Submission #9786: despoa & ForgoneMoose's PSX Castlevania: Symphony of the Night "Richter mode, all bosses" in 25:02.18

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is a good game. Now that may be obvious but it is such a good game. And how can you make it better? Adding a playable Richter for the rest of the game beyond the prologue.

Richter Belmont is only playable after beating the game once. This movie starts from a save file generated by this Verification movie.

Verification Movie: https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/57247189192372594

For years, I was wondering if anyone was gonna submit a "Richter, all bosses" movie to TASVideos. ForgoneMoose made his own back in 2015 but he decided not to submit it due to considering his movie "suboptimal" and not much different from the RTA speedruns at the time. Times have changed now, and many recent movies have followed RTA routes with no one complaining. But it's still been 10 years since that movie was made and nobody else has made another one since. If no one else is gonna do it, I might as well do it myself.

A good chunk of the inputs from the first third have either been "inspired" or flatout copied from ForgoneMoose's incomplete WIP run. The rest either takes a lot of the strategies from a video of the completed TAS or this RTA WR video. This is why ForgoneMoose gets co-author credit. Now I can't just copy the inputs wholesale from the WIP movie file because they were made for PSXjin, which emulates the game differently from BizHawk. There's differing load times, lag, and RNG seeds to take into account. So when I mean "flatout copied", I more mean adapted to fit into Bizhawk.

This video covers a lot of the basics for controlling Richter, so I'll cover what that video doesn't.

The input buffer is far more important here than in RTA as it what allows for frame perfect chaining of special movies such as the Vault Kick->Kick Bounce->Blade Dash combo you'll see in beginning of the run.

There's more to this than getting to that platform just mere feet away after blade dashing. Normally, if Richter blade dashes after jumping, he falls like a rock; you can't change his direction or move him in either way. To make it so he doesn't fall like that, you have to either do a flying uppercut or a midair jump in-between blade dashes. The latter is usually preferred since it doesn't take too much time or space and can be worked into many routes that you really don't want Richter to fall straight down.

Holding the whip while mid-air does maintain your horizontal momentum and shorten landing animations, but when to have Richter retract the whip is important. If Richter is still holding the whip when he lands, he can't slide until he gets up and retracts the whip, which can take a couple frames. To prevent this, its important for Richter to retract the whip just mere frames before he lands so he can slide at the moment he lands.

Generally, sliding is faster than running, but you have to a slide a set distance every time and you can't gracefully slide down slopes and absolutely cannot slide up them. In times when the distance you have to travel to get to a certain point is shorter than half a slide or if Richter is in the right state, it would be better to run than slide. Richter runs slower up inclines than down slopes, but he can circumvent that by jumping while running.

Richter is very limited in his ability to manipulate the RNG to his advantage compared to Alucard. He can only do so by either whipping, head banging into a ceiling during an uppercut, or opening the map. The first two really aren't an option in Richter's use cases for RNG manipulation, which is getting critical hits on enemies and bosses and manipulating what items enemies drop when defeated, which is usually hearts. Most of the time, it's for critical hits as damage has to be maximized in as short of a time as possible for bosses with large amounts of health like Galamoth when using the Knife Item Crash.

Like ForgoneMoose, I farm hearts at the Clock Room. You have to wait for the left statue to move so you can get to Olrox so might as well use the time to farm.

I tried to execute exact same inputs that were done in the regular Richter TAS, but the bird moves differently due to the RNG. Combined that with the awkward hitboxes and having to manipulate for crits and I had to setup the fight differently. Becasue of this, the fight may be slower.

At 6:02, ForgoneMoose got a lucky critical against the Sword Lord there in his run. I don't so I had to map pause to get that crit.

At 6:19, at that part of the stage, ForgoneMoose decided to hug the wall while falling. I don't and instead save time in that section by doing one less blade dash and landing on the stairs.

No need for map pausing here. I get the criticals I need right off the bat and the boss is weak enough to be finished off without having to get a critical on the blade dash hit.

I saved time over ForgoneMoose's run by not vault kicking into the boss room and not letting the Scylla get her snake tentacles out. Instead, I blade dash in there and do the Knife Item Crash as soon as I can.

The door glitch is strange and requires timing and positioning. To start off, Richter has to be a certain distance away from the Scylla while fighting her. Any closer and the glitch will not work. Then after defeating the boss, Richter must then wait a certain amount of time, then get to the hole the boss was blocking to find the rock barrier no longer there. Then Richter has to wait a certain amount of time near that hole for a window of opportunity to properly perform the glitch. Once in that window, Richter must go through the hole and immediately blade dash back, in which weird screen transitions happen and Richter finds himself in the flooded room below the Scylla. If you are outside that window of opportunity, the flooded room will be blocked off and the game will softlock. A visual hint on when to go through the door is the rising water after the Scylla gets defeated. Once it rises a certain level, it's safe to go through. However, I never quite tested this enough as performing the glitch was a frustrating experience.

The only moment in the entire run where Richter has to take damage to save time. To expose the core of the boss, Richter has to be in the middle of the boss as it is rising and perform his Axe Item Crash so all those spinning axes destroy the layers protecting the core and the core itself as fast possible. This takes advantage of the mercy invincibility you get after being hurt, but Richter has to be standing while he's hurt or he'll suffer knockback.

Took the path the RTA WR run uses instead of what ForgoneMoose did, which turns out to be faster.

Running and jumping up from the portal to the door turns out to be faster than jumping and blade dashing there.

No critical hits needed here. Hydro Storm is that overpowered.

I had to make a mental note of this after I pulled this off because I initially couldn't figure out how ForgoneMoose did it. To reach the "top" door in the outdoor area, Richter has to make very slight mid-air jumps in-between blade dashes so he can make it.

This fight may be slower than ForgoneMoose's take due to the hellish RNG to manipulate.

This one was a little tricky to figure out due to lack of premade inputs to go back on. The AI can read your inputs and react frame-perfectly, but only in certain situations. This is why Richter jumps every time he blade dashes the Doppelganger. Otherwise, the boss turns into mist and avoids damage.

The Frozen Halves deserve mention here. Every time you defeat them, the game freezes for a couple frames that BizHawk doesn't register as lag for some reason. The input buffer gets messed up a bit as a result and your inputs won't be registered during that brief moment of freezing. The ice surrounding them can also still hurt you after they're killed so it's best for the blade dash to not end near them.

Same as the Creature Boss fight, hellish RNG to manipulate leading to a possibly longer battle.

Possibly slower due to the RNG to manipulate for that critical hit.

In his run, ForgoneMoose killed a Ctulhu with a manipulated critical hit on his way out so his blade dash run won't be interrupted. To replicate that, I had to map pause for much longer than he did due to the RNG, so I decided not to do that and chose a different way of getting through the Ctulhu.

Faster thanks to a better damage stacking and a lucky critical against Fake Trevor.

Faster due to uppercutting sooner for the final hit.

Before I fought him, I decided to get the Holy Water instead of sticking with the Axe like the RTA WR run or ForgoneMoose do. This way, I can end input early.

The boss fights that require lots of RNG manipulation can be done even faster if someone were to create a program that can brute force solutions to figure out when and when not to map pause.