Castlevania 3: Dracula's Curse is the third and final installment of the Castlevania series for the NES.
This movie recruits Grant to make it through the game much faster than intended, using numerous glitches and tricks along the way.
The US version of the game was chosen since it allows for a significant trick that involves launching Grant upwards at high velocity, leading to many large shortcuts. Nearly 2 minutes were saved over the old run on the J version.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1, NESHawk Core
- Takes Damage to Save Time
- Manipulates Luck
- Genre: Platform
- Foregoes time-saving glitches
Comments
We're finally here with the Grant path run for Castlevania 3. This movie saves almost 2 minutes over the old 2012 TAS by incorporating all the findings that have been made since then, and throwing in a few completely new ones too for your enjoyment. Unlike the old run, this run was done on the US version, since it allows for launches, which allow Grant to rapidly scale vertical areas. This significantly shortens several climbing sections that would take much longer otherwise. Moreover, the launch glitch is just very useful in general since it unlocks more options for how to traverse through a stage, even if you don't have to climb.
The U and J versions actually have quite a lot of subtle (and large) differences that you might not realize at first. Grant has been affected quite significantly, and now only has a melee attack, instead of his throwing dagger in the J version. It's still a pretty good attack overall due to its fast speed. It's most comparable to Sypha's staff, but the fine movement control you have over Grant makes it very versatile. In general, it's best to have a wall or ceiling near you, since those let you instantly cancel your attack, which lets you attack much faster on balance. You'll see with the boss fights. Other than that, there's a lot of more nuanced differences that affect the TAS:
- The placement of candles and items has been shuffled around and is generally much worse in U. Some areas also have more bats as well
- You take more damage in the later stages in the U version
- Damage stacking has been nerfed. Hitting an enemy with more than two sources of damage in one frame will now do no damage whatsoever.
- Some bosses have more health
- Some enemies have different behaviour, e.g., bone pillars have different timing for their fireballs
- Some areas, in particular boss arenas, have subtly different tile layouts. This sometimes allows us to use different strategies against the bosses than would be possible in the J version.
In general, the J version is preferable for a TAS in every single regard other than the launches. Still, the launches are so powerful that they make the U version worth it by a long shot. The U version also tends to lag slightly less in some areas, but it's a small difference.
Finally, it turns out that on U, the cave route is actually faster with Grant. The main difference is BLK-7. The lower version of BLK-7 normally wastes minutes of your time by having you wait for falling blocks and acid drops, which can all be skipped completely with Grant, while meanwhile cutting out a lot of the slow stuff in the upper route. The routes are overall only different by around 6 seconds. We ended up fully TASing both paths to find out. If you want to see the upper path TASed, here's a full run of the upper route, which begins to diverge from the submission file starting from BLK-3:
The top route can be seen between 07:43 and 20:07 (frame 27940 to frame 72600). As a bonus, the upper route TAS also contains a different Dracula fight in a glitch area to complete the game, so check out the final stage too if you're curious. It is amazing to me that despite the two paths being so long and so different, the time difference came out to being this low.
Once again, the majority of work was done by zggzdydp. Most of the gameplay was done by him, while I just did some partial stages and boss fights here and there. Once again, my special thanks go to him. It's been quite an intense ride, but I'm glad there are finally up-to-date runs for the game, showcasing some of the modern tech that we know of now.
-scrm
Tricks
Attack Cancel
By attacking on the right frame, attack animations for projectile weapons can be skipped. For this run, the relevant uses are landing from a jump or walking off a ledge. Grant's attacks can also be canceled by clinging to a wall or a ceiling.
Crouch Fall Cancel
When falling from a high distance, you are forced into a crouch state when landing. By attacking on the correct frame, this state can be avoided.
Fast Drop
By letting go of any directional input on the frame you walk off a ledge, Grant instantly drops at maximum velocity. This is faster when dropping down ledges that are one tile high. In all other circumstances, Grant is forced to crouch when landing, making walking off the ledge normally preferable in those situations.
Grant Launch
This trick was discovered by Kutsu Shita in 2020 and is exclusive to the U version of the game. If you attack with Grant, cling to a wall, and let go on the exact frame you're touching the wall, you will be moved upwards by 128 pixels and gain a lot of vertical momentum, allowing you to do huge leaps. If you do it at the top of the screen, you will wrap around to the bottom. If you do it in the wrong position, Grant will end up below the screen and die. This can be used for many shortcuts, as well as faster movement in general. This only works with walls on your right.
Launching completely breaks the vertical climbing rooms. If you launch twice or more in the same screen, the game will not be able to keep up and the scrolling will break, which corrupts the loaded tile geometry. This can be useful sometimes, but it's usually a nuisance since you need the game's tile loading to advance enough to allow you to access the staircase into the next screen. This means we sometimes cannot move as fast as would be possible in those sections, since we need the camera to advance.
Left-Side Wall Clip (New!)
Another trick that was discovered by chance while making this run. Walk up against a wall with Grant and cling to it. Let go and keep walking for two more frames. If your subpixel position is right, you will get pushed into the wall. At this point, by jumping, you can rapidly climb upwards. This can be used to clip through certain obstructions, if the geometry is laid out right. The positioning is quite precise, and normally only works when going left. You must be in the middle of a room, i.e., the camera must be scrolling to the left for it to work. Works on both the U and J version.
Scroll Glitch
Similar to Castlevania 1, the game's tile loading routine will only attempt to load new tiles every two frames. By only moving the camera when the game is not loading tiles, you can completely prevent the game from loading new tiles, leaving whatever tiles were in memory previously on the screen. When exploited right, you can corrupt the level geometry in useful ways, by creating shortcuts or deleting the intended endpoint of a staircase. In practice, you need to perform some shenanigans with pausing and turning around in a specific rhythm to get it to work, which is quite slow and limits many of the potential applications. Still, this is a very powerful glitch that has a number of uses throughout the run.
Note that since you can't see what you're doing, you pretty much need a map viewer to perform this glitch.
Stair Glitch
There are numerous ways to disalign yourself from a staircase in this game, which allows you to clear the intended endpoint of a staircase and keep walking into the next room above or below, which allows for many shortcuts. You can use this to enter invalid rooms, some of which can cause memory corruption. In particular, the fabled wrong warp is the result of these glitched worlds. For this run, we allow stair glitches, but chose to forego any stair glitches that lead into invalid screens. Usually, if you find a boss in the glitched worlds, defeating it will just send you back to BLK 1, but we found exceptions. In particular, in the final stage, fighting Dracula in the glitched worlds will complete the game as normal, which we showcase in the alternate route.
For Grant, the relevant methods of stair glitching for this TAS are as follows:
- Jump with Grant and switch to Trevor when partially embedded in the ground. Start climbing the staircase as Trevor, then climb down and switch to Grant to defeat the floor detection. This allows you to walk down into the screen below.
- Jump with Grant and switch to Trevor when a few pixels above the floor, then immediately switch back to Grant and start climbing. You will climb the staircase above its intended axis.
- Corrupt the level geometry using the scroll glitch or launches in vertical rooms. This allows you to sometimes delete the endpoint of a staircase and keep going.
Stage by stage comments
BLK-2 (Clock Tower)
Unlike in the warp glitch run, we force an early stopwatch drop from a Medusa head. This allows us to use the stopwatch twice during the stage, which allows us to finish the stage with 0 hearts without wasting time.
BLK-5 (Caves)
We switch rapidly between the upper and the lower path using launches, depending on what's fastest. There are a lot of options for how to get through this section, and it often comes down very small differences. Accordingly, optimizing this section is quite tricky.
We use a stair glitch to make it to Alucard faster. You could also use the scroll glitch, similar to how we do it in the Alucard path run, but this is slightly quicker overall.
Going through the Sunken City would be slower by an estimated 10 - 20 seconds, mostly because of the dog-slow boss fight in that stage.
The boss is a real pain. He has a lot of HP and erratic movement. What's more, every time you hit him, he throws a bone at you, which also has unpredictable movement. These bones can damage you and block your attack from connecting with the boss. If too many of them are on-screen, they can also cause a lot of lag. We therefore actually need to interrupt our optimal attack pattern at some points to destroy his bones. The layout of the arena is also not great for using axes on him, since they tend to fly above the boss. If the fight looks slow to you, I assure you: This is how the fight looks when it is actually going smoothly.
BLK-6 (Crypt)
We destroy a breakable wall containing a big heart without having to attack. I believe this happens because we ended the previous level with the dagger out when collecting the orb, which causes the dagger's hitbox to linger in front of Grant until attacking again. It doesn't affect enemies, at any rate.
We then use a wall clip for a shortcut. This is the only useful instance of the trick that we know about.
BLK-7 (Cliffs)
This stage is abridged significantly thanks to the launches. Many sections that would otherwise force you to wait for agonizingly long times are skipped entirely. In particular, the infamous block dropping room in 7-05 is skipped completely. This is what makes this route faster, if only just.
After that, the final room of 7-05 has a horrible platform cycle that we cannot make in time with Grant, despite all the tricks we know. The best we can do is use a damage boost from a crow to make it to the platform on its return path. This required some quite precise manipulation to get the crow to behave.
We need a lot of hearts for the BLK-7 trio, which we mostly pick up in the preceding autoscroller. Most of the fight is dictated by the positions the ghost moves to after each phase. Because of this, we delay killing the mummies to conserve hearts for the demon. Since the right mummy moves as fast as the ghost could anyway, it doesn't waste time. That said, hitting the mummy with any attack briefly stuns it, which slows it down. We therefore use axes on the right mummy to kill it in fewer hits.
In a similar fashion, the cyclops is coaxed into moving to a specific X position before killing it.
For the demon, we want to kill it while it is within its jumping animation, since that makes the ghost spawn higher up and start breaking up faster. In particular, depending on RNG, some of the flames from defeating the boss are still around when the ghost breaks apart, which makes some of its fragments despawn, starting with the right fragment and going clockwise. Since the orb only spawns once all fragments are gone, we can make the demon move to the left side of the screen, kill it in mid-air and then make the right- and down pointing fragments despawn, while only leaving the fast fragments behind, which makes the orb spawn much faster. We barely manage to kill the demon in time for this to work, but it saves over a second.
Of note, the upper route version of this arena has much more favorable layout for the demon fight, which makes it considerably faster there.
BLK-8 (Entrance Hall)
A scroll glitch is used to create a shortcut in BLK 8-02. In the final corridor, we use another stair glitch to get to Death faster. I still don't understand how the game decides what camera position to send you to, so it's fortunate that this staircase makes us end up near the boss.
BLK-9 (Riddle)
The vertical room is swiftly broken using launches. We deliberately do not let the camera scroll high enough to create the final set of blocks, which allows us to stair glitch directly to the door in the next screen. Navigating the vertical rooms using launches can be quite tough, since the geometry is not always favorable. You can see more of it in the alternate path run.
The doppelganger fight is quite tricky. He has some invincibility time after each hit, which forces us to stack our damage sources to hit him on the same frame. In particular, we use the nearby wall to stack 1 knife hit and 1 axe on him each time. This slightly reduces the damage compared to letting both attacks connect individually (from 4+3 = 7 down to 6), but it's still worth it. We need to take damage while doing this. We also deliberately turn around sometimes to force our axes to go left instead of right, which makes them despawn earlier, so we can use them again faster.
BLK-A (Final Approach)
The autoscroller is my arch-nemesis in this game. There is no way to do it without creating a lot of lag. As in the warp glitch run, sticking near the ceiling to prevent any Medusa heads from spawning and pulling yourself up and down corners are the best strategy for reducing lag. However, it turns out that merely having the axe and triple shot in our inventory causes more lag, which cannot be avoided. Lag can also be slightly unpredictable: entering the screen a frame earlier or later can influence the lag you get, probably because of the Medusa head spawning. Sometimes, saving lag earlier creates more lag later.
In A-02, we use a new scroll glitch to make it to the staircase faster. Unfortunately, this means the horizontal wrap glitch is no longer used, which I am personally quite sad over, but hey, it saves around 90 frames.
For Dracula, we use a similar strategy to the warp glitch run, by using a scroll glitch to create a raised platform and ceiling in the arena. However, since we have a triple shot in our possession, we can dispatch Dracula 1 and 2 faster. For Dracula 3, we alternate between stacking two axes on him for 8 damage each time, and 1 axe and 1 knife for 6 damage. The positioning for this is quite precise. Since we need to wait for the top platform to clear the fake ceiling anyway before we can land on it, we instead slow down slightly at the end to reduce lag. In theory, it would be possible to do the fight without the fake ceiling, which could enable landing on the platform earlier, but it's not faster, since we cannot hit Dracula as fast without the ceiling.
In the alternate route, we instead use a stair glitch to get into a glitch area. Since the game pulls the enemy data for a room from the subsequent screens, we can find Dracula here if we make it to the right location. Defeating him ends the game as you'd expect, however, the arena can be tricky. This particular glitched screen has the property that the tiles you get can be influenced by waiting for a different amount of frames or performing different actions. Finding an arena that can be used to kill to Dracula is very tough; most of them are completely unusable. In the end, this one is the best we found, as it has favorable properties for all three phases. In the end, Dracula is defeated all the same, and we collect the orb to end the game.
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: Wow...so glitchy! Looks like a lot of good work. Audience is in agreement. So amazing that after all these years, roughly 2 minutes is found. Great job on this!
Stovent: Processing...