In 1997, the industry had declared 2D dead and 3D polygons the only future. One Konami team with a shoestring marketing budget disagreed. This episode explores Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, from its canceled Sega 32X origins known to fans as The Bloodletting, to director Toru Hagihara and assistant director Koji Igarashi choosing 2D sprites on a PlayStation that lacked native 2D scrolling hardware.

We cover how the team brute-forced flat backgrounds through the 3D engine, Ayami Kojima's bishonen redesign of the series' heroes, and the bargain bin problem that pushed Igarashi toward a Zelda-style interconnected castle with RPG stats as an invisible difficulty equalizer. We also get into the Holy Glasses, the inverted castle as a memory-saving twist, Jeremy Blaustein's localization borrowing from André Malraux, Michiru Yamane's genre-ho ...