Here comes another Castlevania TAS, on the same day. Did I see this coming? I didn't. :P
- Emulator Used: Bizhawk 2.2.2
- Genre: Metroidvania
- Takes damage and dies to save time, MASSIVELY
On Aug 27, 2018, Burb discovered a wrong warp in FDS Castlevania 2 that allows the player to skip to the final boss from early game and made a testrun that beats the game in 05:59.824. This run uses the inputs from that run for the first 90 seconds. Hence I made this movie.
Version Choice
This run is done on the very first release of Castlevania 2, on Famicom Disk System. This run is made possible by two of its exclusive glitches. Another important differences is that the height of Simon's jump while whipping is slightly lower than how it is on the NES releases; because of this, the wrong warp and certain damage boost featured in
the NES run cannot be done on the FDS version.
Jump Animation Cancellation
If you use your whip during a jump and the animation of the whip ends exactly when you land, 1 frame is skipped by canceling the landing animation. However, due to how easy it is to create lags in this game, this trick isn't used too often in this run since it only saves time when using the whip doesn't generate any extra lags at all.
Day-night Transition Skip
Remember the infamous staple of this game? You can skip it on FDS version by entering the next screen on the exact same frame the in-game clock reaches 18:00 or 6:00. This glitched is used around 2:57 in this movie to skip the first and only day-night transition. However, this essentially created a bottleneck since I would need to wait for the clock to reach 18:00 before triggering this screen transition. Therefore, lag-reduction is the top priority before this point since there is time to spare.
Loading Sequence Death Warp
Reducing HP to 0 during a loading sequence triggers a wrong warp, as seen around 3:13 in this run. I tried to trigger a day-night transition skip and a death warp at the same time, but this seems to be impossible. Another option was to make the day-night transition happen right after the loading sequence, but it turned out to be slower than skipping the day-night transition. I can't just let the day-night transition happen while Simon is in the monochrome glitch town either because
that would cause the universe to explode.
Subterranean Death Warp
If you exit a town after doing a floor drop without waiting for the camera to catch up, you will enter the void beneath the next map and die. Usually, you will simply respawn in the town, but for unknown reasons, you can warp to glitched maps from certain places on FDS version. FYI, the monochrome glitch town takes you to a different place than the normal Town of Ondol does, and the combination of these two death warps is therefore necessary for getting into the final castle.
A friendly reminder: If you sit through the credits and go back to the save file selection screen, you will notice that all save files are corrupted and you can't even delete them. In other words, the game becomes practically unplayable at this point. Therefore, it's probably not a good idea for you to perform this glitch on actual FDS hardware! :D
Special Thanks
- Burb: for discovering this wrong warp route that allows skipping the majority of the game and jump animation cancellation for minor optimization.
- Producks & Koh1fds: for posting information about the death warp on the forum. Koh1fds was actually pretty close to finding this specific route to the final boss.
- zggzdydp: for the run on NES version.
- YOU, for reading the submission text and watching the movie.
Memory: Changing branch name to warp glitch per guidelines.
Memory: Updating with 311 frame improvement and resetting to judging underway.
Memory: With the updated file, this seems fairly optimized.
feos has confirmed
here that the ending does play as normal despite the corruption of saves. We don't have any rules against leaving the game in an unplayable state after beating it, just that the ending does indeed play.
Accepting to Moons as a new branch.
