Insane Difficulty: Castlevania - Symphony of the Night - HardType v4.6 - Insane Difficulty

Castlevania - Symphony of the Night - HardType v4.6
http://www.insanedif...night-hardtype/

This patch is a difficulty and re-balance modification for the PSX NTSC-U version of Symphony of the Night.

Enemy HP and Attack have been increased. Some enemies have higher Defense and Resistances. Equipment and special attacks have been re-balanced. Removed Mablung drop. The Duplicator has been removed from the game. The Mablung is available from the Master Librarian after defeating Dracula. Added an optional patch to remove experience from enemies.

Note: The Mablung can cast shield spells.

v4.6 Changes
another minor alteration to dracula and galamoth's hp

v4.5 Changes
minor alteration to dracula and galamoth's hp

v4.4 Changes
tweaked akmodan ii, beezelbub, death, galamoth, and dracula
reduced the mp cost of most shield spells
slightly weakened the blood cloak and walk armor

v4.0 Changes
added mp cost to katana warp attacks
tweaked mp cost shield spells
altered defence and holy resistance of some bosses

v3.6 Changes
altered the crissaegrim
restored crissaegrim drop
slightly reduced mp cost of alucard shield spell
increased dracula and galamoth's hp

v3.4 Changes
increased holy resistance of most reverse castle bosses
buffed most normal castle bosses
tweaked the marsil and heaven swords

v3.1 Changes
reduced dracula and galamoth's hp

v3.0 Changes
buffed reverse castle bosses
re-balanced mp cost of shield rod spells
replaced the duplicator with the mablung in the shop menu
altered the vorpal blade
restored vorpal blade drop
re-balanced two-handed sword, katana, and club special attacks
cleaned up some text
partially dummied out the tactics menu

v2.2 Changes
galamoth's lightning attack deals non-elemental damage

v2.1 Changes
vorpal blade removed
tweaked duplicator

v2.0 Changes
re-balanced mp costs on special attacks
re-balanced attack of katanas
re-balanced attack of fists
re-balanced attack of two-handed swords
re-balanced defense of shields
altered vorpal blade
altered tyrfing
altered ring of varda
altered duplicator
clubs set to two hands (disables shield rod spells)
mablung removed (disables shield rod spells)
crissaegrim removed

v1.0 Changes
altered all enemies

Thank you so much for this. I've been searching for some time now for a difficulty patch.

Man this looks very nice indeed!!
I have 3 questions

1.) Any chance of a version that keeps all content?
Crissaegrim / Vorpal Blade / Mablung
Maybe nerfing them a lot

2.) Also could you elaborate a little more on this changes:
altered tyrfing / altered ring of varda / altered duplicator

3.) Does it requires a new game?

thanks a lot for this patch!
SOTN is my all time favorite Castlevania game!
Now it could get even better!

1.) No.

2.) Ring of Varda - decreased stat bonuses
Duplicator - increased stat penalties
Tyrfying (and other cursed weapons) - higher attack power

3.) No.

Thank you for your hard work. I've been playing the mod on and off over this last day and the enemies seem much more aggressive. Did you make their AIs more aggressive?

Also, you removed some of the items, and I'm not sure if it's just me, but did you also move some of the relics as well? It feels like the spirit orb got moved, or am I just imagining things?

I didn't alter AIs, but it feels that way because enemies have the necessary stats to make their attack patterns more effective.

Also, I didn't alter or move relics.

Someone posted a video of this patch on YouTube. Whoever it is, I'd like to see more of them.

First off, thank you for all the work you've done on this patch so far. I've truly enjoyed playing every bit of it thus far. I have been doing a stream play of it for a few friends and for the most part everything feels well balanced(currently about halfway done with Inverted Castle). Some of the really notable things are...

Hippogryph boss fight actually felt like a boss now instead of a miniboss.
Tyrfing was actually useful(allowed 2hit kills on Harpies in the Clock Tower).
Medusa Heads became an actual threat at times.
Drop rates seem to be better(or got lucky for a change) which made the difficulty feel perfect(was never over geared once spite this) and removed the want to farm for items(except to speed up killing Galamoth).
Richter fight was a lot more fun. You couldn't simply rush damage on the orb but instead had to spend time dodging Richter.

TLDR, game feels much more "right" or "correct" with this patch then it did originally(to me).

I do have to ask, is the Yasutsuna still in the game? I spent about four hours farming Werewolves and never got a drop. Main reason I was trying to acquire one is to speed up the time it takes to kill Galamoth. He takes ~20sec of Alucard Shield+Shield Rod to kill(used a save that had both already equipped to test). He also seemed to have way higher defenses now which made his increased health even more insane. I do feel this is a bit much mainly because with the Beryl Circlet you would have to be terrible to get killed(which is unlikely if your that far into the game with this patch).

The Yasutsuna is still in the game, however it has been weakened. The drop rate is still incredibly low. It took me about two hours or so to get one (I got it in the same spot where you were trying to get it).

I completely forgot about the Beryl Circlet. I'll have to fix that in an update. I wanted Galamoth to be a post-game boss, which is why his HP is so high.

Is there any way to switch controls for subweapons? Maybe by having them replace Alucard's backdash? Since spells use motions, I often wind up triggering a weapon while doing the rolling motions.

I've tried to get this to work in Mednafen, and I haven't been able to get it to work. Standard game works. It works in other emulators. I'll test other accurate emulators next see if it works in those. It could be a problem with Mednafen, or it could be that this romhack doesn't work with accurate emulators. Romhacks should aim to work with those though, as it will mean they work on real hardware, and in all other accurate emulators forever.

How did you make this? Did you simply use a debugger? Would you be willing to release notes/tools for the game. I would love to see more romhacks. This is the first one for this game that I'm aware of. I really would like to see others make mods to this game.The holy grail of SotN romhacking would be a map editor to create a truly new experience.

Would you be willing to release a complete list of all the gameplay changes in a more detailed changelog?

Finally suggestions for balancing:

- reduce starting Hearts significantly. 50 is too high
- MP restoration rate is too high
- Basilard is still very powerful

Basilard could be balanced by adding +5 to all other weapons, then +5 to defense to all enemies. All the other weapons would stay the same, but the basilard would be weaker in comparison.

Early game spells and sub-weapons are very powerful. I didn't have much difficulty dispatching hard enemies with holy water. Also the Doppleganger was giving me some difficulty, so I just went back and got the stopwatch. He's the only boss that works on.

Wanted to also throw in my thanks for doing this; it's amazing to finally have something like this. Last time I looked for a project like this last year I was pretty disappointed to not find anything like this, especially given SotN's huge fanbase. Thank you

I'd also like to echo Pizzaro's comments above... any notes about how you did this (even if super basic, hastily-written notes with little explanation) would be wonderful. Re: level editing, I do remember a while back someone posted a program that could view SotN's levels, but couldn't yet write to them, and I think that was a planned feature in a next release that never did happen, which is really unfortunate. I'm imagining if SotN eventually had the hacking capabilities that Super Metroid has... that would be amazing

Do you have any tools for making hacks for this game?

Can you upload Castlevania - Symphony of the Night - HardType v1.0 patch? Because I want to download only SOTN - HardType v1.0 patch.

http://www.mediafire...r/SOTNHTv1.0.7z

Thank you very much.

How about to creating from yours one patch, create couple patches with different levels of difficulty.
Something like: normal, hard, very hard, insane difficulty. So, every man will choose his own level of difficulty. Just an idea. (Sounds good, but much harder to do).

I just want to ask.
I like patch closer to original where Only HP(health points) of bosses changed. Something like: double(200%) and triple(300%) HP of bosses. And other enemies HP, stats remains same, like in original SOTN. Can you create patch with only double or triple HP of bosses(except Dracula in prologue)?

Razi, on 03 January 2016 - 08:27 AM, said:

That ... that's the perfect tagline

Bishop, on 03 January 2016 - 02:47 PM, said:

Sounds good. Not perfect, but good.

Found one weak spot in hardtype version of sotn.
You can do in hardtype version "Keep Your Alucard Equipment" trick, without the 99 Luck code. Because attack of the Wargs is very powerful (200%), you can skip room where game takes away Alucard's Equipment. With Alucard's Equipment, the game will be very easy.


Can you create patch with only double or triple HP of bosses(except Dracula in prologue)?
Never mind. I did it myself.
Also I created patch with infinite wing smash like in sega saturn.

Yay, thanks for the great work, LandonRay. Nice job trying to balance SotN. I'm addicted to this game and have been looking for a Hard patch for years. Playing Hardtype right now. Just did a video on Death's battle, and I am planning to make a full game video upload of my testing if you want.



Btw, IMO there are some balance changes that could yet be made, since that the game is still somewhat easy after a point. These are very important in my view:

- Nerf/remove the Holy Sword & Holy Rod weapons; (they do bonus damage to lots of enemy units, and IMO are by far the most powerful common weapons now, except by Alucard Sword.)

- Nerf the Holy Water,Holy Cross, Knife and Bibuti subweapons; (All these are OP in my opinion. For 6 hearts you can easily kill the Cthulhu early in the game with HW, for example, and both the Knife and Holy Cross are Boss killers. The other subweapons are balanced IMO.)

- Nerf/remove the Blood Cloak; (because it converts damage received into hearts. Think about you being able to perform a Holy Cross every time that an Inverted Castle boss hits you. It's not fair IMO).

- Nerf/Remove the circlets; (they make Alucard gain HP each time that he's hit by the circlet's element attacks. They also increase a lot INT. Very OP in my opinion.)

- Give a cooldown for the Backdash ability; (Is it possible? I find it annoying to see people dashing everywhere for speed in SotN videos)

- Increase the heigh of Alucard's crouching sprite; (Again, is it possible? Many enemies, including bosses such as Medusa, Cerberus and Slogra simple can't hit you if you're crouching. It's not well balanced in my opinion)

- Remove/reduce the pain chance of some units; (Some units/bosses like the Succubus and the Karasuman cannot even attack if you keep hitting them).

Well, that's it. The link of the video that I've posted is below. Thanks again.

https://www.youtube....h?v=nmBGsu0vHvs

Razi, on 05 January 2016 - 02:20 PM, said:

How did you do that? Is there some editor for SotN...?