This topic is for the purpose of discussing #6878: arukAdo & EZGames69's Saturn Castlevania: Symphony of the Night in 10:17.37

Had to pop this on during lunch and found this to be an excellent submission and very entertaining! Easy Yes vote.

A couple things. First, regarding the "save corruption" bug that was the key inspiration behind this run in the first place. There's a concern that if save corruption is allowed, then it would be arbitrary to not just use the same sort of save corruption as in the PSX ACE run to allow swap overflow to be performed, which would likely be even faster than this route if improvements to the ACE route that have yet to be implemented into the current ACE TAS are done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmD9VyTGz58 However, I don't think the save bug used here works in the same way as the PSX save corruption, so I wouldn't say this is a concern. I'm not even sure swap overflow is possible in the Saturn version; I'm not very familiar with the Saturn version of the game at all. Perhaps the authors could shed some light on how this save bug works? Second, in regards to the question posed in the submission about which version of the run to publish, I strongly recommend using the one that does not use SRAM. Unlike the PSX runs that have been accepted using SRAM, which use it to take wildly different routes and navigate the castle in faster and more interesting ways not possible without it, this run only seems to use it to skip the cutscenes before the final bosses. Additionally, allowing the use of SRAM in this category causes an interesting problem: if you have a clear file at the start of the run, you could just have the SRAM verification make its way back to the correct save point near the start of the game after making Alucard as strong and capable as possible, getting maxed out stats and any weapons you need, etc., and activate the save glitch using that file instead of making a Maria file from scratch, as is done here. This much more closely emulates a true new game+ than simply having replay mode enabled, which is all the submission here used SRAM for. It would also completely remove the part of the run done as Maria, as well as remove a lot of the combat and RNG manipulation done in this run. This would be getting closer to the territory of simply loading a file partway through the run than I am comfortable with, and regardless, I don't see any way how such a run wouldn't be less interesting than the one that's been submitted here. To put it another way, allowing SRAM for skipping cutscenes but not for use in the save bug seems too arbitrary to me. Those issues aside, the run seems well optimized as far as I can tell, and the combination of the crazy save bug and Alucard's full, unchained movement being available from the start make this a sufficiently different submission from the PSX runs to be worth accepting in my eyes. Yes vote.

I've always considered runs that involve extreme glitches and ACE as being different, because the former usually involves completing the games ultimate end goal i.e. defeating the final boss; as opposed to manipulating the games memory system and executing a jump to the games end credits. Yes vote BTW.

I don't think this glitch should be considered "save corruption" in the first place, because it's about tricking the game into carrying the loaded data from a save file to a new game. If I understood correctly, it doesn't involve the actual corruption of SRAM, at all. Given this, a comparable case would be #5239: Fortranm's DS Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin "Sisters Mode" in 24:42.75 instead of the PSX SotN ACE movie. As for the New Game vs Replay Mode thing, the very fact that the one of them can be synced into the other this easily means they definitely don't need to be published as separate branches. I think the New Game run should be used in this case because that's the universal default. With all that being said, YES vote. Great job. It is also truly impressive that this version doesn't look too much worse than the PSX version in a TAS movie anymore thanks to the improvements in emulation.

This is going to be interesting.

It is! FeelsEvilMan. Will watch and vote afterwards. Spoiled by some posts though RIP. EDIT: Voting Yes for one reason: Japanese Alucard lines, Kappa. Jk, Maria into Alucard is just amazing! Playing this in AGDQ with TASBot is going to be hilarious!

Playing this in AGDQ with TASBot is going to be hilarious!

Except TASBot doesn’t do disc based games.

Playing this in AGDQ with TASBot is going to be hilarious!

Except TASBot doesn’t do disc based games.

RIP!

An interesting category with an entertaining result! Yes vote.

That was interesting. Yes vote.

We the authors, have limited knowledge on this new bug, but its not a memory corrutpion, like ive mentioned in sub, the trick reside in the fact that the game doesnt clear the ram when you start a new game, it obviously does if you load a game tho (or you would be able to do some very bad things), this is just a dev oversight, they could have fix it by just disallowing soft reset when you load a game, that alone would prevent it even if the code still doesnt clear the ram. Id dare to say this is 101 dev, clear the ram when you start new game or load the game, they simply forgot to lock the former. And remember the richter "special mode", or the murasama stats, those are psx ram value that also carry over soft reset, so we can deduce they just plain sucks at reset the ram. paulo did a video for this Link to video There is one thing important ive found out just yesterday while making tests with it, you actually do keep the map along stats/equipment, what this mean is you can with maria unlock the keep teleporter and with alucard just go down instead of up in the glitched room and directly access to keep like this, you can even go further with maria and unlock the teleporters in reverse keep and death wing lair, essentially making alucard run just about to use teleporters and do marble gallery. You could also like moose mentioned get lvl99 stats, and better gear. All this combined would make a newgame+ "concept" run that beat dracula under 2min. (and thats a very generous estimate) And none of this would matter for the clean sram, or at least with how its presented right now; its obviously slower on the paper to unlock teleporters, it will increase your loading times by a lot. The question is not wether we want to perform or like this idea, but only if this is cheating or not. I do believe its cheating, but is it really? judge input on that would be nice To what extent we can use this bug, where is the limit with cheating. There is little difference between doing that and using a password to load last stage of a game, imo. After saying all that, you may ask what are the bennefit of dirty sram in this movie context, if you declare all the previously mentioned techniques cheating, well the dirty sram presented here isnt, and the difference is just that it allow to skip the dialogues, it cost no frame and is totally equal to the clean sram, but its "faster" by definition. On the other hand, if its allowed to make a "newgame+" nonsence with lvl99, all relics, all teleporters unlocked, AND the replay mode, then this sram movie is all wrong.

Ok just because I could, I made a "test" run of what would be to take full advantage of sram, this is as close as newgame+ shenigans you can get. Sorry for double posting but here we go Link to video So what happen is in the sram there is a clear game with alucard, all relics, unlocked teleporters, and mablung/alucard shield. I just load this save, do the glitch (soft reset), start a new game and boom, everything is up. From there you just casually take all the teleporters up to shaft/dracula and kill them almost instantly. It can be optimized further with maybe a different shield? this was done very quick just to show case.

If this data carrying glitch can be done from any saving points, then it's rather arbitrary to start from that one specific saving point and not just start from the last saving point in this proposed "NG+" category.

Im sorry I forgot to mention that info, it does only work in entrance, if you do it somewhere else, you will be locked in that glitched room, somewhere in the first castle (even if you saved in the inverted one), the only way out then is a library card.

If this data carrying glitch can be done from any saving points, then it's rather arbitrary to start from that one specific saving point and not just start from the last saving point in this proposed "NG+" category.

It only works in the nearest 3 save points, with the one being used in the movie being the best overall candidate.

This actually suggest that you dont even "need" a save room, and that it can work anywhere. Link to video So I mean really at this point, I can only say that it is not arbitrary in the sence we using what we know to work and is usefull, what wasnt tested may work yes, we dont know everything. The capabilities of this glitch are streching far beyond our little speedrun route. I would definitly invinte anybody who is interrested/motivated/curious to give a test at this bug. Our beloved dev and coders can also look at debug and maybe share some light on this strange bug.

Based on that, don't you still need a prior save file to pull it off?

To be fair/frank, I dont know the exact answer, im tempted to say you need a savefile to gather your stats/relics/map unlock from, but maybe you dont even need a savefile at all, just soft reset and start new game seem to be fine. Theres only one thing im sure off, this doesnt corrupt the ram, everything is left untouched, by now we would have witness many side effects if it wasnt the case. So this fall into the bug category and not memory corruption, maybe it can be considered as memory manipulation. Maybe I should have mention that richter and maria does have all relics by default, they simply are turned off for most of them, and you dont have the ability to change them (theres no menu for them); when you start your new game with alucard you simply activate them (in menu), but they come directly from the maria/richter gameplay. This simply mean all 3 characters share everything, but because in maria/richter you dont have access to the menu, you cant really figure that without ram watch. To be more clear, it is only when you start a clean new game with alucard that the game will write "you have no relic unlocked" in ram, otherwise they are all just there. Or if you load alucard game that doesnt have all relics unlocked yet. Or if you die (assumption). Whenever you new game or load richter/maria, they are all unlocked in ram. For the map it doesnt matter who is gathering the rooms, it just carry over regardless what character you were using in the first place. By extension, this mean you could have a maria run that have: -maximum STR/INT stat to maximize her damage -increased mana so that she can hadouken all the bosses -wear alucard gear that boost stats beyond 99, like the rings, alternativly she could go for max luck to increase her critical hits -use swords/shields (?) -access to [USE] items (?) (by default she wear nothing except the dragon helm, richter wears nothing at all)

Here a partial answer to whats happening 1. defeat minotaur and werewolf 2. defeat sucubus 3. defeat death 4. save richter 5. meet maria for the first time You can see that the 5 top are unlocked at 00:01, so this is right when you start the new game as maria, then the 3 last are revelant to the speedrun itself, defeat hippogryf, defeat medusa, reach last save point This is probably why theres nobody in the throne room, it is also probably why maria/richter does not get to fight sucubus/death/minotaur But when you do the opposite, load maria into a (clean) alucard game, she will have to collect the relics, cant open the blue door, richter will be in the throne room but will do nothing, and you can fight death and sucubus.... Edit: Ive reworked the sram run to include the 9999 dmg bug, with this you can defeat shaft in one hit and dracula in 2 hits, to make this work you need to have -1 (or less) luck stat, this is done here by having 2 duplicators and the blood cape (2x-10 and -1) It is a good alternative than to have a lvl99 alucard, as it does the maximum dmg possible. The verif movie (~15/20min) essientially beat dracula (get replay mode) just like the nosram, then get 2 duplicators + the knuckle (happen to crit easier than the rest), and unlock the revelant teleporters on the way as well Shield is use to manipulate the crits, and the axe is use to make a second hit after the 9999 dmg Link to video I think this should really look like the closest to a perfect run you could have, assuming you can only start from entrance savepoint because of how the bug works, if you can load at last save point somehow it would be extremly faster.

om, nom, nom... blech, salty!

Among the few things that are important: -the 3:29 run doesnt even use maria at all. -the route alucard is taking was never used in any of the tas we have. (btw the entrance represent less than 2% of the map, the run finish with a bit over 10%, thats not 50% of the run but less than 20%) -comparing the bug to selecting peach in smb ... I mean its a bug not a feature... you sayd "switch" to the princess... not bug the game to do it... your not suppose to be able to do that in the first place!!! If it was just about that, it would be fine, but like you mentioned it unlocks everything, wich makes it the most interresting bug in sotn since ACE... I guess? thats letting aside the fact that alucard gameplay is not comparable to maria, while mario vs peach... its not like peach transform into cakes and tea and mario doesnt. Now its true the 3:29 run was posted a few days after the 2 others, but it was updated twice, and it was very noticable in the thread, yet no words on it... so ive resubmited it. No words either on skiping dialogs or not, while it makes a 2:30 difference, but whatever, I suppose taking a totally different route and beating the time of both psx published run (with and without dialogs) doesnt matter after all. It is also important to mention that rejecting something only on the premise that we have too many run is toxic. I believe this is a prime exemple, maybe this isnt as popular as some other game, but there should be no question of if its worth more branches, what matters is if the run bring something new, something unexcepted, something interresting. Does this run check those boxes? I think it does, and so it does also deserve to be published. The labbeling doesnt matter, and wether or not it obsolete something else that is close or far to compare with shouldnt matter either. I can understand the need to limit and organize things, but to be fair, there isnt a million game where you can do shenigans like this one (and some others), but on the vast majority you dont even have to ask yourself that question because there isnt material (bug...) enough to make those kind of run anyway. Ive been told also that by giving as much info as I could it triggered the rejection "reason", the 5 unlocked events; this totally discourage people to actually show their finding, if you present less knowledge then what... publish because you dont know what your talking about... go team. Im also over the part where "I should have update the psx run", because thats only a confusion, the premise of that come from the assumption that I could have done this on psx or that theres a major time saver discovered for it, wich is not the case, only small optimization can be made for psx. You wanted to know under what branch this should be classified; but does it really matters? is it what it come down to? labeling... I think tas are more than just labels But if you want my answer, I dont see whats insulting or problematic with "saturn alucard", or "saturn fastest alucard" or "saturn alucard bug" or "saturn save bug", or anything resembling that. The day you will have psp tasing the same thing will happen all over again, sram nosram and all that stuff will also have to be taken into consideration, but essentially it will be the same equation than the one here. 3 runs were presented here, each having its own merit and well made (even if its mostly copy/paste it doesnt make them less good), not even picking one sound a bit exagerate, you had the possibility to pick one over the others for whatever consideration you could have to allow a new branch, and you decided to not even make a branch at all... this is quite extreme

There's no denying that this is an interesting submission, and that new things are showcased. After all, you're demonstrating save corruption/borrowing/why are you stealing from save points (and game modes), and as a result of that, Alucard is able to take new routes through the castle. All of that is impressive technically and entertaining visually. However, the question being asked of this run is one of speed (the objective criteria by which runs are measured), and the fundamental criteria here is that the run is slower than using Maria alone. If Maria + Alucard is slower than Maria alone, why bother using Alucard in the first place? This is a slower run than it should be (by using Maria alone) because of how we time runs. If we were using SRA timing, there is no doubt there would be a leaderboard for this category, timed from whenever you gain control of Alucard, and this run would be receiving accolades, stars, moons, publications, awards, and all of that. However, because we time things from the instant of console power on until final input, the site can't just create a new category for this which follows its own non-standard rules, especially when a faster run (of Maria alone) exists. And when faster Alucard runs (that abuse game glitches) exist. The closest parallel to this run that I am aware of to the RTA speedrunner world is EarthBound, Pajama%. To set that up, you have to play through a significant portion of the game, then save, reset, shenanigans, and Ness gets to stay in his PJs for the entire game (well, until the ending. You know how EarthBound gets). Those runs are timed from when you start the glitch, not when you start creating save files to switch between. In that scenario, only Alucard's portion of the game would be timed, and that would be leaderboard-worthy. This run, while impressive to watch, and which definitely deserves to be showcased, might belong on a YouTube channel instead of this site, because of all of the rules that exist here surrounding timing. It's a good run. It looks nice. It looks fun. It looks interesting. It doesn't follow the rules. Please showcase it somewhere. Link to it from your user page. Record the information about the glitch on the relevant game resources page. Keep exploring it, maybe something publishable will come out of it.

We've been discussing this submission for a while among staff and agreed that this branch deserves another chance. And since there is an improvement (is that correct?), feel free to submit it!