Castlevania Miscellanies

[drauch]

Maaaaaan, who wants a poster of man-boy Richter from his PSP monstrosity. Give me headbanded, gigantic armed Richter shaking his fist at Dracula. He ain't no chump.

[Volteccer_Jack]

You don't belong in this world!

Meanwhile:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19bYGamq3Dk

[Sengoku Strider]

I just saw that Limited Run is putting out a physical edition of Castlevania Requiem, which is the dual SotN/Rondo release for PS4. Sony had a hand in initially getting it into existence, so it's PS4 only. Preorders open next Friday and run through Feb 27th.

Versions - regular, as well as a "retro style box" that is not retro-styled with soundtrack + poster edition.

And then there's this monstrosity:

Spoiler

Just put in my order for the regular version. When are they going to finally get useful and put something I actually need in these collector sets?

Like an actual chain whip. According to people who pay attention to this stuff we only have like 8 years until societal collapse. We already have Chinese plague bats, social media zombies, NFT phantoms and corporate vampires. I'm through taking chances.

[copy-paster]

Did some XX session with Sumez's Rondo walkspeed patch, very good the game is now challenging in a good way (pretty sure I posted about XX's problem while back and this hack made dreams come true ). The sluggish jump still there unfortunately and kindof weird without Rondo walking animation, but still better than nothing.

Werewolf and Ghost Annette probably hardest boss in the game, both bosses have gap where it's impossible to avoid some of the attacks and forced me to use item crash button which I rarely did (so does in Rondo). Minotaur does the classic "4 hits and you die" rule I didn't knew it before, it's harder as well but pretty fun fight with key subweapon.

[copy-paster]

Dracula XX bad ending 1LC (with Sumez's patch) > https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1295757304

There are quick frame drops but it's more of OBS being shit atm. Most fun route so far and I actually supposed to go for good ending but one slip up led me fall down for free . Looking back even with original walkspeed there isn't much big difference control-wise, just I think with the patch Richter's speed is more organic.

[Blinge]

Surely it gives you an unfair advantage over slow richter.
Allows for leniency in timing

[copy-paster]

Also makes the game have arcade-y pace, now that's a plus.

[Sumez]

Obviously it makes the game easier, but I don't think it's in a way that's to any detriment of the game. (and I honestly don't think it's as hard as its reputation sometimes claims)
copy-paster and BIL are the only people I know that have given the hack a full spin, and both have approved of it, so that's good to me. I'm happy to see cps enjoying it.

As I've gone on about in the past, the default walkspeed in DracXX really doesn't bother me, I love the game otherwise. But I realise it's a big hindrance to others, so if changing it can make the game much more appealing to them, I think that makes it a good way to open up the game to more players.

I looked into the laggy jump action, and there's a 2 frame lag that would be very hard to prevent without a complete rebuild of the game logic which would probably affect a lot of other things as well, and potentially introduce bugs, so I'm not sure I dare touching that. I'll adjust the hack to change the walk cycle though.

EDIT: Might be interesting to try fixing some other variables to adjust the difficulty according to the new walk speed though? Stuff like platform movement speed, and the big beast that chases you on stage 1, etc.

[Blinge]

nah man learning that death fight with ol' Leadshoes was hard as fucking balls

[Sengoku Strider]

Castlevania Requiem arrived this week, just in time for me to spend much of the Labour Day weekend with it.

I haven't played through Symphony since it first came out. At the time, I really didn't appreciate it. It had been praised through the roof, and so my expectations were sky high going in. Castlevania III, Super IV, Adventure II, those were my benchmarks, and I'd spent a lot of time playing and replaying them (Adventure II was one of only 3 Gameboy games I ever had, including Tetris. Super was one of the 6 SNES games I had).

So now I had Symphony in my hands. Kinda low res assets, not enough parallax, lacking in wild areas with crazy effects like Super IV had, etc.; I had wanted this to be the AAA 2D blowout I'd been wishing for since the start of PlayStation era (though in hindsight, I guess it was). The move to multiple weapons felt really wrong - Castlevania had a scientifically atomic perfection to its whip mechanic, this thing with quick swords & stuff was...some other game. By the same token, Alucard's movement was just weird. Aside from the bat, the transformations and most of the items, familiars etc. seemed pretty pointless. And even though I was used to it during the era, the goofy translation still managed to diminish it. It was way too short & easy, I finished it in a couple of days.

So starting it up again, with the entire evolution of the Metroidvania genre behind me and having gone though all the GBA sequels I was surprised how much it sucked me in right away, I was actually planning on playing through Rondo first. The movement felt smooth, the pacing hypnotic. I was now ready for an appreciative of all the little random hidden touches throughout the game. A decade of soul-numbing generic Hans Zimmerman-xerox LA Strings™ arpeggios left me really impressed with the quality of musical composition in this game. Viewing the game on a 50"+ HDTV showed me so many little touches in the artwork throughout the environment. Statuary or odd flourishes that would only be seen once. A surprising amount of full-out dongs. And the enemies - I know they kinda cheated by pulling sprites out of Rondo to pad the roster, but the number of things which appear once or only a couple of times is mind-blowing given how the subsequent 20-odd years of game design went.

Lots of other things - I had no idea why the Shield Rod was named as such, until I realized it has a hidden move that shoots out a shield-ball from Gradius (I had played plenty of Gradius III, but went with the force field or mini pretty much 100% of the time). And the fact that the trophy that popped for equipping the whole Alucart set was titled "...Tracula?" had me genuinely laughing out loud.

Anyway, really glad I shelled out for this one. I got 100% on the Collection, I'm going to give it my best to platinum this one too.

[Air Master Burst]

Rondo is even better, if you've never played it before you're in for a real treat.

Symphony is a great game in its own right, but all the tacked-on rpg stuff never quite sat right with me. I did end up enjoying the GBA games, and soul hunting in Aria and Dawn was a blast; but I vastly prefer 3, Bloodlines, and especially Rondo.

I do like all the weapons in Symphony, although too many of them are boring swords and I don't think anything ever quite matches the raw efficency of the combat knife. Dead Cells takes this formula to the logical conclusion, although its procedural generation will never match the charm of a Castlevania map.

[Sengoku Strider]

I finished Rondo via the PSP remake on Vita a couple of years back. I really loved the walking speed & animation in that version, and the 3D models looked fine on the OLED screen. But I'm sure couch + tv + pixel art will make Requiem a more comfortable and different experience overall. You can switch the PSP version to the original, but I didn't think it translated well there. IIRC it was 4:3 vs the remake's widescreen, the pixel scaling down to the smaller screen looked bleh, and the animation couldn't match the smoothness of the polygon version. It felt jarring to switch.

But from the little I've played of the Requiem version, it looks way better. I wish I'd been able to get my hands on a Turbo CD player back in the day. I'm sure Rondo would have blown my mind at the time if I could've sourced it.

[copy-paster]

Rondo in Requiem is based from upscaled bonus game from PSP so does Symphony, never tried PSP Rondo but I like the faster loading and new sound effects there sounds more punchier from the looks of it. Not sure what are platinum requirements but going for 100% is really easy, only took 2 playthroughs and rescue all the maidens.

[Air Master Burst]

Yeah, it's a shame they used the retranslation for SOTN. The original is so iconic it pales in comparison. The Maria boss fight is pretty dope, though.

[Sumez]

A surprising amount of full-out dongs.

Sums up SOTN perfectly

Lots of other things - I had no idea why the Shield Rod was named as such, until I realized it has a hidden move that shoots out a shield-ball from Gradius (I had played plenty of Gradius III, but went with the force field or mini pretty much 100% of the time).

The shield rod actually has different effects depending on which shield you have equipped!

[Blinge]

youze are basically missing the point of sotn and Birru's gonna come whip you all so hard your nutz will enter ur buttz

[Sengoku Strider]

The shield rod actually has different effects depending on which shield you have equipped!

Cool, I'll check that out.

the fact that the trophy that popped for equipping the whole Alucart set was titled "...Tracula?" had me genuinely laughing out loud.

I started playing Dirt 4 and it asked me to name my team.

Akumajou Trackula X, thank you very much.

[BulletMagnet]

Akumajou Trackula X, thank you very much.

Presumably helmed by Richturbo Belmont.

[Konsolkongen]

Got Requiem yesterday. Very pleasantly surprised how this collection looks. With retro collections you always expect garbage scaling or excessive blurring, but in this case they did a brilliant job. Even though they didn't integer scale the games they managed to keep the pixels very sharp while still uniform in size. I see no reason not to use the full screen option here which is nice.

The scanline option sucks and is complete nonsense with lines on top of pixels (regardless of screen size), whoever did these have no idea how a CRT worked or looked like. It's a shame but for me I probably wouldn't use them for SotN anyway since all 3D objects and sprite rotations are now rendered at 4k. I think that would look weird combined with 240p scanlines.

I didn't think I would, but I do kinda like the super high res objects against the low res sprites and backgrounds, but I can imagine that some people won't. A proper 240p limit on everything would have been nice to have as an option.

I'm not super knowledgable about Symphony of the Night, and I've only ever played through the Saturn version, so I was surprised to see that weapons can be combined to perform magic attacks like the Shield Rod and the Iron shield, which is stupidly overpowered by the way

I have yet to play Rondo, and I've only every really played it a bit on my PC-Engine Mini. That version was fine for what it was, but the sound lag was super noticeable. Requiem does seem like a big improvement so I'm very excited to dig into that game at some time in the future

[Sengoku Strider]

Somebody is porting Symphony of the Night to the Master System:

https://youtu.be/w230M2cRj20

[Blinge]

that will never be finished.

[Sengoku Strider]

I just learned that the PS3 Castlevania games were the best selling in franchise history. Which is weird because I feel like when they came out the "I buy every gritty AAA 3D game on Xbox the day it comes out!!" crowd got it while everyone else frowned and then they were forgotten a month later. But apparently the second one was poorly received at launch and effectively sunk the franchise because Konami, but actually ended up having a long tail and doing well. I guess I'd go back & try them if I hadn't sold my PS3 in 2013 because that whole generation got pretty dumb and I'd played everything I wanted to at the time.

-------

Getting close to the platinum on Requiem. I think this is an example of a title that the trophies really help, these games have so many little quirks & secrets that most would never bother seeking out (or know about) otherwise. Except that after getting 200.6% and all the monsters and cool secret weapons and watching the bird eggs hatch and grow up and listening to the fairy's (not faerie's!) whole song and killing 374 schmoos and finally getting that dawn mage to appear and falling asleep and swimming around as a wolf and summoning a giant cow and making coins fling out of my sword and stomping the librarian in the ass 48 times so I could turn into an axe knight and then finishing the game twice...it wanted me to raise half a million dollars to buy the duplicator. What a dumb enthusiasm killing grind that trophy was.

Now I gotta go back & 100% Rondo because I haven't even done that yet. Then beat Symphony with Richter. My memories of Rondo from Vita were that it's pretty dang old-school hard.

I do like all the weapons in Symphony, although too many of them are boring swords and I don't think anything ever quite matches the raw efficency of the combat knife.

On the list of things I would have never seen without having to chase the trophy, the Crissaegrim turns you into Strider 2 Strider Hiryu with rapid fire on (the good arcade/PSX one, not the bootleg Euro US Gold one). It trivializes the whole game, but it is totally kickass.

I really liked the Dawn Sword as well. It felt great.

that will never be finished.

Having seen it, I am entirely fine with that.

[Steven]

Rondo is pretty easy. Pretty sure I no missed the game a few years ago when I first started playing this series. The only game in the series that I've played that is easier than Rondo is its own sequel; maybe they decided to make the Dracula X subseries easier for some reason.

I do really want to play those PS3/360 games, but naturally they are region locked on Steam, so that's not happening. I really have no idea why massive Japanese companies who publish their own games in their own country won't let you buy the PC versions in said own country and make you buy the shitty console versions instead. Sega's even worse about it than Konami, though.

[Sumez]

If Lords of Shadow 2 "sold well" that must have been in numbers rather than revenue, because I picked up the comically gigantic coffin boxed collector's edition of it half a year later for $3 from a random store which was unable to unload them.

[copy-paster]

Rondo is pretty easy. Pretty sure I no missed the game a few years ago when I first started playing this series. The only game in the series that I've played that is easier than Rondo is its own sequel; maybe they decided to make the Dracula X subseries easier for some reason.

DX Chronicles has true last form of Drac that's probably harder than any of Drac fights in classic series combined. Takes too long to kill and each attacks deals punchy damage, still haven't finish it yet because of this hahah.

[copy-paster]

Got another X68000 CV 1cc and Chronicles Arrange nomiss on stream, all by derust run 1st try hahah. Despite the harsh damage scale on the former the game is really generous of the extends (assuming you got nomiss clear, usually you have 9-10 lives spare), you also could farm some lives in stage 4's blood skeleton mania but watch out of the timer. My long-term goal is to clear X68K no death, but the wolf boss is make it or break it moment.

As per usual, here's some funny and interesting clips.

[Austin]

I de-rusted on Chronicles as well a few weeks back (original mode). The first run was rough, relearning everything, but the next one basically went flawlessly, haha. It's one of those games that's rough to go through when you're not comfortable with it, but once you are, you can just rip through it.

[copy-paster]

Wanted: commentators for my upcoming X68000/Chronicles arrange run for some big Twitch event, schedules are here. Run notes says both are going to be 1CC run but I want them to be Nomiss run as possible.

[BIL]

Definitely ask SuperDeadite for that one, and Squire Grooktook if you can reach him (I'd volunteer but my voice comms are utter shit atm and I'll be away then). Best of luck!

[Blinge]

I hope to get a 1LC/no miss to my name in the Bloodstained classicmode.
Which is a de facto classicvania

(hell not sure what thread to talk about it in)

I was on track but then fucked the jump up and walked off an edge in stage 5 clocktower reeee

I dunno how you guys have the patience honestly, I always felt 1ccs were a nice middle ground, and only have Ninja Gaiden + Contra under my belt for one-lifers.
(although NG is no picnic.. to state the obvious)