Castlevania Aria of Sorrow
	posted Thursday, June 14, 2007

Big thanks to nate from SDA for capturing the run and to DarkValentine for helping with the editing!

Aria of Sorrow has been one of my favourite games of all time, probably because I just love super responsive gameplay and the 'Castleroid' consept (yeah, I still haven't played SotN :p). Also, I'm a fan of the NES Castlevania games so I immediately fell in love with this game, despite the vastly different gameplay. After finishing the game in every possible way, I watched the speedruns on SDA and I was particularly amazed by dingussjr's Soma Boss Rush. So, this game being on a handheld console, I though it would be fun to practice Soma BR from time to time using dingussjr's tactics (I actually didn't like Julius mode AT ALL, mainly because it had reversed jump/attack). But it took only couple of attempts after I made some compromises on his tactics (blocking mail anyone?) and got fed up with all the switching. I ditched the game for couple of months but I picked it up again for some unknown reason. Knowing how not fun Soma BR was I tried Julius Boss Rush for a change and after all, I wasn't used to the default Soma controls anymore so it was a pretty easy switch. I got 4:30 without any real tactics after couple of attempts and then checked SDA again (I actually hadn't watched Julius BR run) and saw the 4:06 time.

After watching Dragondarch's run and searching for information I found some old run by Persona. After a while, I was able to beat the run on SDA but Persona was still giving me trouble. At that time I knew I was gonna do a run on this game no matter what and so after practising quite a lot, I finally beat Persona's run. There was some talk about AoS at the time so I made a post about beating the SDA/Persona's record with couple of seconds and explained some of my revisited strategies. I'm not sure if Persona improved his run after I told on the forum that I had beaten his or had he already made it before, but still he had a 5-6 seconds better time at the time, 3:40:93. After watching that run I learned a bunch of things, including the notorious Legion Quick Door trick. I asked him how did he do it but he didn't really know himself either and directed me to dingussjr. Well, it turned out that he somewhat knew how it works but it's nearly impossible to get. With the various info he gave me about the game and his support helped me to beat persona's record, 03:38. I kept trying but I wasn't able to improve it for a long while. One day I got a great run going and for my surprise I did the Legion Quick Door trick and dropped my record to an awesome 03:31. After this began the very long search for a Gameboy Player (which was nearly impossible to get from Finland) and the very frustrating fight with recording problems.

After finally getting a GBP, I recorded a crappy quality run after couple of hundred attempts, 03:30. Again, I was lucky with Legion but when I got 03:31 I had kinda promised to get sub-03:30 so I kept trying and of course I wanted the run to be on SDA. When I got rid of the recording probs, and after many failed attempts to beat my own record, I finally did it, this time it was only 0.2 seconds faster but it was without Legion Quick Door so I was baffled with the result. I never even thought of sub-03:30 being possible without LQD and after reviewing my run, I knew it definitely was possible for me if I got few of the bosses to cooperate. So I furiously attempted to nail down the run and I really wanted to do so too. I had worked on this for way too long :D. After 78 recorded attempts this time, I finally got it! 03:28:63.

General stuff and tricks

• Legion Quick Door: inside the ball of the naked bodies, Legion spins around clockwise all the time. so the trick is to get the final blow dealt on Legion when Legion is at the 12 o'clock position but still there is only a 1 frame margin of error according to dingussjr and when Legion has 4 hit spots it is practically impossible to get it with skill, it's pure luck. Legion drops on to the ground immediately and the orb appears much faster, it saves around 5 seconds.
• Luck Based Bosses: Manticore (very minor), Great armor (minor), Big Golem (average), Death (major), Legion (major) and Graham1 (major).
• Non-Luck Based: Giant Skeleton, Man-Eater, Headhunter, Balore, Graham2 and Graham3
• Julius' hitbox: If you're facing the way where the attack is coming from, you will get hit a lot earlier than with your back against it.
• Jumpkicking: Great way to move faster.
• Dashing: Dashing into every boss room saves some seconds.

The run and strategies:

• Giant Skeleton: One of the bosses that have the no luck factor sticker on them. I throw two crosses and wait for a while before I use dash because if I use it too early, I will grab one of the crosses while I'm inside the Skeleton and it will not die. It is very easy though.
• Manticore: Manticore can rarely screw up your run but when it uses the tail to attack it sometimes avoids damage from the Grand Cross and it fails to die.
• Great Armor: Perfect luck on this boss would be that it would only move back and forth. Sometimes, it attacks with the sword twice and screws up your run pretty much. I use Holy Water and whip on this one.
• Man-Eater: Grand Cross is the way to go here. I have to wait a little bit for the third eye to appear. I was positioned pretty badly and took a hit after I had killed it.
• Big Golem: I got perfect luck against this boss which means it takes one step forward and then uses the rock spitting attack. If you can get perfect luck, Holy Water is the way to go. I also take the Orb for the first time and I take it every time after this one.
• Headhunter: Using the Grand Cross on each form was a pretty obvious strategy. I also tried not to be so frame perfect because it would usually screw up my run.
• Death: My favourite boss in the game, too bad it's very luck based. In this run, I got a Death fight that I've never seen before. It was almost too fast. Death screws up your run 75% of the time by using his dash attack so this fight was really a miracle. I hit the scythe two times before using two Grand Crosses on it. For Death, the Cross is the right weapon.
• Legion: My least favourite boss. Like explained before, LQD is pretty much impossible but I've never been this close getting it and not getting it like I was in this run. Shows how frame perfect it has to be. I use three Grand Crosses on Legion, obviously and I decided not to dash inside the boss room because, I wanted to be somewhat consistent with the trick. Just for the record, LQD has happened about five times for me and I've played this atleast a thousand times.
• Balore: My strategy is to use whip until Balore tries to hit me with his fists and use all three Grand Crosses in a row when he does so. When he uses the eye lazer or whatever, I whip him until the first row of flames comes and use the 'hippogryph' to give him 150 or so damage and jumpkick him to death.
• Graham1: There's a trick to get this fight to only three teleports, but it requires that Graham only uses the meteor attacks and not the triple fireball. There's only one downside, it's even more unlikely to happen than Legion Quick Door. My second screw up happened here, I was pressing up on my GCN controller DAMNIT! I use three Grand Crosses here always and hit with whip once if he uses a meteor attack.
• Graham2: The easiest form of Graham. I've made this a bit faster because my jumps didn't quite match up with the meteors this time. I use one Cross in the beginning.
• Graham3: I'm not too happy about this fight, I missed two hits but overall it was quite good. I use the Axe in the beginning because it equals for two whip hits in the end. I've tried several strategies for this fight but I found out that taking damage is definitely the way to go. I kinda like this fight, but the very low jump whipping can be annoying at times as seen in the run.

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