Castlevania - Alternate Scarlet Symphony

I love how you made this hack challenging, however, the "platforming" doesn't feel natural. There's awkward and unneccessary platforms everywhere, just makes jumping and maneuvering really tedious and gives it less quality experiencing the game. Now let's talk about the hearts... Omfg.. Can you just keep it as is, please? Because whatever you did is absolutely insane! Seriously, a knife cost like 30 hearts and the hearts you collect are the same amount? That's absurd. The only real way to get hearts is if you receive damage... Come on, just keep the heart system as it is and we'll be happy.

Next is leveling up: honestly... It just feels... Useless? You barely feel it, especially with the amount of health and damage you receive.

I can see this mod is absolutely the best and i LOVE how challenging you made it to be. But can you just please focus on the platforming and fix the damn heart system? Thanks!!

clock subweapon not working ? and some paths are breaking the game . one passage causing break and other passage in clocktower to outside is a dead end you can jump back .

Okay so to start - I've been playing SotN for decades and I know this game upside down like the back of my hand. And I still play the original version from time to time...and I wanted more from it.

So when I knew about this romhack, I'm immediately excited and tried it.

And I loved it! Seeing the old familiar castle but now with different paths to take, some hidden pathways, new items location, different progression upgrades (more to this later) and some altered weapons and other QoL improvement....man I feel like playing this game for the first time again!

The new progression is fantastic (a little janky, yes, whenever you need to use Mist then Wolf to go through a small path, but I see the point), I'm like excited to know where I could go next, and actually being lost to this castle feels great to me. And the way it made wolf skills a progression (like skill of wolf to go past low spikes) instead of just a moveset is really cool. I was like "aaahh!". Good stuff.

Now one of the other things that I liked the least in SotN is the difficulty - it was TOO EASY, especially if you know all the spells and subs and techniques you can do. And this hack overhauls the difficulty to be really HARD but fair - I think it actually expects you to use all of Alucard's arsenals. You can swap subweapons on the fly so even dealing with tough enemies gets interesting, knowing what subweapon is good for each encounter. Also some weapons placement are nicely done, example at the start you encounter Ax Armors which are of course strong to CUT, but then before that you'll get IronBall which interestingly enough does ICE damage, which can help kill them faster. Then eventually you'll get Sparkblade that deals lightning damage that kills those armors easily, especially the big one near the elevator. It's also interesting that the enemies don't die very easily so I get to see them actually attack and me needing to dodge or to think of different ways to approach them....the big numbers changes are also great for me, it actually slows down the powercreep of alucard, you will get stronger by the end, yes, but not so much you stream roll everyone. Also the equipment stats are interesting, everything is not just stronger than the others. Some prioritize DEF, some ATK or INT, so you can tweak your build depending on your playstyle.

Also throw weapons that has unlimited use----there are times that I just play with it and be a summoner with Monster Vials, or be a TNT freak. I just wish it doesn't cost much MP so whenever I need to use Mist, I wont get stuck and wait to replenish MP. And some of their ATK is very weak.

I could go on an on on how much I like this rebalance. The game feels fresh. I'm in love with the game all over again.

CON

Well of course it's not perfect - some places look broken, but I really don't mind it that much. And one more fatal flaw - THERE'S NO INVERTED CASTLE. If this hack somehow got updated to include a full second castle I'll be over the moon and give it 5 stars.

It is clear a lot of work went into this but it seems to miss entirely what made SOTN fun in the first place.

PRO This is a new way to play SOTN. If you are still playing SOTN daily and have been for the past 20 years; then certainly this is new content to experience.

CONS Pretty much everything. Pathing is a nightmare for the beginning; filled with constantly awkward jumps and awkward movement. The 'platforming' is a huge step back and feels tedious and unfun to engage with for the most part.

Leveling feels pointless and unrewarding; essentially ripping the RPG 'feel' and mechanic completely out of the base game.

Enemy damage and status effects are incredibly high while you have access to practically nothing useful for quite a while.

The heart system has been overhauled but not really for the better. It is nice that you have access to all sub-weapons and can seamlessly choose what you want; but the only real way to have a heart supply is to have an item equipped and take damage repeatedly. Collecting hearts is absolutely a waste and pointless due to the low amount you still obtain (1-5); while sub-weapons all cost 10-50-500. This means the only viable way of obtaining hearts quickly is to sit outside of a save room and take damage; go back and heal; repeat.

CONCLUSION There's probably some fun to be had here; but the insane balance and terrible platforming make it a chore to play--rather than something fun to play. This hack essentially guts most of the 'fun' aspects of SOTN and replaces it with artificial difficulty that isnt very fun to engage with.

I'd recommend this only for HARDCORE fans that want to play SOTN but have already played every other SOTN hack under the sun. Otherwise youre in for a terrible time.

I can see the vision that the dev was going for, for sure. Let's start with what this hack does well:

PROS

• New layouts are interesting, if a little confusing in ways that are mostly just due to a bit of poor environmental guidance or just strange choices as a whole.
• Rebalancing of the enemies to be based around weaknesses and resistances is interesting, but it comes with its drawbacks.
• Exploration as a whole is very much locked behind interesting exploitation of Mist and Wolf collision changes, which is a nice way to go about keeping certain areas off-limits.

Unfortunately, that's about all of the good things I can say about this hack.

CONS

• The rebalances are very overtuned, to the point where nearly every encounter is tedious rather than deliberate. Every single enemy has at minimum an additional 2 or 3 hits required to kill them compared to the vanilla game with no added depth to combat. Some combat depth is actually removed since the developer got rid of the ability to cancel your initial attack in the air and start up another attack immediately upon hitting the ground.
• Since enemies have weaknesses and resistances, this means that weapons have new elements. Unfortunately, this means that you will need to go into the menu and equip a new weapon, attack once to check if the enemy is weak to it, and rinse and repeat until you find the correct weapon that the enemy is weak to. This makes a for an extremely tedious experience upon encountering a new enemy and also never cuts down on said tedium because you will need to be swapping weapons after almost every enemy since the weaknesses are so varied. Additionally, since the HP values are heavily inflated just using a weapon that is neutral to the enemy is a genuine waste of time; you are spending upwards of 5 or 6 seconds on a single enemy that is going to respawn.
• Certain encounters in this hack almost encourage spamming "cheesy" solutions to them, which seems against what the developer's philosophy of including things that make it seem like they want combat to be more deliberate. I found myself abusing the stopwatch a lot, and I needed to (on many occasions) farm hearts by throwing myself against an enemy near a save point before going back and healing myself until I had full hearts before going into an encounter and spending a long time just wailing on the boss.

All in all, if this hack were executed better by a developer with more skill, it would be great. It honestly suffers the most from tedious combat the most. I personally went through the entire hack deathless using the HARD item, and since the additional HP did nothing but make fighting take longer, rather than more difficult, I didn't have much trouble at all. Many parts of this hack seem sloppy or rushed, there are random tiles missing, random deadends, strange clipping, and other strange design choices sprinkled throughout the whole hack. The whole thing took me around 3 hours to complete, half of which was just extended heart farming or time spent in menus trying to figure out enemy resistances.

Introduction This mod overhauls the balance of the game, but the prominent feature are the many edited stage layouts that allow for a new experience regarding the exploration of the castle. The new layouts come with new ways to access areas and to use skills to navigate through zones faster by using Power of Wolf (e.g. Underground Caverns), without having to rely on Wing Smash (which can only be gained later in the game).

Exploration The new layouts heavily rely on narrow corridors or entrances that require Alucard to use skills like Soul of Wolf and Form of Mist. Progression is also changed, which means that the order with which areas are explored will be different compared to the original game. There are also shortcuts that allow Alucard to get to some rooms in more than one way, allowing some flexibility in how to progress through the game, even if the overall experience did feel a bit more linear compared to the original game.

Presentation The mod uses the Quality Hack, by paul_met, to remove the black borders at the bottom and top of the screen (and other minor changes). The layout of the stages is also edited by using map tiles to draw new walls, corridors and other things, but sometimes the rooms look a bit awkward due how the tiles are used. (The stages may not look smooth and a bit jank) On top of that, sometimes the backgrounds do not load properly when entering some areas in a certain way (e.g. the moon in Clock Tower, the water in Underground Caverns using wolf shortcuts) Items have new descriptions that inform the player of the elemental attribute of the weapon, but there are typos here and there. For some reason, some headgear pieces can be in the armor list and viceversa, which is not intended behavior.

The in-game map is not updated with the new layout changes, so checking it will be misleading most of the time.

Game balance All stats are inflated, which means that everything in the mod will have 3 to 4-digit stats. This makes spells less strong, so bosses don't explode instantly after a single Tetra Spirit, but it can make some other enemies very, very tanky, which could make some fights boring, even if taking advantage of elemental weaknesses (e.g. Richter fight). Some bosses don't flinch anymore when attacked, which makes for a greater experience (e.g. Karasuman fight) Some boss rooms have new layouts which are supposed to change the flow of the fight, although most of the time, it really doesn't matter. (e.g. Doppleganger10 can still be stunlocked, same for Richter and Succubus can be taken care of with Tetra Spirit spam) However, Alucard does take a considerable amount of damage from every enemy in the game, which makes things more spicy. There are some new weapons with some nice special effects, which make for some interesting combinations to experiment with. Shield spells can be used at any time, however most of them require a lot of MP and damage is nerfed to the ground (e.g. Medusa and Iron Shield). The stat buffs are minimal considered stat inflation. Overall, balancing is decent, besides the idea of locking subweapon usage behind a cloak.

Playtime around 3 hours The inverted castle segment is not available, so only the first castle can be played in this mod (unless Richter skip glitch is being used).

Rating

7.5/10