Castlevania: Symphony of the Night: Part 27: Last Map & Item Coverage Before The End
9I had initially meant for this playthrough to be finish with Part 27 showing the final boss, but I instead used this Part as a course correction based on how I misread how this game calculates its completion rate.
To summerize, the percentage of your completion rate does not just increase when you enter into a new room. IT INCREASES WITH EVERY SINGLE BIT THAT YOU FILL IN AND BRIGHTEN UP ON THE MAP!
Each bit on the map is a square, and if you can fill in that square, you will raise the completion rate. There are two good endings in this game that are based on how much of the rate you get. Although I'm not trying to go for the max rate of 200.6%, I AM trying to get the game's best ending for when you have over 196.0%. This rate is counted from your map progress of BOTH CASTLES!
So I had to go back through a majority of the game to see the spots of the maps that I could fill in, and I sometimes learn and discover new things I can do.
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At 1:23, if you have the Demon Familiar out in either version of that room in the Mine/Cave, he will press a button that Alucard can't reach, leading to a new room. In this playthrough, I've only done this in the Inverted Castle, and both cases are the ONLY time that the Demon can be used like this.
The Reverse Caverns has some really REALLY annoying map squares to reach, and a lot of these are at the floating what you can dive... up to. I found how that you would have to try and use the Wolf form and squeeze its smaller body towards those squares. That's when I found out that you can use the Triangle button to swim through the water as the Wolf.
In the Bat form, if you hold X, then do up, up-back, back, down-back, down, down-forward, forward, then release X, the Bat form will do a Wing Smash. I found that it's a bit more managable for speeding through rooms compared to the Power of Wolf, because it doesn't use a lot of MP.
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There is a Long Library room at 34:21 that is right under the Master Librarian's chair. If you have the Gravity Boots, you can mess around with him by headbutting his chair from below. Do this for the first time can you can get a Life Up.
But messing with the old man like this has a secret. If you can Super Jump him 15 times without landing, you'll get the Ring of Arcana, do it 32 after unlocking the Inverted Castle to get the Dracula Tunic.
If you have enough MP to do 64 Super Jumps in a row, you'll get the Axe Lord Armor. It turns Alucard into an actual Axe Armor that can move faster can chop demons. However, it has a really bad jump.
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In the regular Castle Keep, I realized that I missed an ability for the Mist form: Power of Mist. This allows Alucard to stay in his Mist form as long as its button is held down and as long as he has MP. Combined with the Gas Cloud, this can turn Alucard into a different force of a destruction. This was the last of the Relics I needed to find.
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After I saved at the end, I saw on the save file that I had hit just a little over 197.0%!
So the next video will be the grand finale of this playthrough!