I vant to suck your skills! Fun fact, rearrange those words and you’ll end up with how Dracula likely feels when he encounters players in Castlevania. “I vant your skills to suck!” Yeah, so he can… win. Ha ha… Uh, anyway, that definitely isn’t the case this time around, because CosmoSpeedruns whips Symphony of the Nightย in under ten minutes. There have been tons of Castlevania games (and soon an animated series), but SotN is lauded as one of the best, plus it’s been a long time since we showcased a commentated speedrun explaining all the strategies involved in the process. Keep your garlic and wooden stakes close at hand and enjoy.
Cosmo enters a code for his file name that grants him 99 luck and makes all other stats horrible. Guess you could say his run is very dependent on luck, eh? As the runner explains, this Castlevania run also strongly utilizes glitches, all the way up to one of the most frightening: save file corruption. Yep, he uses that to his advantage. It comes when he acquires the Faerie Card, then pauses during a game save to corrupt his data and replace his inventory with short swords. Doing this lets him access slots in the inventory that players aren’t supposed to have access to. And what happens when runners get access to code they aren’t supposed to see? That’s right – arbitrary code execution. In this case, he writes the code to beat the game for him. You know, it’s a good thing he gave commentary, otherwise, we’d all be completely lost as to what the heck’s going on.
Most of the danger in this run seems to come from item drops, as some enemies can yield items that will ruin the entire run. This goes back to those inventory slots, as he needs certain items in a certain order for the code execution trick to work. The downside to using this trick: after the castle disintegrates, it’s nothing but a black screen while the dialogue plays. Well, hope all enjoyed this, uh, audio book reading of Castlevania? Leave a comment and let us know what game you want to see broken to Hell and back!
