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The original Castlevania is set in the year 1691. Simon Belmont must make his way through the eponymous castle to destroy Count Dracula. To make his quest a little bit harder, Simon is not allowed to use subweapons or take damage.

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: FCEUX 2.1.4a
  • Aims for Fastest Time
  • Manipulates Luck
  • Does not use Subweapons
  • Does not take Damage
  • Genre: Platform

Comments

I got the idea for this some time ago and wondered how such a movie would work, and decided to make a |Testrun at 14:03.33. This movie improves the Testrun by roughly 45 seconds due to general optimization, much better boss fights and generally becoming more familiar with the game. I also tried to showcase some more interesting things than in the testrun, such as odd enemy behaviour and narrow avoiding of projectiles.
The run was done on the (PRG1) version, though it syncs with the (KC) version as well.

Stage by stage comments

Stages 1 - 3

Things start out relatively simple here. At one point I jump to affect the spawning of the Zombies. The bat acted much more favorably here, saving a rough 5 seconds.

Stages 4 - 6

I was unsure wether I should get a long whip to have an easier time hitting Medusa. Ultimately, she went down without a problem though.

Stages 7 - 9

Most of the work here consisted of getting a rosary or potion to spawn. The Mummies could perhaps be improved by getting the long whip and hitting them from afar, but I find it more interesting to stay between them the whole time.

Stages 10 - 12

I got an invincibility potion and could thus ignore the fleamen. Once you get to the Skeledragon, everything else on the screen disappears, including the fleamen.

Stages 13 - 15

Certain enemies such as Fleamen act differently, depending on wether you are facing them or not. If you face them, they'll do a slower high jump, allowing me to reach a door before one could hit me. I got a potion to spawn early on, allowing me to ignore a fleaman that would otherwise have slowed me down.

Stages 16 - 18

I figured a way to hit Dracula's head three times instead of two, cutting down a considerable amount of time. On his second phase, a few frames were lost to make him do a high jump.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoy this movie as much as I enjoyed making it. The game is pretty straightforward to TAS and progress was steady.
Suggested Screenshots: 20353, 21132, 26754, 38966

Flygon: Added YouTube module, and fixed header.

Nach: Poor audience response. Seems the goals didn't go over so well, and some minor improvements were noticed. Rejecting.


Joined: 7/25/2007
Posts: 109
There can be no powerup runs and pacifist runs for Contra, then I don't see why we shouldn't be able to have a similar movie for Castlevania as well. :) TASes don't always have to be about destroying games by abusing every trick to its fullest advantage and in what seems to be the main complaint here, being hit every single solitary time it'd save time, after all. Dodging stuff in amusing or fancy ways is also entertaining, after all, and suboptimal character stuff is also permitted (SMB2, Castlevania 3). Yeah, watching the same old cross or holy water rip things apart is entertaining, but seeing how much can be done with the oft-ignored main weapon is good enough to get a "yes" out of me. With that being said, I bet that if the damage boosts were included and it was just no subweapons, just about everyone would be singing praises for this run. ;)
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Joined: 6/22/2005
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Considering how hard the game is without these restrictions (for me, at least), I enjoyed this TAS a lot, especially the Mummy and Death battles. Like Mukki pointed out, however, you didn't always jump to get the orbs after each boss, so I wonder if there may be other possible optimizations that you overlooked. Meh vote.
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Joined: 7/2/2007
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I bet if this run was just "no subweapons" people would be decrying it for being too similar to the published run, actually. Some days you just can't win.
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J.Y
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Joined: 5/24/2008
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It's not amazing! Bad work. A no vote from me. Sorry!
Mitjitsu
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This is quality material for gruefood delight, but I consider these goals unpublishable for this paticular game.
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System Error wrote:
There can be no powerup runs and pacifist runs for Contra, then I don't see why we shouldn't be able to have a similar movie for Castlevania as well. :)
The difference is that Contra wasn't designed to be allow a pacifist run. It completely changes the gameplay and adds to the TAS as the author takes interesting measures to avoid killing foes. Taking no damage in Castlevania takes out all the fun damage boosts and boss murdering glitches. That detracts from the TAS and makes it rather dull. The only interesting bits were manipulating potions and rosaries.
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ObadiahtheSlim wrote:
The difference is that Contra wasn't designed to be allow a pacifist run. It completely changes the gameplay and adds to the TAS as the author takes interesting measures to avoid killing foes.
Can we please not get into the speculative arguments of what was intended or designed without ever having a way to substantiate that? By the same logic Castlevania wasn't designed for not using subweapons (because they're there) and not taking damage (because there's a health bar), and you can't argue that it doesn't change the gameplay, either.
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Joined: 7/25/2007
Posts: 109
ObadiahtheSlim wrote:
System Error wrote:
There can be no powerup runs and pacifist runs for Contra, then I don't see why we shouldn't be able to have a similar movie for Castlevania as well. :)
The difference is that Contra wasn't designed to be allow a pacifist run. It completely changes the gameplay and adds to the TAS as the author takes interesting measures to avoid killing foes. Taking no damage in Castlevania takes out all the fun damage boosts and boss murdering glitches. That detracts from the TAS and makes it rather dull. The only interesting bits were manipulating potions and rosaries.
A run doesn't need damage boosts, like I just said. MMX6 is another run that could be interesting without damage, especially considering how hard it is not to be damaged in that game to begin with. I mean, sure, in any game with damage abuse, you got skips of areas, but to some, it's arguably more boring to see damage being used to bypass enemies rather than annihilating or ninjaing by things in the way. ;) And since we're on the subject of being able to apply the same logic to other things as well, if you want to talk about dull TASes, how about something like the Earthbound run? It's just a bunch of crazy glitches and walking around in black spaces. Nice "wow" factor, but no lasting charm IMO. What defines interesting? What the majority thinks? What the target audience thinks? What the mainstream thinks? What the people who matter think? I can't really answer that question, but I do know that no one group is completely right, nor is one group completely wrong.
Derakon wrote:
I bet if this run was just "no subweapons" people would be decrying it for being too similar to the published run, actually. Some days you just can't win.
Unfortunately true. :( There's no pleasing some people, I suppose.
NitroGenesis
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You could maybe save a second off this run if you tried harder. It wasn't particularly enjoyable but it was pretty optimized for a first submission. I guess a Meh vote is my choice.
YoungJ1997lol wrote:
Normally i would say Yes, but thennI thought "its not the same hack" so ill stick with meh.
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CoolHandMike
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Compared to current published runs this is missing lots of tricks and glitches. Not surprising for a 14 year old submission. If it was re-judged it would be found un-optimized.
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Challenger
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I'd like to take a shot on it sometime in the future, because the scroll glitch can be abused even more.
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Oh hey, this old submission. This was one of my first "real" TASes, and it very much shows in the level of optimization and planning. When submitting this, I frankly anticipated the run would be rejected, and I understood the reasons when it was. It would definitely need another round of optimization to be up to snuff these days. More significantly, the run nowadays has to justify its existence against the "pacifist, minimalist" category of this game in my eyes. While that category came later, this run and the pacifist run have a lot of overlap, but there are also differences where they sort of slot into each other's gaps:
  • This run is allowed to attack (non-essential) enemies, the pacifist run isn't.
  • This run is allowed to pick up power-ups like the cross and rosary, while the pacifist run isn't.
  • The pacifist run is allowed to take damage from enemies, so long as the enemy doesn't die from contact. By extension, this means:
    • The pacifist run is allowed to use damage boosts.
    • The pacifist run is allowed to use critical hits against enemies.
Overall, I believe the pacifist run has much more to offer and is overall a better representation of a "limited" category choice for this game. It has less downtime, and the lack of screen-clearing and invulnerability powerups means the pacifist run has to spend much more time tightly dodging and weaving between enemies, which is where I think this run here actually gets interesting. In retrospect, I am wondering if I should have banned crosses and rosaries for this reason, but that would've made the runs even more similar in the end. I am also wondering if this run should have scroll glitches. They'd obviously present a massive improvement to the walking-and-stair-climbing simulator that is this run, but I don't think there would be any unique scroll glitches that wouldn't also be seen in pacifist. Since the idea behind this movie originally was to make a "perfect" run of this game under a set of extra-challenging conditions, skipping portions of the game through scroll glitches would sort of undermine this goal. With pacifist around, not having scroll glitches would set this run apart and make it more unique, at a serious cost to entertainment (which is already lacking) and completion time. I don't think that's a worthwhile trade overall, but I still wanted to bring it up for consideration. I am still quite fond of this category. If Challenger (or anyone else) wants to have a look at it, I'd gladly encourage you to do so. This was a very simple TAS to make (in no small part because it cuts out all the difficult stuff, as people back then noted :P), so it might serve well as a simple break project between more complicated TAS projects. I'd seriously be interested to see how this TAS would look when pushed to its maximum potential, with scroll glitches or without. So yeah, that's my 2 cents on it. Or a couple more of them maybe considering how stupidly long this post on a 14 year old rejected submission turned out.

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