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 Released in 2003, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow is one of the last and best Metroidvanias made for the Gameboy Advance. After Dracula's final defeat in 1999, he and his castle were sealed into the eclipse because reasons. In 2035, Soma Cruz and his fabulous coat were sucked into the eclipse, and now he must conquer the castle and absorb the monsters' powers in order to escape, and find his girlfriend a personality. The game's story is simple and predictable, but it does what needs to be done, and provides a twist that is, if not surprising, at least creative, and takes the series in a new direction. We're gonna be ignoring all of that poo poo. My name is PMush Perfect, and I am going to be performing a challenge run. Specifically to spite this game's RPG elements, I am going to be completing the entire game without ever killing a single unnecessary enemy, up to the true final boss, Chaos. How's this gonna work? This is going to be a hybrid LP of a sort. On Normal, I will be completing each section in a single run, with deaths mostly edited out, using subtitles to explain the strategies and quirks of this particular challenge. Then, once you know what I'm supposed to be doing, Hard will be a montage of my many, many deaths (and occasional successes) for two co-commentators to bathe in schadenfreude and laugh at me sucking at video games. There will be a rotating roster for the latter, so if you have a mic and a sense of humor and you want in on this, shoot me a PM. Spoiler Policy I would prefer we avoid gameplay spoilers, because for anyone who does not know the game, I don't want to ruin the surprise of just how I'm going to get my rear end kicked. Story spoilers, I'm much more lax about, and won't really be paying any attention to. If you'd like a more standard run of the game, I recommend Garin's Hard Mode LP. It's definitely not a bad story, just not what I'm here for. Normal Mode          Hard Mode  Featuring Herr Tog and UZWorm  Featuring Herr Tog and CirclMastr  Hard Mode discontinued because, frankly, I'm just not good enough. Special  Featuring Castleween! girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 11:13 on Jun 28, 2017 |
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Feb 25, 2017 03:06
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I'm a big fan of this game, and a big fan of watching people beat their heads against low level runs in CV. Looking forward to this!
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Feb 25, 2017 23:05
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ah, it's the best GBA Castelvania, heck yeah
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Feb 26, 2017 00:00
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Dawn of Sorrow is the superior Sorrow. I sure love flailing around on the touchscreen. But really any GBA/DS Castlevania games are good fun. I am v. excited to see you die a whole bunch from just constantly tanking enemy hits in order to get through them.
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Feb 26, 2017 00:05
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Dr. Hurt posted:Dawn of Sorrow is the superior Sorrow. I sure love flailing around on the touchscreen. But really any GBA/DS Castlevania games are good fun. Counterpoint: Dawn of Sorrow's character designs are more generic (excepting the priestess lady, I guess), and its story is not nearly as good. About all it has going for it is that smug jerk villain (EDIT: okay, the Castlevania 3 mode is also pretty good, in fact it's by far better than the main mode). But worst of all, they jacked the soul rarity way up while also shoehorning in a dumb crafting system to force you to grind for souls if you want to use non-starter-tier weapons, and a dumb soul leveling system that means that even when you do get a soul it'll probably be underpowered unless you grind for more copies of it! They should have named it Grind of Sorrow. It's the worst modern Castlevania, possibly excepting Circle of the Moon. Ranking is something like Ecclesia > Aria = Portrait > Symphony > Dissonance > Moon =?= Dawn. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Feb 26, 2017 |
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Feb 26, 2017 00:26
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Dr. Hurt posted:Dawn of Sorrow is the superior Sorrow. I sure love flailing around on the touchscreen. But really any GBA/DS Castlevania games are good fun. the touchscreen stuff was all a dumb gimmick tho
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Feb 26, 2017 00:31
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If I had any doubts about it, they were lost in your painful bashing against enemies just to get through. I will greatly enjoy your pain, I'm sure. Can't wait for the hard mode videos!
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Feb 26, 2017 00:52
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For my money this is best Metroidvania game, looking forward to this. Would be down to commentate on an ep or two because I love this game, but my schedule is all sorts of hosed up from week to week so we'll see 
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Feb 26, 2017 02:03
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Dissonance is the worst one. Hands down. Maxim mode kinda saves it. Kinda. Then its circle of the moon. Ecclesia is some kind of magic and is probably the best possible refinements to the style of gameplay that symphony started. Its just so drat good. (I wonder how much harder this challenge would be without the xp you get from bosses)
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Feb 26, 2017 12:13
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I like Circle of the Moon more but it's still a pretty solid game, some really uninspired boss and area design apart. Dawn improved on that - at the cost of being worse at everything else. Ecclesia is the best Castlevania period. Thus spake anilEhilated.
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Feb 26, 2017 13:11
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Hard #1 coming soon. Editing an hour and a half of me dying to regular rear end enemies takes a long time.
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Feb 28, 2017 23:11
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PMush Perfect posted:Hard #1 coming soon. Editing an hour and a half of me dying to regular rear end enemies takes a long time.  It begins
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Mar 1, 2017 01:41
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I have a feeling I'm going to enjoy this. If you're still looking for co-commentators, hit me up.
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Mar 1, 2017 08:01
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PMush Perfect posted:Hard #1 coming soon. Editing an hour and a half of me dying to regular rear end enemies takes a long time. I am so eager to see which this early are your actual problems.
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Mar 2, 2017 00:13
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This time on Medusa Head: Expositional yet pointless dialogue. girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 14:41 on Mar 18, 2017 |
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Mar 2, 2017 02:37
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PMush Perfect posted:
"This video is not available."
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Mar 2, 2017 23:08
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WilliamAnderson posted:"This video is not available."
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Mar 2, 2017 23:11
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Yeah, it works for me. Also, good editing choices.
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Mar 3, 2017 02:47
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Lightning Doll or bust  Valkyrie is also good because so much in this game is weak to Holy damage. I knew about that back door to the IQ but never bothered with it since I'm too much of a rule-follower. Also because the Headhunter soul is really good but I can see why you'd want to skip that fight on a low-level run! Do you not need the slide elsewhere in the game?
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Mar 3, 2017 23:02
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C-Euro posted:Lightning Doll or bust I think the only required use of the slide is one of the paths into Top Floor. I'm also pretty sure that you can get Giant Bat before needing to go that way, which just lets you fly through the slot instead.
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Mar 3, 2017 23:20
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I'm also pretty sure that you can get Giant Bat before needing to go that way, which just lets you fly through the slot instead.
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Mar 3, 2017 23:30
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Featuring Herr Tog and UZWorm
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Mar 5, 2017 23:50
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PMush Perfect posted:
All downhill from here!
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Mar 6, 2017 06:52
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Casual cloths run is best run
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Mar 6, 2017 07:17
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Are you recording this with the built-in AVI recorder off Visual Boy Advance? Because that way you will get desynch. I had that problem too until I got the recommendation to switch to VBA re-recording, which is basically the same emulator but the AVI recorder doesn't desynch. Might be helpful?
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Mar 6, 2017 12:54
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Simply Simon posted:Are you recording this with the built-in AVI recorder off Visual Boy Advance? Because that way you will get desynch. I had that problem too until I got the recommendation to switch to VBA re-recording, which is basically the same emulator but the AVI recorder doesn't desynch. Might be helpful? I use Bizhawk for recording now, it's another good option for GB games and the like.
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Mar 6, 2017 13:53
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Herr Tog posted:Casual cloths run is best run What's a reincarnated Dracula's favorite day of the week? Casual fly-day! (Note: joke will work much better once pmush gets the giant bat soul)
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Mar 6, 2017 17:07
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quote:Mama Hen - Today at 1:08 PM
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Mar 9, 2017 22:16
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Uh, ouch, wow. That's really bizarre and really lovely. I can hardly blame you, but hopefully it comes back soon - I've been enjoying it so far!
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Mar 9, 2017 22:25
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It may in fact be because I was toying around with gameshark codes earlier to try and turn on 100% soul drop rate, to save myself from grinding like this in the future. ...I may need to test if this freezes ANY soul drop. 
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Mar 9, 2017 22:52
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See if you can contact the folks on the TASVideos forums; they'll have a game thread in their GBA subforum for this game. They can a) help you directly set the RNG via memory address manipulation (which is cheating, but helpful for diagnostic purposes), and b) help you figure out why the game is locking up. You're presumably on an emulator of some kind, it could also be worth trying a different emulator to see if you're running into an emulation bug. ...is the soul Manticore? That's one of the transformation souls, isn't it? EDIT: oh yeah, gameshark codes could be an easy culprit. Especially if it is Manticore since IIRC that enemy has some kind of weird double-kill thing you can do which might be confusing the game logic.
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Mar 9, 2017 22:53
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PMush Perfect posted:Mama Hen - Today at 1:08 PM What soul were you trying to get to drop?
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Mar 9, 2017 22:54
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Yeah, Manticore, so I can get under the waterfall. If I can get the Great Armor soul in the bargain, cool, but that's not necessary. I didn't do it in the Normal run because there, the Balmung is more than enough. But on hard, that extra little boost from the Claimh Solais is gonna be crucial.
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Mar 9, 2017 23:33
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I love how the more this LP goes on the more holes we find in it's greatness.
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Mar 10, 2017 01:44
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PMush Perfect posted:
That trick shot at 6:40 was glorious  you can just barely make out the arrow & you had no real way to avoid it, given your airborne status.e: and another at 7:25 
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Mar 16, 2017 04:08
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV7a4uahTOI
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Mar 16, 2017 06:52
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0j0lO7uQBo&t=4s
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Mar 16, 2017 07:02
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 This Time On Medusa Head: Probably only like half of the music in this episode is from Aria.
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Mar 18, 2017 14:45
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PMush Perfect posted:
This is a frustrating challenge to watch, because so many of the enemies are jerks and deserve a swift death. Especially blue devils.
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Mar 18, 2017 15:09
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That poor Bat did not deserve death. Why did you do it, PMush Perfect? Why?
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Mar 18, 2017 16:25
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