Game:

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997)

Duration: 3:48:43

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A hack for the SEGA Saturn version of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, played as Maria with the intention of beating all of the bosses the game has to offer for the selected character. Hard mode is enabled, which means every enemy in the game has twice the amount of health they normally do.

The hack features some enhancements such as faster loading times, less lag, added transparencies for some effects, increased screen size, proper resizing of some of the sprites, inclusion of new portraits for the character select screen, some basic translation for menus, the aforementioned hard mode and some other things I probably won't remember right now. It is effectively the most definitive way to play this game on the SEGA Saturn, or maybe even just in general depending on how you look at it.

SEGA Saturn port of SotN features extra content not seen in the original version or any other port of the game. New content includes a couple of new stages to discover, a fully-playable Maria with unique spells and movement, some new items for Alucard and a new relic for him that gives him the ability to dash like Richter and Maria.

Playable Maria in the SEGA Saturn port of SotN is a formidable foe in both strength and ability.
She is able to walk, dash and slide similar to Richter, high jump with opportunities to high jump in a diagonal direction, triple-jump, kick, kick jump and cast powerful magic spells. Unlike Richter and Alucard, her movement doesn't lock when she kicks downwards from a jump and high jumps subsequently, making her versatile at all times.
Magical spells include a blast shot that can be charged up to four levels with each having unique properties and which can also be shot diagonally downward at the first level as well as several powerful spells that can be inputted via button combos.
The button combo spells have four beasts to summon: a flame bird summon which lets Maria cast a powerful flamethrower of sorts into a designated direction (it can also sometimes critical hit with a special rare white color version of the flames), a turtle summon that moderately heals Maria, an owl summon that gives Maria a temporary companion to fight alongside her and a dragon summon that sets a powerful dragon on the whole screen which can be controlled with the directional keys.
The final button combo spell involves summoning all of the four beasts at once with a unique button combo, which is difficult to pull off but very rewarding. Once it is performed correctly, Maria will gain invincibility for 40 seconds. She will also hurt enemies on contact.
Maria in general has higher health and defense, so enemies don't deal as much damage to her as they do to Richter, making it easier to learn the tropes of playing as her.

Controlling Maria can be a bit difficult, since her general control is somewhere between the rough control of Richter and smooth control of Alucard. Her spells can be a pain to perform, specifically the dragon summon that you can see me fail to perform a lot. Interestingly enough, the invincibility spell is one of the easiest button combos for me to perform despite it being commonly agreed by many to be the hardest, so it came in handy for me in certain sections where not taking a lot of damage was important.
The Count Olrox battle was broken for some reason, probably because of either the hack or just playing as Maria. Whatever the case may be, this gave me some time to try and perform the dragon spell on him.

Thanks to the new PC I now possess, I was able to play the game through the Mednafen emulator instead of the YabaSanshiro one. The game was far smoother and there was no noticeable corruption during game-play, everything worked fine (except for that weird Count Olrox glitch). Just about the only issue I noticed is that the emulator turns on frame skip randomly, causing the game to look a bit choppy... I looked through the emulator settings and it doesn't look like there's any solution to that... Well, at least it's still very smooth and not too bothersome. The frame skip could also be attributed to the port of the game itself, since it's far from perfect and contains a good number of tech. issues.

The hack can be found below:
(http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/6184/)

NOTE: This video could not be edited despite the multiple attempts to do so, something about the encoding makes it difficult for video editors to crack. At around 0:29:10 you'll hear the Windows 10 notification sound effect that the recorder did not flush out when I was recording the game and the ending theme is still "I Am The Wind", so this video is copyright claimed. Believe me, I've tried multiple video editors, but they either exported the video with terrible frame-rate pacing present when the video is uploaded to YouTube or they just straight up didn't accept the video at all.
Unfortunately, there's no other way for me to upload this properly without re-recording the whole thing again, so it's best to leave it as it is now.

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