Chapter 9 Already

It wasn’t my intention to do two Castlevania HD posts in a row, but I didn’t know Chapter 9 was about to hit when I wrote last night’s post.

This new chapter is huge and hard. It’s filled with the mid-boss monsters Slogra and Gaibon. I’m fairly sure most players will spend as much time fighting all the Slogras and Gaibons as they do actually navigating the level.

My favorite trick to this level is that there are two shortcuts. The first is accessible to any player (well, at least, any player with Winged Boots boosting their speed) and involves scaling an outside wall by double-jumping from one breakable tile to the next, dodging swinging blades the whole while. It’s a pretty exhilarating platforming experience, the kind I didn’t imagine we’d see in Castlevania again! It’s also fairly tricky to do in multiplayer, with a bunch of other player sprites all hopping around at once.

The second shortcut is only available to Shanoa, Julius and Soma, and involves navigating Magnes studs through a tight vertical passage. I suspect Julius isn’t supposed to be able to get up there, but then, his Magnes navigation has always been a little glitchy.

The boss is Beelzebub, Lord of Flies from Symphony of the Night. Like Legion, he’s largely a gimmick boss. It only takes a few tries to learn his attack patterns, and he only has one type of attack. Unlike Legion (and Astarte, and Dracula…) Beelzebub doesn’t seem to have nine times as much health as he needs. Before long I was smashing him with no problem whatsoever, adding to my giant pile of endgame trash drops.

If the information on GameFAQs can be trusted, the good drops in this chapter include a pair of boots even faster than Winged Boots and an item that allows Yoko and Maria to use Charlotte’s Heal spell.

Hmm. That last one kind of cheeses me. Not only does Charlotte get nothing at all new in this chapter, but they went and gave her one and only exclusive ability to other characters, as well. On the other hand, this would allow teams to coordinate healbot efforts without requiring two players to both be Charlotte.

Also worth noting: I landed on two multiplayer teams this morning that wanted to run Chapter 7. I’m kind of over Chapter 7, but I was willing to run it. All the Ch. 7 stuff I want for Julius drops in Ch. 8, so I switched to Charlotte in order to get a shot at the Ch. 7-exclusive robe. Both teams kicked me immediately upon switching to Charlotte.

Before the healbot exploit was found out, there was a kind of stigma against using Charlotte because she was thought to be the worst character in the game. Now that the exploit has been patched, it looks like we’re right back where we started. What a gyp. It’s their loss, honestly; Charlotte’s one of the few characters who is unambiguously good against Ch. 7’s annoying boss!