Uploaded April 2013 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Historically, when any% routes for Metroidvanias become extremely broken, "all bosses" becomes a complimentary category in order to keep the broken aspects while still playing most/all of the game. This video just shows a couple potential skips I thought up for such a route in DoS Julius mode. I tried some others, but circumstances to make everything work correctly with zipping in Julius mode are weird (I'll upload some more videos with full blown zipping later to show this). With my hellfire setup for this, I'm sure there are several more places on the map people could test for zips. I know I'll be messing with it more.
Keep in mind that the experience point route needs to be optimized for these to work in an actual run, and there's a chance that doing so will slow things down and make these skips not worth it. However, the other possibility is that you gain extra levels while still gaining time or breaking even, making boss fights even faster. I'll break down the two skips individually so you can understand what's going on.
1. This skip would be done right after beating Zephyr. Warping back to the Demon Guest House, zipping up to Paranoia, and heading back to Aguni should be faster than going through the rest of the clock tower, through the bottom of the Pinnacle, and then to Paranoia only to backtrack to Aguni. The Alucard special actually needs to be pretty far left here; if you're not far enough, you get pushed out of the wall instead of zipping up. I'm not sure what the best boss strat to use on Paranoia is, but I'd probably refer to Aftermath's Julius boss rush for a starting point.
2. This is the skip where I was forced to figure out the hellfire setup. I knew from the Soma all bosses route that you could zip straight up to Aguni's door, but it was a matter of making that actually work in Julius mode. This would be right after Paranoia, so experience management might be tricky to optimize since you would gain a lot from him. It is surely faster to even kill a few Succubi on the way here to set this up than to go through the entire Pinnacle.
Not sure if anyone is interested in picking up running Julius mode, but here's at least some ideas to get started with for zip searching if you wanted to!
Historically, when any% routes for Metroidvanias become extremely broken, "all bosses" becomes a complimentary category in order to keep the broken aspects while still playing most/all of the game. This video just shows a couple potential skips I thought up for such a route in DoS Julius mode. I tried some others, but circumstances to make everything work correctly with zipping in Julius mode are weird (I'll upload some more videos with full blown zipping later to show this). With my hellfire setup for this, I'm sure there are several more places on the map people could test for zips. I know I'll be messing with it more.
Keep in mind that the experience point route needs to be optimized for these to work in an actual run, and there's a chance that doing so will slow things down and make these skips not worth it. However, the other possibility is that you gain extra levels while still gaining time or breaking even, making boss fights even faster. I'll break down the two skips individually so you can understand what's going on.
1. This skip would be done right after beating Zephyr. Warping back to the Demon Guest House, zipping up to Paranoia, and heading back to Aguni should be faster than going through the rest of the clock tower, through the bottom of the Pinnacle, and then to Paranoia only to backtrack to Aguni. The Alucard special actually needs to be pretty far left here; if you're not far enough, you get pushed out of the wall instead of zipping up. I'm not sure what the best boss strat to use on Paranoia is, but I'd probably refer to Aftermath's Julius boss rush for a starting point.
2. This is the skip where I was forced to figure out the hellfire setup. I knew from the Soma all bosses route that you could zip straight up to Aguni's door, but it was a matter of making that actually work in Julius mode. This would be right after Paranoia, so experience management might be tricky to optimize since you would gain a lot from him. It is surely faster to even kill a few Succubi on the way here to set this up than to go through the entire Pinnacle.
Not sure if anyone is interested in picking up running Julius mode, but here's at least some ideas to get started with for zip searching if you wanted to!
![[OBSOLETE] Castlevania: SotN (XBLA) speed run in 19:55](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/PDhsLwrWDDU/mqdefault.jpg "[OBSOLETE] Castlevania: SotN (XBLA) speed run in 19:55
WATCH THE NEW RECORD: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQzTQ-5rNbs
As far as I know, this is the first console speed run of SotN to be completed in under 20 minutes. This isnt a very good run and is definitely far from being submittable to SDA, but I figured since it was perhaps a bit of a milestone for speed running the game that it might be nice to upload.
This is the world record as of 2/20/2012, but this time will probably be crushed very soon so whatever. If you want to see me do live attempts of this run, follow http://twitch.tv/romscout and check the schedule for when Im doing runs of the game. I missed a skip entirely and messed up a lot, but hopefully you still enjoy this run! Expect a better one soon.")
