Description: In a (apparently) exclusive video, Arnox will reveal the rough size of Dracula's Castle in Aria of Sorrow.
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:33 - Methodology
03:00 - Final Results
03:53 - Some Extras
Music Used:
Forbidden Area (Cover)
by qwertyGUY
Outro Footage:
Demolition Man (1993)
Transcript:
Intro:
One day, during my rediscovering of my love for Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, I got curious about how big Dracula’s Castle would be in real life, so I did a simple search. Bafflingly, it turns out no one has apparently answered this question. What’s going on here? It’s not even a hard question to answer. We have the tools.
Whatever. Fine. I guess I’ll have to do it myself.
Methodology:
Let's assume Soma has the standard average height of 5 feet, 6 inches. Soma's sprite has a height of 34 pixels and a length of 17 pixels. If we divide 66 (5'6") inches by the height of 34 pixels, we get this long number (show 1.9411764705882352941176470588235 inches/pixel). Thus, each pixel in the game is equal to that length.
Let us also assume each cell or square on the map is equal to one GBA viewport window size. Each window has a length and height of 240 and 160 respectively. Thus, if we go back to the crazy number we got and multiply the window length and the window height by that number, we will get a length and height of 465.88235294117647058823529411764 inches and 310.58823529411764705882352941176 inches respectively.
Now, let's go back to the map. We can see that from the Castle Corridor to the Chapel, end to end, the castle measures 50 cells long, and from the highest cells in the Floating Gardens to the lowest cells in the Underground Cemetery, it measures 36 cells. 32 cells if we don't count any of the Floating Gardens. Thus, the castle measures 23,294.118 (23,294.117647058823529411764705882) inches in length and 9,938.823 (9,938.8235294117647058823529411763) inches in height.
Putting those numbers into feet, we have a final length of 1,941.176 (1,941.1764705882352941176470588235) feet and a final height of 828.235 (828.23529411764705882352941176469) feet from the cemetery to the top floor. Next, we know from pictures that the castle is laid out in at least a roughly circular formation. Hence, we need to find the circular area. The formula for computing the area of a circle is pi*r2. So we divide our final length by 2 to get the radius and then plug that number into the formula, giving us a final circular area of 2,959,509.291 (2,959,509.291521249829761953704916) square feet.
The Final Answer:
So, to sum up, the castle from beginning to end measures 1,941 feet in length, or 592 meters in non-American units. The height from the cemetery up to the top floor, not counting the floating gardens, is 828 feet, or 252 meters. And finally, the circular area is 2,959,509 square feet, or 274,947 meters squared.
Just to give an idea of how big this castle is, the size of the Malbork Castle in Poland, which is the largest castle in the world, has a size of 1,545,600 square feet. Dracula’s Castle is about twice the size of that.
Extra Credit:
For the Minecraft builders out there, you may be interested in this. So, if every block in Minecraft is canonically 1 meter cubed in real life, then we see that Dracula’s Castle in Minecraft would be 592 blocks in length and would require almost the entire build height limit of 252 blocks. That is of course before the next 1.18 patch as of this writing.
Alright, that’s all I got for you. You can leave any comments you have on the Sanctuary site, even without an account. Be well.