Castlevania 3: Dracula's Curse is the third and final installment of the Castlevania series for the NES. This movie recruits Sypha and utilizes numerous tricks and glitches to finish the game much faster than intended. Over a minute was saved over the previous run through using new glitches and general strategy improvements.

Yep, it's Castlevania 3 again. This movie improves 4165 frames, or around 69 seconds, over the previous Sypha run thanks to using the scroll glitch and other new strategies.

zggzdydp did most of the work for the run. He TASed most stages. I mainly helped out in specific sections, and with stratting out other areas. Overall, about 80 - 85% of input in the run is his. My special thanks and appreciation therefore go out to him.

If you have any questions about the run, I'll be happy to answer.

-scrm

You can skip the animation for projectile attacks by attacking when landing, walking off a ledge or sometimes when dismounting from a staircase in vertical rooms.

By attacking on the right frame while in mid-air, it is possible to avoid the forced crouch when landing.

By attacking and switching characters, you can drop from a staircase. This is exclusive to the Japanese version.

You can use damage boosting to reach higher ledges. This is used in BLK 4-0E and BLK 5-0A.

You can freeze enemies and use them as platforms, which allows you to reach higher ledges. This can often be tricky because enemies can be difficult to manipulate to get them to act how you want them to. Additionally, the hitboxes for frozen enemies are often very finnicky and don't correspond to the visual frozen sprite that you see. In particular, the area you can stand on is often much smaller than it looks. Still, this has a lot of uses throughout the run.

This technique can also be combined with damage boosting to reach even higher.

There are numerous ways to disalign yourself from a staircase in this game, which often allows you to take unintended shortcuts. For Sypha, the main way to disalign yourself from stairs is by freezing an enemy near the stairs. If you attempt to climb the staircase, you will be blocked by the enemy, which causes Sypha to start climbing offset sideways from where she should be. This is used for many shortcuts in this run.

Another minor way to disalign from a staircase is to use the falling blocks in the BLK-7 and BLK-A autoscrollers. There is one frame where Sypha is embedded in the ground. If you start climbing then, Sypha will be offset below the axis of the staircase. This saves a few frames in both instances it's used.

When you kill an enemy, on every 8th frame, a heart will drop. The 5th time this happens, the drop will be a subweapon instead. The exact subweapon that you get depends on RNG. Some subweapons only drop on certain stages. This is normally a huge pain when playing the game casually, but we can deliberately force the subweapon we want to drop at the right time.

This is especially helpful for Sypha, since she doesn't need a shot multiplier. We can therefore force an ice drop when it is useful to us, and then switch back to another subweapon to destroy the bosses.

This was discovered by chance while making this run. Unfortunately, no time-saving use was found, but I'm still noting it here for future reference.

There's a bug in the stair checking code for vertical rooms that causes you to be able to climb a staircase exactly 239 pixels below its intended entrance. This allows you to start walking on staircases in thin air.

It is unfortunately not really feasible to abuse this in most situations, because you need to be standing exactly one pixel above the ground (5 pixels as Grant), which the game normally does not allow. Still, this means that there's a ton of hidden staircases in the game that were previously completely unknown. Maybe more uses can be found.

It also works exactly the same on U.

Similar to Castlevania 1, you can corrupt the level geometry by making the camera only scroll every other frame. This causes the game to never load new tiles, which leaves the previously loaded geometry in place. It's more difficult to achieve than in Castlevania 1, and you unfortunately need to pause frequently, which makes a constant loud dinging sound, which is a bit unpleasant.

Still, this technique is really powerful and breaks the intended level design in a lot of places. Sometimes, we can just eat through walls that are blocking us. At other times, we can delete the intended end point of a staircase and keep walking into another room, or create other useful geometry.

Sometimes, deleting a block with the scroll glitch can be combined with a freeze stair disalign to go beyond the end of a staircase. This can be seen in BLK 7-01 and A-02.

Thanks to the scroll glitch enabling many potential new stair glitches, many stages have a lot of possibilities now for how to approach them. This turned some stages into quite complex puzzles where the best solution isn't obvious. We spent a bunch of time routing out the best strategy in some areas.

We use the same 5-drop strategy to get an axe as in the any% run. This saves jumping back for the holy water. Not much else to mention here.

Once again, not much to mention. The jellyfish split apart when you hit them. You can avoid this by forcing an item drop from them instead, which saves some lag. In BLK 3-03, you can see the first scroll glitch, which is just used to create a shortcut. The cyclops walks forward or does a charge depending on RNG.

A double scroll glitch is used to delete the endpoint of a staircase. This saves several seconds over going the normal way. The rest of the stage goes by mostly as before.

This stage features a faster damage boost from the axe knight by using a stopwatch, which saves around 80 frames. We tried using the freeze spell to disalign from the staircases in the vertical rooms, but this wasn't faster, since you need to spend a lot of time climbing up anyway, so it's better to just go the intended way. There is also a stair glitch that allows you to climb straight into Frankenstein's room, but it takes too long to set up and is not practical.

You can either use a double scroll glitch or a double freeze strategy to get past the wall in BLK 6-0C. The freeze strat is faster by just around 10 frames.

The crows can be influenced by RNG. You can mainly control RNG by jumping and attacking on different frames.

The dragon boss is a laggy bastard. The boss fight only ends once all their fragments have dropped into the water. Despite this, killing the right dragon first is still faster, because it saves lag.

In the first screen, there is a combined stair disalign and scroll glitch to skip right to the end of the next screen, which saves around 230 frames.

The second scroll glitch uses some tiles that were loaded in from the previous stage to jump on a frozen bone pillar.

The autoscroller features a ghost staircase and a minor stair disalign at the end to save 9 frames on entering the next room. Unfortunately, the ghost staircase is not useful for stair glitching here, because it does not start you in a convenient location in the next room, so it's faster to just use the normal staircase.

The BLK-7 trio is also quite difficult and enduring. You need to conserve health to get into the demon's hitbox, so we can't take damage throughout the level.

There are numerous scroll glitches in this level, but none of them are useful for Sypha because her freeze spell allows her to bypass most obstacles anyway.

Destroying a candle in the crumbling bridge section saves around 25 frames of lag.

We keep Ice throughout the boss fight and fight Death with the staff to use it in the next level.

Freezing a gremlin to climb into the next level saves a large amount of time. The autoscroller is also started earlier by freezing a fuzzball and jumping on it.

The autoscroller is once again horrible for lag. It's best to stay at the top of the screen to prevent any Medusa Heads from spawning, but it's more difficult than with Grant, because you can't cling to walls.

There's many possibilities for how to approach BLK A-02, but this strategy turned out fastest. By combining a stair glitch and a scroll glitch, it is possible to enter the upper room near the left side. Unfortunately a character switch is needed to dismount the staircase. Later, another character switch is necessary to switch back to Sypha, which loses around 8 - 9 seconds. Regardless, this is still faster than going the intended way.

For Dracula, we once again use a scroll glitch to create a raised platform in the arena, similar to the any% run. This allows for a much faster phase 3, because you're no longer dependent on the moving platforms.

The orbs are very finnicky here. Once they're going, they try to track the nearest target and cannot be influenced anymore. Their exact behaviour depends on the exact position that you fire them from. It is therefore important to force them into trajectories that make them disappear early, so you can use them again sooner. This mostly came down to trial and error.

The final two orbs somehow hit Dracula twice. I'm not sure why exactly this happens, this doesn't always work. We let a damage boost move us to the right position to collect the orb, which ends input much earlier than before. Finally, once the orb is collected, the game is over.

Samsara: Replacing with a 509 frame improvement, and judging!

Samsara: Ah, my favorite puzzle platformer, Castlevania 3. Crazy how long this game's been out and yet there's still new, faster solutions being found for each puzzle. That's the mark of a truly great puzzle game: Longevity, replayability, and deep mechanical depth. Everyone thinks Baba is You was revolutionary for its mechanic of changing the rules of the game at your leisure, but Castlevania 3 was doing it decades earlier by allowing players to create their own brand new paths through each level. New staircases that seem to lead to nowhere only to put you much further ahead, perfectly placed enemies that can be frozen to jump over "normally" "unscalable" walls, or just removing and re-adding walls entirely. What a great little puzzle game. I dunno why people seem to remember it as an action game about vampire hunters or something, though.

Accepting as an improvement to [3360] NES Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse "Sypha path" by zggzdydp in 26:31.88!

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