Yep, also tested Canary build and it's at least as fast as the last Chinese build I had been using, probably faster. Metroid: Samus Returns runs at fullspeed with no drops. I also tried Fire Emblem Fates but that had some slowdown. I also don't like the direction Fire Emblem has taken since the GBA games - they went too overboard with the animu cinematic shit, gameplay is very slow.
Also, that fucking glass tube you need to powerbomb is easily as obscure as anything in SotN. The whole 200% completion thing is a neat gimmick, but if you got 99%, you got the clues you need to get 200%
It's actually a rocket, not a powerbomb, but yeah. However, it is not required to blow up the tube - there is an alternate (secret) route in Maridia that gets you where you need to go. The smashed tube is a great shortcut, though.
Speaking of SotN, I had been playing it on and off and after finishing Super Metroid I cleared the first castle - I did the 'bad' ending just to remember what it was like:
Very odd choice for the credit song - it's a sort of elevator soft jazz vocal piece. It actually reminded me of Coppola's 1992 Dracula, which had one of the best soundtracks of all time by Wojciech Kilar only to be capped off during the credits by an awful fucking Annie Lennox love song.
Anyway, went back to kill Shaft instead of poor possessed Richter and now I'm onto the inverted castle:
An odd tidbit to this game is that it actually runs on PSX's lowest resolution mode (256x240) instead of a regular 320x240. This means there are horizontal black bars on top and below the 4:3 frame which were probably hidden under the overscan of most CRT tvs of the time (I certainly didn't remember noticing any bars when I played it 20 years ago). The upside to this is that you can zoom in the frame to eliminate the borders and since the ratio is closer to widescreen, you can get almost fullscreen without stretching on modern 16:9 displays.
Since it had been over 15 years since I last played this, I remembered almost nothing. The succubus dream, for example... also, item drops are much less prevalent here than in later games that followed the formula, and it's much better this way. The unique weapons that are hidden away are pretty much all cool. It all goes to confirm that Igavanias have declined sharply over time, with the sole exception being Order of Ecclesia, which is pretty great.
Will finish the 2nd castle. I remember it going much faster than the first round (which took me around 3 hours according to the save file).
