Almost 19 years ago, I reviewed just the first hour of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I had fun with it but had already played the flurry of Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS Castlevania games that had come out in recent years, so the formula felt a bit stale, even though this was the game that changed the series.
I don’t think I actually beat Symphony of the Night at the time, so I decided to break in my brand new Ayn Thor with the PSX classic. Here’s my thoughts on the Castlevania great and a brand new piece of unique gaming hardware.
The Ayn Thor is a dual screen device similar to the 3DS, with a 1080p OLED top screen and a 4:3ish OLED bottom screen. The system runs Android, so has access to an incredible emulator ecosystem and a maturing platform of game-centric launchers. I initially started playing Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology, but swapped over to Symphony of the Night after watching a speedrun of it at SGDQ 2026. Switching from a dual screen game that was absolutely perfect for the Ayn Thor to an old school game that could only take advantage of a single screen may seem strange, but it ended up being an incredible use case.
I played through the first half of the game up until the first/false ending pretty much blind. I had the bottom screen of the Thor turned off for this. Symphony of the Night does a wonderful job guiding you around its absolutely huge castle, giving you hints at upcoming abilities (“Mist could pass.”) and features a detailed map drawing the room exits you haven’t taken yet. In just a few hours, I had made my way to the game’s “final” boss, curiously Richter Belmont and not Dracula?
I suppose if I had been playing this Castlevania back in 2007 I may have felt satisfied if slightly underwhelmed. But Symphony of the Night’s grand reveal lies in its inverted castle that resets the map and challenges you to collect the pieces of Vlad. It was at this point that 1. I knew for sure I had never beaten this game before and 2. It was time to pull out a walkthrough because I had no idea how to even unlock the inverted castle.
I did some googling and fumbled with my phone a bit as I hunted for the Silver Ring I needed that would lead me to some goggles so I could redo the Richter fight properly. It was awkward swapping devices but nothing I’m not used to when going deep into most retro games. When I reached the inverted castle and my map blanked out, a moment of clarity came to me: I have another screen right down here!
I pulled up an Android app called Pixel Guide that I had installed earlier and found the perfect inverted castle map for Symphony of the Night. Now I was set, with the game running on the top screen and my vague, map-based walkthrough on the bottom (reverse of how the Castlevania DS games presented the map), I circled the castle once more (even fighting the incredibly tough, optional boss Galamoth) and eventually had all five of Dracula’s treasures: the ring, heart, rib, tooth, and eye of Vlad. I took down his servant Shaft, downed an Elixir potion, and defeated Dracula once and for all.
Having the map on the bottom screen made for such a joyful experience in the second half of the game. To be honest, I was feeling slightly burnt out when I hit the inverted castle. It’s not like I lost my loot or experience, but it kind of felt like I was starting over again. Having a direction to go and being able to cross compare my map to the unlocked map in real time gave me the boost I needed to complete Symphony of the Night for real. I ended up with over 180% map completion percentage too!
I’m so very excited to have an Ayn Thor now, before it arrived I was a bit skeptical at how much I would use it. I like my Miyoo Mini Plus but it has gathered some dust since I finished playing every single NES game back in 2024. The Ayn Thor is a magnitude more powerful, plus the two screens give it so many more options that probably haven’t even been imagined yet. Of course, the Ayn Thor is also about a magnitude more expensive! I’m going to continue playing the 3DS Radiant Historia and I’ll likely write (another) review about that soon.
As for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, what else is there to say? Not only is it 100% deserving of its canon status, but it’s still an incredibly fun game with an endless amount of little flourishes that made me smile and marvel at the genre defining game that Konami had developed all the way back in 1997. Also, it’s a PlayStation game that has been preserved forever. Will a Castlevania game that comes out tomorrow be able to say the same thing?
