Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1
- Takes Damage to Save Time
- Uses Death and Game Over to Save Time
- Manipulates Luck
- Heavy Glitch Abuse
- Genre: Platform
Comments
Here's an improvement to the Castlevania 3 Warp Glitch run, saving 754 frames, or around 13 seconds, over the previous run. Once again, zggzdydp did the vast majority of the work, while I basically just swooped in and optimized the Dracula fight at the very end. Pretty much all major new discoveries for this run came from him, so I can't thank him enough.
We once again pick up Grant in the Clock Tower before doing the Wrong Warp in the swamp. You can read up on the general tricks and the basics of the wrong warp in the other Grant submissions, but for this run, we have got a couple of new strategies that significantly change the late-game of the run:
- Switching to Grant midway through the Wrong Warp will confuse the game as to what character we're playing with. Once we emerge in BLK-A, we start with both Trevor as our player and Trevor as our spirit partner. Once we switch back a second time, we will be playing normally as Grant again
- If we pick up holy water with "Fake Trevor", Grant will still have the holy water when we switch back to him. This allows us to finish off all 3 of Dracula's phases a lot faster
- Instead of fighting Dracula normally, we instead go to the glitch area above BLK A-02, because it is faster to reach Dracula there.
Everything up to the wrong warp is basically unchanged from the current warpless Grant publication. During the wrong warp, we then do the extra character switch after the merman section. This causes some visually glitchy behaviour, but the actual sequence of the wrong warp is unchanged. Since we would've needed to switch back to Grant later anyway, this doesn't lose any time. Crucially, switching early makes the game reset our character back to Trevor while still considering us to occupy the "alternate" character slot.
Once in BLK-A, we can use this to pick up the Holy Water during the autoscroller. Once we switch characters twice, this allows Grant to use the Holy Water. The Holy Water has a significant glitch when Grant is using it: When you hit an enemy with 3 holy waters and the knife at the same time, the boss takes a ton of damage. This can kill Dracula 1 and Dracula 2 instantly, and take down Dracula 3 in two hits. I am not sure why this happens, but it saves a significant amount of time. As far as I know, this cannot happen with the whip.
When you switch from Fake Trevor to Real Trevor, the game pushes you upwards by 4 pixels. This is normally done because Grant's origin Y coordinate is closer to his feet than for the other characters, here, switching on a staircase will disalign us vertically from the staircase. This allows us to easily do a stair glitch to get into the glitch area.
The glitch area in A-02 is very unstable. The actions that you perform while moving have an influence on the tiles that are generated, as does pausing and delaying for a specific number of frames. It was therefore quite tricky to find a route through the area that produced a favorable arena for the Dracula fight while not losing too much time. I have included an encode with the map viewer script enabled to show what we're dealing with:
The glitch section at the end starts at 13:44. For Dracula, we had to find a tile layout that satisfied the following criteria:
- Solid ground near his head in Phase 1 and his center in Phase 2
- Ground near Phase 2 to block his Debris
- Solid ground near his head in Phase 3
- A solid platform for the orb to land on at the end.
You don't have much control over what tiles you get. For Phase 1, we can then just instantly kill Dracula by stacking holy water on him. Dracula 2 is similar, but we need to be very precise with the positioning of the holy water. I am not quite sure why, it probably has to hit as many heads at once as possible. Similarly, for Dracula 3, we just have to let holy water do two ticks of damage on him before just landing where the orb is gonna spawn. Lag reduction is a concern here, but it's not nearly as problematic as for the regular run because of how quickly input ends. Ultimately, Dracula is defeated once again, and we collect the orb for victory.
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: Excellent work! Very glitchy and fun to watch. Nothing to complain here about, as you beat the previous publication by almost 13 seconds.
Accepting over [4895] NES Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse "Grant path, warp glitch" by scrimpeh in 14:18.24.
fsvgm777: Processing.