Random 27 Years Later, A Secret Code For Saturn's Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night Has "Broken" Speedruns

"Does this count as any percent Speed Run finish then?"

by Damien McFerran 12:45pm

Random: 27 Years Later, This Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night Code For Saturn Has "Broken" Speedruns 1 — *Image: Damien McFerran / Time Extension*

The Saturn version of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night gets a bit of a bum rap these days.

Sure, it's not as technically accomplished as the PS1 original (Konami Nagoya handled porting duties, rather than the original team at KCE Tokyo), but it does have Maria as a playable character – as well as some new areas and music.

It turns out that it also has a secret code which has remained hidden since its release in 1998 – to our knowledge, at least.

The code has been discovered by @memory_fallen, and allows you to view the staff credit roll without actually completing the game.

This discovery has led some to joke that the code effectively breaks speedrun attempts for the game.

You can read all about the process taken to find this code here.

[source x.com]

1
RupeeClock
1:25pm

So giving the argument some actual thought, it had to depend on your definition of "finishing a game".
Is the goal to see the end credits staff roll, or is it to perform the final feat within gameplay that triggers that staff roll?
In Symphony of the Night, the latter would be landing the finishing blow on one of two end bosses under certain conditions.
Some games feature an option to play the staff roll from the menu, in addition to the staff roll displayed after beating the game. Many of the modern Kirby games have this.
There are also some speedrun categories, usually tool assisted, where the goal is to get to the end credits by any means as quickly as possible, and this usually involves arbitrary code execution ("ACE"). They might not even jump to the starting point of the end credits sequence, one of Ocarina of Time's ACE runs jumps to a mid-point in the sequence!

ACE runs typically redefine the win condition for the game, but calling upon a hidden function in code to display the staff roll doesn't redefine a win condition, so much as it doesn't even engage gameplay by bypassing the starting parameters entirely.

2
KingMike
16m ago

And the Famicom RPG Metal Max allows you to jump to the ending at any point after only a couple minutes into the game.
(basically, your daddy calls you an idiot for your monster-hunting aspirations and kicks you out of the house in the opening cutscene, but you can anytime go crawling back to daddy and tell him you'll get "a real job" or whatever and it ends the game. Something along that line.)

Obviously the "win" condition would need to be redefined per game by speedrunners.

3
KingMike
14m ago

Speedruns usually forbid cheat codes anyways, so this would probably just be classified as that.

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