Submission #6757: EZGames69's Saturn Castlevania: Symphony of the Night "Maria mode" in 06:49.47

WHAT IS A MAN???? A MISERABLE PILE OF SECRETS!!

That's why we're letting the ladies destroy the castle now.

Castlevania Symphony of the Night is arguably one of the best 2D platformers ever made. While most know of it from the PSX release, it also received a port on the Sega Saturn in Japan, and is considered to be one of the worst ports for the game due to its poor performance in lag. However it has an exclusive maria mode, which allows you to play as Maria Renard.

Maria mode plays simmilar to Richter where you can freely explore the castle. so much so that you can get to the final boss right away after you turn the castle around.

This is a 214 frame improvement over the previous publication: [3982] Saturn Castlevania: Symphony of the Night "Maria Mode" by EZGames69 in 06:53.03 The majority of the improvements come from new OoB tech done in the anti-chapel. Big thanks to 3snow_p7im for finding these (he also found some useful OoB things that will also be used in the upcoming All Bosses run when I eventually get back to that).

The majority of these submission texts are copy and pasted from the last submission, Changes start in the Inverted Chapel section.

So right off the bat, you'll notice some different movement compared to the previous TAS. You can cancel out your forward kick by holding the opposite direction during the kick, this allows me to continuously dive kick and forward kick in quick succession. It is faster than just down dashing. some areas I still do down dashing because I either cant do a forward kick there or it puts me into position to start a high jump.

probably the only time save worth mentioning is the 3rd to last room, instead of downward kicking to a lower level then super jumping to the exit, instead I go to a higher platform, slide on that, then use a super jump to hit the exit to halt my jump speed then mozy around to enter in, this saves a little bit more than a half a second.

since you have a bit more speed doing the downward kicks than doing diagonal super jumps, I alternate using both methods to get up the giant stairs. for the Griffin fight, I can get a bit more damage on him by shooting a hadauken before doing the KameHameHa.

I manipulate RNG to get an axe drop from one of the knights, it will be important for use in the Inverted Chapel. This area just has some better movement overall and doesn't try to bonk into ceilings as much.

Screen Transitions in the Chapel in general are pretty broken. if you back dash into the middle of a transition you can confuse the game into placing you somewhere else on the screen. The first room had it in the save room originally, but it turns out doing the out of bounds on the opposite side is faster by about 15 frames or more (I didnt keep count :P). For the Medusa fight, I dont use the KameHameHa as it would waste valuable energy that I need for the next room (plus her shield will block most of it), so instead I stomp on her until she's dead. This was improved by doing a faster pattern of inputs for each stomp.

once again, by using the broken screen transitions, I can get out of bounds and avoid any other obstacles that would normally slow me down. Axes are important here because your downward kick will lose speed after awhile, but if you throw an axe, you can preserve your current speed, this allows me to quickly get under some steeples. Since then though, I found that you can preserve speed for longer by kicking in the air after doing a downward kick, this preserves all speed for about 3-4 seconds, which saves the amount of axes I need to throw at at time, as you can only throw a certain amount at a time.

Doing the Out of Bounds trick at the top left tunnel rather than the tunnle I exit out of is 151 frames faster than the previous movie, as you don't need to regain the lost height from going below the castle.

not much to explain in this room, other than the axe movement at the end lets me avoid taking damage from a werewolf

Blue Dragon helps to end input extremely early. Due to some RNG, ending input is slightly longer.

feos: The ending starts 223 frames sooner, so it's even faster than what the framecount says. The potential improvement idea mentioned in the thread is vague, because it requires reverse engineering, changing the strategies, and still doesn't guarantee an improvement. Accepting over [3982] Saturn Castlevania: Symphony of the Night "Maria Mode" by EZGames69 in 06:53.03.

fsvgm777: Processing.