Game:

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997)

Duration: 5:05:20

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16

What if Symphony of the Night played exactly like Rondo of Blood? What if it *was* Rondo of Blood 2 (yes, I have very grand dreams)?

This long-play's been in the making for a long while.

I've always wanted for the game to play more true to it's classic Castlevania roots, specifically more in lieu with Rondo of Blood. And you pretty much don't need any mods to feel like you're doing that, but then, somewhere along the way, you'll realize the game is pathetically easy and most enemies will die to a single whip hit, which all results in the experience being ruined.

That's when I decided to try and make this challenge run. I used the "Castlevania: Rondo of Blood 2" hack I've previously made utilizing a cheat tool which changed enemy stats to the ones I deemed more desirable for a far more challenging experience and combined that with this next challenge that's probably already obvious from the thumbnail.

Unfortunately, it's impossible to make it 100% accurate. But the rule-set works, and it goes as follows:

I am to not utilize special moves like running, blade dashing, sliding and uppercutting as much as possible along with the whip brandishing move not exactly being restricted but made less desirable to use to pronounce more traditional whipping like in RoB. If there are any shorter paths I could take via special abilities, I may ignore them and instead walk my way around there if I can. All of the abilities Richter has as seen in RoB are fully allowed without any restriction whatsoever, and this also conveniently includes the unlocked air movement SotN introduced. Sub-weapons don't have restrictions either, but I made Holy Water undesirable to pick-up in most cases since it's item crash is far too powerful. Same rule applies to the dagger.

This isn't exactly a fully set in-stone rule-set, so I am allowed to have moments where I may break them. This touches the reverse castle part, but it's especially in place concerning the game's input detection since it is a bit buggy, and you'll notice weird moments like me accidentally dashing for a split second or restarting my walking animation cycle because of inputs just going off for whatever reason. I am also allowed to style on my enemies with special moves if I am really bored.

(I also discovered that you can start running by holding the forward directional button and then quickly pressing and letting go of the down directional button. As you may see it in the video, it is extremely comical and ridiculous.)



Challenges that limit the player and make the game more difficult are quite common with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night players simply due to how easy the whole game is, and because of that people resort to doing these challenges. But for a long time, Richter Mode didn't have that kind of pleasure. You could play it in two modes: slow ("I love Christopher Belmont" mode) and fast ("speedrun!!!!1111" mode), and also a hybrid of each of them ("I love blade dashing but it makes me feel filthy so I just use it less idk" mode).

With this hack and this challenge, I can finally live my dream of Richter clumsily strutting through the castle with game-play similar to classic CV while ignoring stair-cases because he drank a little too much of the same juice Alucard's been drinking.

I've been thinking about finding a way to release this hack for a long while now, but I might just end up releasing it in an ISO format because all of the things I tried to make it work without utilizing a copy of the game are incredibly convoluted and not worth the trouble of going through. So I'll leave it in the oven for now and set the dead-line to be summer of this year. I should be able to make a decision by then. For now, it stays in my vault of broken hopes and dreams.

Also, here are some notes about some miscellaneous changes I've made:
- I used a special save file for these kinds of occasions. Richter has both the gold and silver rings equipped in order to get into the center of the castle and get that one max HP potion. It also enables a couple of relics that let me pass into certain areas of the game and it has the damage numbers relic disabled to feel more like classic CV. Spike Breaker armor is used on Richter to grand the spike breaker effect;
- I used video editing to stitch together a few moments and remove some deaths. The intro from Alucard's play-through never plays when starting as Richter, and the same is true for the True Dracula final battle since it only plays out exclusively for Alucard in the normal game;
- When I rendered the video, I realized I forgot to edit out a single death (I got killed by the mummy of all things, damn if it isn't hilarious but also embarrassing!), and you can also see me fast forward after dying in that section. Every other death was indeed cut, though.

Other hacks utilized and featured in the video:
Quality Hack [https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3606/]
Cheat Tool [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umLFfAu6onU]

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