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Castlevania SOTN I have no idea
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Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hi folks.
I am a huge fan of the Metroid / Castlevania genre, must have played all of them to completion over the last 15 years, but SOTN I am just lost brother.
I have achieved %37 completion after 6 hours and after many hours of backtracking I cannot find anywhere new to explore.
Can anyone give me a not so subtle hint as to where the hell I am going wrong?
Out of the clear blue sky someone almost physically assaulted me because I hadn't played SOTN, That was a few weeks ago.
Whenever I see him now I need to pretend I have seen and had all these cool experiences, the shames burns. Please help!
I am a huge fan of the Metroid / Castlevania genre, must have played all of them to completion over the last 15 years, but SOTN I am just lost brother.
I have achieved %37 completion after 6 hours and after many hours of backtracking I cannot find anywhere new to explore.
Can anyone give me a not so subtle hint as to where the hell I am going wrong?
Out of the clear blue sky someone almost physically assaulted me because I hadn't played SOTN, That was a few weeks ago.
Whenever I see him now I need to pretend I have seen and had all these cool experiences, the shames burns. Please help!
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The circled portion is a doorway, but I think that might just lead to a part of the coliseum that is blocked by a giant statue.
The small arrow to the right is a room you have to get into to hit a switch which will open up the path where the long arrow is. It's a magically sealed (blue) door, though, so you'll have to find the relic that allows you to open them.
You buy that relic from the librarian.
Yes
She used to have the original, but it was lost somehow (among other games, which is weird, as we take good care of our games). She has the Greatest Hits version (with the ugly stripe), the XBLA version, AND the PSP version.
At least I can score some Achievements out of it.
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
He must already have that relic, because you need it to access the middle-left part of the map (just to the left of where you fight Gaibon and Slogra). But yeah, listen to what SmokeStacks says; there's a lot of grey areas on that map you should be able to explore right now, Icon.
My Backloggery
If you own a PS3, PSP, or an Xbox 360 you can get it back for less than $10.
My Backloggery
Technically you have 2 options on where to go next...
Oh and I am very envious of you. I wish I could play SOTN again for the first time.
yeah, I know I can get it cheap but I really regret not keeping that copy.
That being said, I've been continually impressed with the size of the game and the huge variety of enemies. In fact, pretty much this entire game impresses me aside from the stupid hidden things and occasionally getting stun-locked in a boss fight. Kinda wanna get the achievement for getting 200.6% of the game completed, but I also feel no real desire to sit around grinding away at certain enemy types to get rare items. This game is an absolute steal for the XBL price, though.
The devs certainly put an enormous amount of effort into SOTN. Can't believe I've missed it for all these years.
That's debatable. I mean, on the one hand, this was their first go with this formula. But then on the other hand, how many flaws does it take before it becomes inexcusable?
Note: holy crap I typed a lot and considering it some of it may be a spoiler to the OP, it's in a tag anyhow.
If you don't like linearity, I dunno, I guess you're right. But what I like about linearity is when I'm able to break it - that's why I love Super Metroid, for example. The game has a path to follow, but when you get the controls down and learn some things, all of a sudden the whole game is open ended.
If SotN was built in the same way the whole way through - a linear path, but if you've mastered controls of the skills you can break that linearity - it would've been great.
The game has aged badly to me. Every "Metroidvania" to come out has further worked on their ability to layout a linear path while working on the challenge. SotN is just too goddamn easy. The only hard boss in the game is Galamoth or whatever his name is, the tall guy that fire lightning all over the place (now that I think about it, I'd like to go back to it and fight him in a non-cheesy way). CotM is actually okay in difficulty, and whenever they made you do some backtracking that had to be done, they at least spruced up the enemies as you moved along. The itemization in the game was kinda goofy though, as was the idea of magic and everything special was just a mess. I pretty much default to just using the whip and subweapons. All the magic shit was fluff.
HoD was easier, and they tried to play to the SotN vibe (two castles, Juste had the shadowy thing to his movement like Alucard and even resembled him, that sort of shit). But it eventually succumbs to the SotN problems - the linearity is lost, and the game becomes even easier than it seemed to be at first (though, one of the final boss fights can actually fuck you up). The shop guy was a pain in the ass in that he would disappear after you moved on to later areas and you could miss out on some items.
AoS was even easier but I think they managed to nail the castle layout / exploration thing. The main entrance hall area was the place you had to travel through most to get to new places in the castle, but I don't think people really gave a damn on account of 1) it giving you a chance to find out how strong you've become in the meanwhile and 2) the music for the area was fucking sweet. It also adopted SotN's different weapons scheme, and came up with a good idea for special abilities (which helped the castle layout / linearity).
DoS was just fine-tuning of the AoS system but still managed to be easy, though it had the hard points of Death and Gergoth (the guy in the tower). The idea that multiple gatherings of the same enemy soul would empower the ability further felt like too little too late for the formula; that should've been in AoS for god's sake.
PoR managed to divide the game into a SotN play style vs a new style, which was Charlotte's magic. the game was more difficult than DoS, though not by much, and the layout was made to be brisk and extremely linear, everything really being locked out by story progression as opposed to new abilities. There's like no room for breaking the linearity, which is true of the last two titles, so that much was disappointing.
OoE was extremely fucking linear. But they managed to hammer out the difficulty of the game right. Plus the armor / weapons thing was stripped down to extreme basics by the entire series' standards, which helped a lot.
The leveling up is a nice reward for exploring; otherwise, you'd just spend hours wandering and have nothing whatsoever as benefit for your time. And for once, you're supposed to actually be this pretty powerful character and you actually get to be that character for more than five minutes at the very end of the game. By the time I finished, I had no desire to face some bullshit fights where the bosses could swipe off half my life with one hit or something like that.
As for the game's linearity, I had infinitely less gripe about everything being open to you later on than not knowing about some super-secret route. By the time you get to
I also actually like the fact that the devs took the time to look at the game and see where somebody could sequence break. I still managed to do it a couple of times, but whenever I wasn't supposed to get somewhere it was very, very clear you weren't supposed to get there yet. There was no "if I could just get a foot higher"; you either could get somewhere or you couldn't. Conversely, in the Metroid games it's completely possibly to go way the hell off one way and be blocked because you don't have a given beam yet. I will say that SotN could've definitely done with a map which showed things like blocked points and broken the map up into color-coded sections.
And I had no idea this was the devs first try at something like this; that actually impresses me more. Yeah, there were flaws, but the game is impressively large and in-depth. I was pretty much hooked the first time I randomly did a magic spell (Soul Steal, of all things); before that point, I'd had no idea the game magic was something you could just do if you knew the commands.
As far as the challenge, I felt the castle itself was supposed to be the challenge more than the enemies anyway. If every enemy I came across ended up being even a slightly tough fight and the whole game stayed that way, I probably wouldn't even have played the whole game. There's just too much exploring and backtracking and making the enemies all challenging would've turned the game into a huge chore. Instead, I could blaze through the vast majority of enemies and focus on getting to where I needed to go, particularly towards the end.
That area you have circled just contains a Basilard (not very good where you are)--you go down a long elevator and pick up a run-of-the-mill cape half-way to the bottom. There's a cannon down there that blows open a hole in a wall, thus allowing you to go through.
As someone else mentioned, you should have the Leap Stone and Soul of Bat by now. I believe you can either proceed down the long fall over to the mid-bottom-right down into the Caverns, or you could go get the Power of Mist, which is in the Coliseum--basically the center of the map. You have to go to the big clocktower in the middle, see if the statue on the left is out of the way, if it isn't just wait a minute (literally and at most), then double-jump/bat your way up.
This leads to Olrox's Quarters. Proceed along and go toward the left when you get to the open-ish area that has one of those animated swords--only this one calls on all sorts of miscellaneous weaponry to circle around it. This should take you to the Coliseum. Fight the boss there, and you should immediately be able to pick up the Soul of Mist.
The world's your oyster at that point. Take your time, look around, and when you get the Fairy or the Demon familiar, make sure to use them--they spot weak walls and certain secrets for you.
The crappy special weapon system. Hate it when I accidentally grab something I don't want... worse is when I'm unable to retrieve my original due to enemy interference.
...not big on unskippable cut scenes, either.
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
1. See that upwards opening in the middle of that long, straight path with plenty of empty space above it? That's the clock room, and you'll do well to memorize it's location. Currently, you can go up two ways from there. They're both blocked by statues, but one opens up every other minute, so it's easy to get through. The other opens if you have the clock special weapon in effect. From the left of the two paths (the one that opens every other minute,) you'll eventually find yourself in the Colisseum, where you'll gain the power to turn into mist.
2. This way's just right of the clock room. When the path branches, take the upper path and you'll find a door you couldn't get through before you bought the Opening thing in the library. Step on a switch, and then backtrack and take the lower path. The switch opened two holes in the floor. One leads to a few items, and the other to...well...about an entire third of the castle. Good hunting!
Edit: Oh, just to make things easier, Option 2 is already on the path. It's the long vertical drop to the right. Note that the area below it is less than half of the places you can reach this way. And Option 1 is the first unexplored opening to the left of Option 2's start.
I was infuriated every time I lost my holy water.
Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
3ds: 3282-2248-0453
Now if you'll excuse me, there are some children on my lawn that need to be yelled at.
My Backloggery
Once you beat the game once you can skip cut scenes.
Where you start the game with horrible, horrible stats, but your luck is 99 AND you get some luck pumping gear to start the game with if I remember correctly.
It starts off hard, but then the luck kicks in and you start getting all these awesome drops.
I had to remind myself this was the first gameplay reboot of Castlevania. All the fancy weapons and magic system we associate with it were not around yet.
Ahh. Now i have to play Circle of the Moon and Order of Ecclesia again.
I don't =(
Cool thing about the Clock room, the PS1 version measures minutes based on how long you have been playing, whereas the Saturn version uses the systems' internal clock and opens/closes based on the actual time.
Not sure about the PSP (Dracula X) and 360 versions, but since they're pretty much the PS1 version I would assume it's done by playtime.
Pounding the librarian's ass for goodies sure was something.
Nope. Real time for the 360. At least I'm pretty sure it was.
hahaha I'd forgotten that
If videogames are taking up too much of your time, you could always try a new hobby ... like piano lessons.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsysZQYBQU8&feature=related