Castlevania Symphony of the Night
	posted Monday, November 21, 2005

After speedrunning Symphony of the Night with Richter, I felt a little underwhelmed with the fact that my video was only about eight minutes total.So, with the inspiration of Persona's 100% map completion run with Alucard, I started working on a comparable Richter run. Since Richter can move stupidly fast from the very beginning of the game, however, I decided to cover as much of the entire game as possible. I checked around for the generally accepted maximum percentage for Richter without glitching, and there's a pretty little map at Gamefaqs that shows both castles adding up to 195%. So, this is the map I attempted to cover for this run. Big thanks goes out to Snapdragon for capturing my run, and save for a little shimmering effect in the video, it's a really nice capture. Also, to my buddy Scott who helped me plan the route through the first castle.

I was debating whether or not to include the Konami-abandoned area directly underneath the entrance gates because you have to glitch the game to access it.It seemed like a harmless area to cover, brought my overall percentage to a nice even 195%, and (I thought) was just fun to see. So, here's how it works. The instant you get control of Richter, you must immediately run toward the gate, and in doing this, you will fall through the floor of the game. Richter becomes stuck in the floor and the screen bounces back and forth between the gate and the underground cavern that I'm trying to force my way into. After a bit of directional influence on my part, I shake free from the glitch and fall into the cave. Yes, all that effort for a single dead-end save room. Neat stuff.

Now, let it be known that because I did this as a single segment run, I do take damage. A few times more than I would have liked, but there are only a few instances where it really hurts my time, so for a run that lasts 2 hours, I think the result is within reason. I grab health power ups that don't waste too much time, or when they're needed, and I use a few save rooms to keep me going. Besides, Richter throws himself so suicidally into rooms full of enemies that you gotta expect some boo-boos for our dear vampire hunter.

Side note: If it ever looks like I'm hanging around too long in an area for some reason, it's probably 'cause I'm making sure that I'm covering all corners of the map. Or, I might just be messing up, but I like the former explanation better.

There are quite a few instances of the run that don't happen as smoothly as I wanted them too, but turn out to be fairly minor bumps in the video. For instance, the Scylla fight. I usually do three blade dashes, one past her, back out, then back in, and she's dead. It looks really sweet, but it didn't happen in this run. Instead, I had to improvise with an uppercut. Still looked cool, I suppose, but I figure this is a run of compromise; some things really clicked, while others didn't.

One of the earlier points in the video that may need some explanation is the infamous spike room. On the first pass, it's a pitch black room filled with spikes. Normally, Alucard would turn into a bat and use echo-location to guide his way through the room. Unfortunately, Richter can't chirp his way through this area. So, by using the item crash technique for the Rebound Stone, Richter can use the very temporary invincibility to hop through the room. It requires quite a few magic hearts to pull off one pass of the room, so I slow down a bit on the way back to make sure I have enough hearts to bring me back. It's a very risky room to move through, but I managed to 'nail' (Get it? Nail? Spike? Bah.) down this room so that it wasn't a terrible burden on my run.

One of the first really ugly parts of the run shows up in the inverted chapel stairway area. It has tons of enemies to slog through, and none of them are on the ground, so rooms like this are pretty hit or miss, and in the end, I took most of the hits. To keep the run going, I use Hydro Storm a bit too much, and eventually cover all of the stubborn areas of the map and move on. In general, I felt my second castle had a bit more mistakes than I wanted, but it's such a hard castle to move through with efficiency and style, so some areas can look a little nasty.

I screw up on aligning the gears in the second clock tower, so that cost me a bit of time.

The inverted library is incredibly deadly. I slow down a bit after some blows shake my confidence.

Okay... biggest blemish in the run: Alucard II. I have a pretty sweet looking pattern that can finish him very quickly. I grab the cross sub-weapon so that I can toss one cross, hit Alucard, and keep him in the corner. After a few well timed crosses, he's toast. Not what happened on this run. He just wouldn't die. It was pretty frustrating, and we just traded hits until one of us was slain. Luckily it was Alucard. So, yeah, big ugly mess that was supposed to look sweet. Oh, well.

For the most part, the run is fairly straightforward. I cover all of the available percentage, then I make a final save and soft reset the game. I highlight the file I was using to show my final time and official percentage but... the run in this video was only five seconds faster than a run I had saved previously! After all the hustle with Richter, I couldn't remember which game was which. My plan was to re-enter the game and defeat Shaft for the end credits for the sake of completeness. Idiotically, I pick my last save game, rather than the run that I just made, and finish the game. Oh, well. No biggie. I hope.

And that's my Richter 195% run. Richter can be a very tough character to control, especially for such an extended period of time (blade dashes, uppercuts, and running are (literally)painful to do so consistently). Because of this, I think there's room for improvement in the run. I'm confident that the route I used was very efficient, so I feel the imperfect execution was a bit more of a factor than the route itself. If I wanted to improve on this run, I think it'd have to be a multi-seg endevour; maybe in the future if I run out of things to do, I'll come back to this if people see fit. Otherwise, I made the video because I wanted it to entertain. I hope you enjoy!

-Adam "Psyrell" Van't Hul

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