Castlevania Symphony of the Night
	posted Sunday, July 30, 2006

Hello. This is my Maria run in Nocturne in the Moonlight (Castlevania Symphony of the Night in the US). As using the Japanese name suggests, this run is on the Japanese Saturn version of the game (which makes sense, as Maria is only playable in the Japanese Saturn version).

Since I got my video capture card a couple weeks ago, a few people were interested in seeing how Maria plays. I was jokingly saying I'd try a speed run to show this, and eventually got a run of about 20 minutes in length.

After watching Psyrell's run with Richter on the PlayStation version, I adapted (aka stole) his route and got under 10 minutes after a few hours of trying. After a few days of trying to play better (and even cutting open my pinky with my death grip on the controller), I got some more runs with better times, finally achieving the time in this run. According to my best guestimate, I am about 20 seconds behind what is optimal unless there's something huge that I am missing. As such, I am very satisfied with the quality of play in this run.

As you can see in the video, Maria plays differently from both Alucard and Richter. She can triple jump, super jump diagonally (much more so than Alucard), and instead of the super sub-weapon attacks Richter has, Maria has spells where she calls forth the power of one of her animals.

I use all of her spells except for a few. The fire attack is powerful, but takes some time to cast due to the animation. Against the Hippogryph I thought I made a mistake by not using the Fire attack twice (I didn't have enough MP), but after comparing it is actually faster by about a second or more to kill it the way I did, which can be optimized more with a super jump after the Fire attack.

I didn't make too many mistakes, and they were mostly minor ones except near the end where I mis-jumped and went down to the previous screen at a cost of about 2 or 3 seconds. Overall, I don't think I would get a better time than this due to the fact that I'll wind up making mistakes anyway.

Bladegash made a suggestion about the big clock, which winded up being true; on the Saturn version the clock's time is the same as the Saturn's internal clock. In the tests I did, it seems that no matter what time it is, it takes around 10 seconds for the clock hands to meet at 6 anyway. So that is both a blessing and a curse at the same time.

I use the invincibility spell at the very beginning of the game, but I don't think it saves any time, only frustration. The time used to cast the spell is "saved" by being able to slide through the first few rooms without worrying about stupid zombies hitting me. So it seems more like a less annoying same amount of time as if I were to have not gotten hit by any Zombies.

I don't use the slide constantly throughout because the damage it does is less than the jump kick, and the "hit window" is much smaller, resulting in Maria getting knocked back and slowing her down. I jump kick rapidly on staircases because that saves some time compared to simply running up them.

The Saturn version of the game has more and longer load times and plays slower than the PlayStation version, so I feel my time is pretty good.

I hope you enjoy the run and also being able to see how Maria plays in the game. Thanks for watching my video!

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