​

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (SotN) was an important turning point, not only for the Castlevania franchise, but for gaming as a whole, as it was the game that cemented the definition of "Metroidvania" into the minds of several gamers as a specific term to explain a particular genre or play-style for games that delve into exploration and items inside a set map.

For SotN, the game saw its initial PlayStation release back in 1997, and just after a year, in 1998, the game saw a port to the Sega Saturn, but this port stands out from all of the other versions of Symphony of the Night due to its included bonus and features. However, the Saturn port was released only in Japan, never seeing the light of day outside of the region and never getting any localization outside of the territory, leaving many Castlevania fans without the added content from the elusive port, which not even re-releases of the game got, given how they were all based on the PlayStation releases for the US and Europe.

Despite the added content, the port had its own set of drawbacks. The transparency effects that the game heavily relies on were instead changed to dithering, the game suffered from awful loading times, making it slower to progress through compared to the PS version, the in-game sprites saw a size reduction, and other small things gave it a less polished status, even with the newly added content.

However, in 2024, that all changed, and thanks to the hacking expertise of Meduza Team, west players can now experience this title with all of its bonus content in full English, and with a lot of quality of life elements added into it, to make it the best version of the title to date.

This hack, titled "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Ultimate" focuses on being the most complete and advanced version of the beloved title, with the following quality of life features:

• Fully translation into English
• Restoration of translucency of many objects
• Direct access to the global map
• Finalization of the global map
• Restoration of the original proportions of some sprites
• Removing horizontal black bars of the screen
• Skipping videos and dialogues
• Access to Richter's alternate costume
• Reduced loading time
• Support for 4MB expansion card
• Bug fixes
• Hard Mode

The hack is available for download right now, in the YouTube video's description, and it's currently in version 1.0, but we can expect a bugfix release later on since some people have started giving feedback to the team.

Meduza Team's Forum

 

[hotsuma2002]

It looks like the final version of it. Thank you so much.

 

[wod1022]

Good :-)