Summary

• "Pacifist" Main Objective
• Lowest "Touch" and "Hits" arbitrary Sub-Objective
• Abuses Programming Errors
• Uses Game Reset Sequence
• Emulator used: BizHawk (2.5.1 interim)
• RealTime:15:05.15 GameTime:13:56(last input) Frames:54309 Re-records:57250

Introduction

Explanation

Hits and Touchs

• Touch are interactions with monsters hitbox, without damaging them, one way to tell is that the monster name will appear on the bottom right of the screen when you "touch" it.
• Hits are attacks interactions with monsters, it will in 99% cases result in damage on the monster, sometime monsters are invulnerable on some parts (stone plant), or like golden skulls just immune to any damage on the whole hitbox.

Character choice

• Richter will not work simply because he only have 10 MP, the sword brother spell requires 30 MP and let you get a million $ very fast, the alternative is to collect for hours the 25$ bags until you have duplicator.
• Alucard scenario is a lot more interresting, because it allow for "live" swap of characters to gather the relics, such a run will be display here later, unfortunatly, its not possible to complete it without killing at least one boss, it is by definition inferior because of that.

SRAM Usage

Flaws, Glitches'n'Routes

• Karasuman skip is very easy, you only have to morph into wolf on the first frame of input after the loading, note that darkwingbat gate doesnt start before you move into the room, and I couldnt find any way to glitch myself out aside whats presented here (half blood).
• You cannot see it but the damage (from one of the shuriken hits) on dracula is 9999 and its the maximum, to obtain this you need to have a negative luck value, in this run alucard got 10, equiping a duplicator means -10, so you need 2 duplicators to make this work, dracula got 10000hp so the second hit kills him regardless whats the dmg from it.
• Ive tested to go by medusa, she does hit for 100 under poison with the sword (attack, not touch), but good luck getting half blood with it, looked impossible to me, all her others attacks arent strong enought.
• Im buying 2 flame shurikens, but only use one (ooops), so you can reduce shop time by a whopping 12 frames, also buying leather shield instead iron saves some 7000$.
• The wolf in reverse castle is purely to show off, its probably slower than just go directly with bat, note that the spike dont hurt the wolf somehow (!?!).
• Ive found that there is a good ratio of bat and wolf in the movie overall and im happy with that, despite not been the fastest.
• The bat squeeze at the end is also slower as it wasnt aligned correctly, but the squeeze in outerwall was definitly faster than crossing the door, it is again a case of me trying to show off bugs rather than going stricly for speed.
• The bestiary showing dracula from prologue is something that unlock in any case scenario, even if you dont do the prologue.
• Choosing the other save point in entrance isnt totally arbitrary; it mean you dont have to deal with the skeleton "guarding" the upside savepoint
• Joseph cloak / pink color cape are another "artistic" choice of mine, they arent required.
• The name input ARUKADO and PACIFIST are not necessary of course.
• Having 69HP by the end of the run is totally accidental, you take 1dmg from poison and 130 from the boss, 131 total dmg on 200hp.
• The rerecord count is inacurate, im reusing the any% to make the sram, it is actually ~ 15k.

PSX vs Saturn

• In the past (before my time on staff so I don't know exact details), the site had allowed runs of a game on one system to obsolete or prevent runs from another system from being accepted. Currently, we lean more toward accepting multiple systems for the same game, especially if there are differences in how the game plays across the systems. So cross-system obsoletion/comparison shouldn't be a concern for SOTN.
• The Saturn version of SOTN gives the player a starting choice from three charaters with which to play the game: Richter, Alucard, and Maria. These characters have different abilities/limitations and thus require playing through the game differently. As such, there is potential value in a publication for each character in order to both archive and showcase (from a TASing standpoint) the differences in how the characters beat the game as quickly as possible. Based on the current rules, it's likely only one of these characters would get a Standard class publication with the others going to Alternate class; but there is also some discussion on whether this policy should be changed in a way that would allow a run from each of the characters in Standard class. Regardless of class distinction, a run from each character is likely acceptable.
• Exclusively for the Saturn version of the game, there is a save-game glitch where the memory of items collected isn't reset when restarting the game with a different character. This effectively allows the game to be started with one character and get to a save point to create the "dirty" SRAM, then restart the game with a new character who will have all the items/stats collected by the previous character due the the game not resetting the RAM values upon stariting the new character. This opens the door for different approaches to gameplay among the various characters and creates some SRAM backed categories of play.
  • Richter normally starts with all the relics, but his relic stuff doesn't use much mana, so he starts with much less initial mana points than Maria. So using him as the initial character is going to be a less optimal use of the save glitch for Alucard to then start his scenario as he would be limited by a lower mana level.
  • Maria also normally starts with all the relics and high mana points, thus using her as the initial character is going to be most optimal use of the save glitch as it will allow for Alucard to then start his scenario with all relics and a good supply of mana.
    • One could do a Richter run instead of Alucard after starting with Maria, but since Richter already has all the relics and doesn't need the mana boost, it's not worthwhile over a baseline Richter run.
  • Using Alucard as the initial character before the reset will still transfer things from the first save, but the subsequent chosen character would then still have to go collect items through the game; so this would also be a sub-optimal use of a save-glitch based any% run. The technique might be potentially be usable for a faster all-relics collection run, though.

• 1) baseline "Richter scenario"
• 2) baseline "Alucard scenario"
• 3) baseline "Maria scenario"
• 4) "save-glitch, Alucard scenario"
  • This could be done either from power-on by including the first character (Maria) setup in the main movie file, or as starting directly with Alucard from an SRAM backed movie file that was created with Maria as the first character. While this would likely be slower than the baseline "Maria scenario" it would likely be faster than the baseline "Alucard scenario" and offer a good contrast to that later run. This would be an Alternative class goal.
• 5) "pacifist"
  • The most pacifist way to play this game is to use the save-glitch to provide Alucard with all the relics from Maria, which then allows for minimizing hits/damage to enemies compared to any other branch of the game. This would be a save-glitch based run and could again either contain the Maria setup in the main movie file or using an SRAM backed start. This would be an Alternative class goal.
• 6) "all relics"
  • A run that actively collects all the relics in the game as fast as possible starting with none. It's not known wheter this would be faster starting from a baseline Richter/Alucard character, or starting with a save-glitch that doesn't begin with all relics yet allows for character swapping which may potentially allow for retreiving the relics faster.
  • It should be obvious that starting a game with Maria to simply have all the relics at the onset isn't valid for this category.
• 7) "best ending"
  • To achieve the best ending in this game requires visiting a certain percentage of the map. It's expected that using a save-glitch to start Alucard with all relics would be the fastest way to do this, but not 100% sure.

• Overall, it's a generally good run and would fit branch wise as run #6 above.
• There are some potential improvements possible, some noted in the submission notes. These may not be huge improvements, but after discussing with arukAdo, they may be able to bring the time below 15 minutes.
• arukAdo is willing (and has actually already begun) to implement these potential changes as well as using a newer emulator version that may have more accurate emulation; he mentioned that there may be more lag which might impact the time, but I noted to him that we'd prefer a run with the more accurate emulation anyway.
• A general submission note (already privately discussed with arukAdo): In the future please utilize userfiles for SRAM verification runs and associated files like Lua, then sinmply link to them in your submission notes instead of cramming them all into the submitted .bk2 file. We prefer to have the .bk2 (or other format) movie files of a submission to just be the submitted movie itself.

• In anticipation of a better run in the near future, that is already in the works. This will minimize work for the publishing team.
• To have a new submission (instead of a modified 4 year old one from before the site revamp)
  • with up-to-date details
  • with only the movie file in the submitted .bk2
  • with links to userfiles for verification/Lua stuff instead