for random drops.
Ear Worm: "The Final Toccata", the music for no less than six areas in the Reverse Castle.
Game Breaker: Many, many examples:
- The Crissaegrim, the Runesword, the Shield Rod + Alucard Shield combo, the Ring of Varda (which can only be obtained after beating the game at least once), Richter's Hydro Storm and so on.
- The Mourneblade and Sword of Dawn. Hell, yeah!
- The Beryl Circlet isn't a Game Breaker, but it is definitely a Bonus Boss Breaker.
- Even the lowly Iron Shield is used in conjunction with the Shield Rod on various Speedruns to make short work of bosses.
  - And the Iron Shield itself can render Alucard invincible for a few seconds when a projectile comes in contact with it.
- Alucard can throw three holy waters at a time. When used properly, this can kill bosses in under 30 seconds.
- The Osafune Katana has a special attack which does 2.6x the sword's normal damage, has great range, attacks a large area, and leaves Alucard invincible for its duration. And it's possible to repeat the attack just before the previous one concludes for potentially infinite invincibility.
Goddamned Bats: The stupid Gremlins and their fireballs, the Imps, the armored Fleamen...
Good Bad Bugs:
- When playing in 99 Luck mode, Alucard can skip the conversation with Death and keep his equipment. It seems that in the PSP version, you can do this simply by leaving the screen before the cutscene starts. You get the Shield Rod reasonably early in the first castle. This means you get to start owning bosses with the Alucard Shield combo early.
- By using the Sword Brothers spell in Master Librarian's room to enable them to open the menu while within the Librarian's menu, the player can use a glitch that may quickly maximize Alucard's money by selling him gem rings you no longer have, with negative numbers doing funny things when not anticipated by programmers, ending up with 255 of them and then selling those. This was one of the very few bugs actually fixed in the PSP version, unfortunately.
Good Bad Translation: The original translation appears to have been done by a mildly concussed Lord of the Rings fan with a very tenuous grasp of the English language.
Hype Backlash: While the game might not have originally been an example of this, people calling it an objectively better game than Super Metroid was a point at which even (quite a few of) its most die-hard fans began to "draw the line" with it.
- To elaborate further, SOTN (ignoring its utterly jaw-dropping graphics and music) is basically the "quantity" to SM's "quality" when it comes to actual gameplay design, and SM itself also has incredibly top-notch graphics and music anyway.
I Liked It Better When It Sucked: The PSP's redubbing changed the Narm Charm to So Okay It's Average. Not everyone was pleased.
It's Easy, So It Sucks: Even without the numerous Game Breakers, it is definitely the easiest in what was until then a Nintendo Hard series, annoying many long-term fans.
Just Here for Godzilla: Many people bought Dracula X Chronicles just for its built-in port of Symphony of the Night.
Memetic Mutation: Dracula's "What is a man?" speech, as well as Richter spamming Hydro Storm.

This game was disappointingly enjoyable.

Most Annoying Sound: PSHWPSHWPSHWPSHWPSHWPSHW! Boy, that Tin Man's annoying, huh? Plus, its high defense, ability to match your speed, and the fact that it's pretty much always attacking make it a tough cookie to silence. But you fought hard, and you finally shut the thing up! ...And then you enter the massive room filled with them.
Narm Charm: Plenty to go around. Its removal from the PSP port irked a few gamers.
Nausea Fuel: Was combined with Nightmare Fuel in order to create the game's Beelzebub incarnation, who is a downright-freakishly enormous rotting corpse that dangles from the ceiling of its room using meat hooks and is surrounded by also-gigantic flies.
Nightmare Fuel: Beelzebub and the True Final Boss form of Dracula. Also, the theme music of the Floating Catacombs.
Polished Port: The PSP had Maria as a playable character. This would apply to the Saturn version if it was not a Porting Disaster.
Porting Disaster: The Japan-only Saturn port attempted to add some extras to the game by making Maria playable and adding two new areas. Unfortunately the novelty of the new features are quickly canceled out by the actual quality of the port itself: the game suffers from constant slowdown when the screen is filled with enemies, most of the graphical transparency effects are lost, and the game loads before and after entering the transition rooms between areas (you know, those rooms that were there to lessen the loading times in the first place). This is because the game was a direct port. The game is built on a 3D engine (only noticeable in a few places like the Final Boss), and the Saturn had trouble handling 3D games. Do the math.
So Bad It's Good: The original voice acting had this going for it for quite a good chunk of the fans. IGA saw to this being averted in the PSP version. In an interview he admitted that though he may not know English even he could tell that the dub was horribly awkward.
So Cool It's Awesome: The game overall.
So Okay It's Average: The PSP voice acting.
That One Boss: Beelzebub can be trouble. He hangs from the ceiling, and is hard to attack because of it. His attacks involve summoning flies that do around 60 damage when they hit you and are annoying to dodge while trying to attack him due to how many there are.
They Copied It, So It Sucks: The game sometimes gets hit with this due to how blatantly it copied Super Metroid's formula.
Vindicated by History: This game had a very limited PS 1 release outside of Japan, so few people got to play it.