Castlevania: SotN Wiki

I’m sure other reviews have said this but the game is a great port and I’m looking forward to getting into it... as soon as they fix the awful controls (or lack thereof). You can’t just slap the imprint of an old school control controller, make its activation areas hypersensitive and call it a day. The game feels clunky, unresponsive and needlessly difficult with its current movement system. Please add controller support as well as on screen customization and button mapping. The left thumb movement pad should not be fixed. This alone would infinitely improve the game. It’ll get 5 stars once they update. Update: Still waiting for them to fix the controls. No reason not to given all the complaints. Second update: So I realized they really designed this to be used with an external controller. You need to buy a Bluetooth controller and download an app that allows you to customize your controllers input and locations. Something like ShootingPlusV3. With those two additional times this game was a real treat. I’m giving it 5 stars now. But really, they should have said something about using a controller!

I’ve been itching to play this game ever since I got into Aria of Sorrow, and this port of the original Symphony of the Night is amazing! I will say that the touch controls do seem (like many other games with touch controls) difficult. They work, but they aren’t comfortable. Playing with a controller though eliminates that problem. The one problem I DO have with using wireless controllers for this game is that the button to open your map is set to UP on the right joystick. The controller that I use doesn’t have joysticks (it’s just a d-pad, L/R, Start/Select, and the A/B/Y/X buttons), so it becomes annoying having to disconnect my controller to open the map from the touchscreen and then reconnect it to play comfortably. The select button doesn’t even do anything in this port, and I know that in previous Castlevania titles the select button served the sole purpose of opening the map. If Konami could fix that and remap the map button to select, then this game would be flawless (when used with a controller).

As many have already said, this is a great game and I was really happy to find it for 3 bucks. I use a ps4 controller anyways so this was perfect and the controller works real well. It feels like I’m playing the OG version but I can use the analog stick if I want (I won’t). The graphics all look the same, not sure why people need to nitpick a 20 year old game. The music is fine too, most of the Rome my phone is silent so who cares about the VO? I got rid of my PSP years ago and now I can finally lay SOTN again wherever I want. Seriously, it’s $3. If you can’t find than much money for a fun game with tons of gameplay, you probably shouldn’t be wasting your time playing phone games anyways. Maybe open a lemonade stand or mow lawns. My ONLY issue needs to be fixed for me to give this the full stars it deserves. Give me the map when I’m using a controller. That’s it. Edit: on the PS4 controller it is apparently using the right analog stick, not clicking it, just bumping it. So that’s ok.

This, for a long time, has been my favorite game of all time. Castlevania is my favorite game series and I was extremely excited for Season 3 of Castlevania the Netflix show. Little did I know, to celebrate, they were releasing my favorite game of all time on the phone! As soon as I saw it I was extremely skeptical, but I got it anyway and I have to say, this has been my favorite experience with this game and I have been playing it non stop since I got it. The best part is the update controls (special buttons for combos and transformations) and the new menu screen which is very organized and allows for extremely easy access of everything. I haven’t had any issues with frame rate or glitches or any problems, really. It’s been a perfect experience and I am extremely happy with the purchase and whether you are a new fan or an old fan I highly recommend spending the money on this game and completing it, you won’t be disappointed.

I am a 36 year old lady who has never written a game review in my life. I have been playing SOTN since I was about 11 years old, and have bought it on every playstation it has ever been available, and usually go back and play it all the way through once every couple of years. I saw this pop up in my App Store and the bad reviews truly made me sad and confused. Then I got to thinking about how hard it probably was to play on a touch screen so I started reading these comments. Some wonderful person mentioned that they play this game with their PS4 controller, and I had no idea you could even do that. So I connected my PS4 controller to my iPad and who knew?? This is officially my favorite platform to play this game as long as you have a controller!! It’s smooth and clear, and I just thank you so much for releasing it here!! My childhood lives on...

I have this game on both an iPhone X and a IPad Pro 3rd gen. Both play great and the visuals look incredibly crisp on both devices, but the IPad really shows the sharpness. It really was a pleasure to play the game, with all of its minute details and beautiful artwork, whenever on the go with this degree of visual quality. A lot of people really get on the touch screen controls. I don’t really find it to be much of an issue. It is definitely a bother at times but I rarely encountered areas where it was truly a hinderance. The controls are certainly better on a controller but the reality is that I rarely bring a controller with me so it isn’t practice for spontaneous playing. What I think the developers should implement is keyboard support for the IPad. This would make controls much more precise using something that I will have with me wherever I have my IPad. It may also allow the game to easily be available for M1 macs, something else I would love to play this game on. Overall, $3 for this game is a steal and worth playing for the first time or again.

The game is fun, challenging, and best of all, let’s you skip the story to just enjoy the exploration and hunting. A few irks: 1. The save system is really weird. I’ve saved, chosen rather explicitly the “overwrite data” option, and still found that my game wasn’t saved. The continue option seems to work as long as the app isn’t closed in the background, which is fine as long as you don’t switch to some other task / restart your phone. 2. The touch controls are terrible, to the point that it forced me to get a physical controller. My guess is that this was just a straight port from a console (I stopped following console systems when everything moved to Call of Duty clones a decade ago) with little to no exploration of how to make it more touch friendly. There are plenty of metroidvania games on iOS that have figured out touch controls. 3. When you die (and at least for me, I die frequently) I have to sit and watch a cheesy screen that seems like it was drawn and written by a 12-year old Japanese boy (“let us go the night for pleasure, the night is young”) and you cannot clear it quickly. You have to wait like 10 seconds, just staring at that screen. Like, why? Get out of my face and go away. Let me tap a button to go back to the menu. 4. The menu system is pretty terrible (hooray Japanese OS, did they hire the folks from Sony to make this menu?) Points 1 and 3 are bugs, IMO, the other two are just due to a phoned-in port.

This is more or less the exact same game that released on the PSOne in the 90s. That's not a bad thing as SOTN is hands down one of the greatest games ever made. That being said it hasn’t aged particularly well. The game has always had some balancing issues. Depending on how you tackle it, Alucard can become godlike pretty early on and never really gets challenged. Especially once you know the boss patterns, many can be cheesed way too simply. More challenging boss battles and an adaptive enemy leveling system (hunting down the most powerful times in the game would be a lot more rewarding if you knew there where still enemies that could challenge you to use them on) would go a long way to freshen this game up. Along with some new items, areas, enemies, and updated graphics. Still, until (if ever) we get a true remaster, this is still the best Castlevania out there and having it with me at all times is pretty great. I never get tired of playing through it. All time great gameplay and the best soundtrack of all time. Two last things... Controls are merely adequate, and while not awful I’d definitely recommend a controller. Some fights really require precise timing and touch screen controls just make it annoying. Why on earth replace the original classically bad voice acting with updated but still just as bad voice acting!? Get good voice actors or lean into the cheese and keep the originals.

This game still holds up pretty well and at this point there isn’t much to talk about since everything there is to be said has already been said. What’s important here are the controls for this mobile port. While touch screens are the bane of mobile platforming this game does its best to accommodate for the lack of buttons and provides shorts, but even a season veteran, such as myself, has a hard time adjusting to these controls. I find some of the early bosses to be difficult because of the touch screen controls and the real difficulty of this port comes from battling the controls themselves. Thank goodness this port has controller support or else I would be giving this review of the game three stars instead of four. And if someone at Konami is reading this please port this game over to PC and Switch. A lot of fans, including myself, would love to see this game on other systems.

Edit2: They removed the original dialog from the game. It was bad, but that was one of the best parts. Until original dialog is an option again, 4 stars forever. It doesn’t ruin the gameplay, but it ruins my nostalgia. Edit: Once I bluetoothed my xbone controller to my iPhone, seems SotN knows what to do with it natively. So they intended for a controller at all times. It’s not very clear on the page that they intended it this way. I moved my review from 2 stars to 4. To start, SotN is one of my favorite games of all time. The devs should know anyone can use an emulator online for free. So charging for this app was a stretch in the first place. Made worse by the Dev’s apparent apathy to the quality of the app. The touch controls were clearly never used by the devs to actually play the game. When you press a button, attack for example, you have to be DEAD center on the button. The button is 5mm wide, and if you hit anything but the 1mm center of that button, it doesn’t activate. Lazy controls, clearly cash grab for assets they had laying around. If they fix the controls, or give better options for those controls, I’ll review a full 5 stars, but the controls being trash, and unchangable, makes it 2 stars for me. Last note. If the devs had released with game originally with this kind of clunky control system, it wouldn’t be popular.

If you’ve played this game on any of the other platforms it’s released on, it’s the same as it is there. It does have the new PSP translation that’s been featured in every port since, if you happen to be in it for the original voice acting you’ll unfortunately be disappointed by Yuri Lowenthal as Alucard. Game controls as you’d expect without a controller, which is not great. With one it’s basically as you would expect. Perfect. However, there is an odd issue on iOS 14.5. When Airplaying the game to a TV or using Bluetooth headphones, the audio is for some reason pitched down and slow. It’s fixable by only connecting the headphones after starting the game, but will come back if you switch out of the app and then back in. This doesn’t happen with wired EarPods. Super frustrating for what is otherwise a great port.

This is an amazing port that brings back nostalgic memories of the original game (lost my original copy so I never got to play it since). What I wish they would’ve done was add in the extra areas that were put into the SEGA Saturn version of the game (after all Maria does become a playable character here, but nothing else). The flaws I will say is the wonky touch controls since pulling off a jump attack is very difficult, it also has a few glitches; upon getting the Spirit of Wolf relic it remains grayed out and I cannot transform at all. A major flaw is the tendency for the in game time to run out much faster than the original and thus not allowing you to proceed from the Clock tower in the galley to Olrox’s quarters; only way to fix this is to copy your save file and load that one instead.

Let me start by saying I love this game and I’ve been playing games a long time. It would have been great if the graphics were a little more detailed, especially when you have to read text on screen. That is a minor issue. The bigger issue is the control and placement. The direction control is to large and partially encroaches on the screen making it hard to see enemies coming. Simplify it by turning it into a stick in a circle allowing you to control direction keeping your finger down on the screen instead of clumsily sliding it hoping you stay on the direction pad. The other issue is the sizing of the action buttons. Nice to have a large jump button, except the others are a little small. It may work better to have four dual size buttons in an up/down/left/right placement instead. It’s almost like they didn’t plan for use on touch screen in hopes people would just play with a compatible controller. I honestly think fixing the resolution to be more friendly to the pixel count and cleaning up the controls would make this a 5 star game! I’ll hang in looking for improvements, but it is nice to see an A+ title make it to IOS at a $3.00 price tag.

This is a decent mobile port of a seminal piece of video game history. Better yet, this is a port of the non-original, giving access to an additional playable character in addition to the already existing alternates. Curiouser yet, the requirement to complete the game before having access to alternative characters seems to have been removed. Cons: No touch control customization and no control manual. The latter point is a bigger issue than as first appears, as previous reviewers gave low ratings and uninstalled the game over such an easy fix; aside from hardcore enthusiasts of the franchise, it does not appear that everyone is aware that holding ‘up’ on the D-Pad followed by attack, allows for use of special weapons. In addition to a relative lack of explanation and customization options, the touch controls themselves are less than sharp; a common problem I suppose, but not an excuse.