Castlevania -- 2-loop Speedrun (Hard Mode) in 24:47 [Former World Record]

Channel:

SBDWolf

Subscribers:

13,200

Published on December 19, 2019 6:01:55 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChLXW3q2YeQ

Game:

Castlevania (1986)

Duration: 26:42

1,806 views

61

(If you want to skip to the 2nd loop right away go to 13:27)

Castlevania 1 has a hard mode that starts after going through the game on normal first. On the second loop there are more enemies in more places and they are generally faster. On top of that Simon takes full damage starting from the first level so he dies in 4 hits without healing.

I've been meaning to do this run for a while and I finally decided to try my hand at it. My objective was just to get a decent deathless run, and while there were a number of time losses especially on the 2nd loop, I think I'm willing to let it rest for a while. I'll most likely try to improve this time in the future if I end up submitting it to ESA Summer 2020, which I'm considering along with fellow castlevania runner 2snek as a race.
Individual loop times were 11:44 and 11:38 respectively. The second loop has the potential to be much faster than the first one because there's an extra major skip in level 2 (stage 25) that saves approximately 15 seconds.

One small interesting quirk about the 2nd loop is that Simon's subweapons such as the cross and the holy water travel faster and further. My guess is that it's a programming mistake; they probably meant to apply a speed boost to enemies and they erroneously applied it to subweapons as well. For this speedrun, it matters the most on two bosses: Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula. On Frank, the standard kill I'd do with the short whip in an Any% run doesn't work because the holy water would fly off-screen and miss instead of barely landing in-bounds and stunning the boss, so I have to do the slightly slower kill from the higher ledge. On Dracula, the 2-cycle setup is even more difficult because it's harder to recatch the faster crosses, which could mean missing the third cross (can only have two on screen at the same time with the double shot powerup) and could mean breaking the candles on the back which doesn't allow to pick up the holy water and the triple shot.

This time can probably go in the 24:0x time range with two extremely good runs back to back. I'm pretty confident a 23 minutes time is just barely out of range for human players unfortunately.

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