Castlevania Gen 1 allowed players to choose a difficulty, with two options: "NORMAL" and "EASY."
However, counterintuitively, the default setting on the difficulty selection screen was Normal rather than Easy!
For kids back then who could not even recognize all twenty-six letters, they naturally mashed the "START" button when entering the game. Ninety-nine percent of them ended up on Normal difficulty, where the Simon Belmont controlled by the Player gained a function called "Damage Dodge."
Once hit, the character would uncontrollably leap backward, and no matter how hard the Player wore out the controller, they could not interfere.
But if Easy difficulty was selected, getting hit would not make the character jump backward. Instead, they would remain standing in place, while the Phase Shift effect still activated, letting the Player freestyle through hordes of monsters.
On flat ground, getting knocked backward was not much of a problem. But Castlevania was filled with terrain hazards like staircases, pits, and jumping platforms. Once Damage Dodge triggered, there was a high chance of plummeting straight into the abyss.
And if, on top of those already lethal terrains, you ran into skeletons throwing arcing bone clubs, S-shaped Medusa heads flying about, or hopping flea men darting everywhere... That feeling was simply incredible!
James's reactions while playing the first game had not been exaggerated at all. This was what Players looked like after hearing the death sound effect.
It had to be said that Cheng Tian was quite the gambler. No wonder he was the kind of guy who liked stuffing Ace Chalice and Time Magician into his deck. This time, he had gambled that the Phase Shift effect triggered when he got hit could evade the Vampire Magician's attack.
And the truth was, he had won the bet.
The transformation spell failed to hit him while he was in Phase Shift, while his forcibly backward-leaping body instead produced an effect commonly known as "Nitro Boost."
This, too, was documented in the original game.
Many speedrunners took advantage of this forced backward leap when hit, forcibly clearing obstacles that could not normally be jumped over and thereby skipping entire maps to save time.
Going all in felt great! Going all in forever felt forever great!
At this moment, Cheng Tian's expression of bliss after successfully going all in probably looked like nothing but "ferocious" to the Vampire Magician.
The magician wanted to blink away from Cheng Tian's flying pounce, but the stagnant flow of magic had already given him the answer.
The skill was in CD State. He could not use it.
Yet just as the magician had braced himself to use his powerful vampire body to withstand the physical impact of a frail human, bare-chested Cheng Tian passed straight through his body, as smoothly as if they were not even on the same layer!
Clearly, the Phase Shift effect brought by Damage Dodge had not ended yet. Cheng Tian and the magician currently had no collision volume whatsoever.
The magician had never imagined Cheng Tian's Phase Shift would last this long. It could pass through not only spells but people as well. He had misjudged every step; one wrong move led to another. Just as the magician Cheng Tian had phased through tried to physically counterattack the human behind him with his cane, an intense suffocating sensation and terrifying burning pain engulfed him.
Cheng Tian's Demon-Breaking Whip Vampire Killer had successfully wrapped around the Vampire Magician's neck!
Here, Cheng Tian exploited a bug that was not really a bug: even while in Phase Shift, his attacks could still hit enemies, and strangling with a rope also counted as a valid attack.
Although only the first instant of the strangling met the weapon's Special Effect conditions, that was still a full 20 points of Holy Damage with no reduction. Using a sacred artifact specialized against vampires to strangle one... all that could be said was that this vampire was truly having the time of his life.
"Ax! Help me block the zombies!"
Afraid he would fail to strangle the vampire to death, Cheng Tian pulled with enough force to nearly snap the whip, while also shouting for One-Ear to help.
"Coming!!!"
One-Ear knew Cheng Tian was calling for him, but he had not been muddled by the complicated situation.
In terms of friendship, One-Ear was naturally closer to his own roommate. But reason told him that his idiot roommate, who was currently courting death, was completely unreliable.
So he decisively chose to support Cheng Tian and let his idiot roommate fend for himself.
After fiercely fighting the zombie horde for some time, Cheng Tian had handled most of the kills with minimal stamina expenditure, while One-Ear had merely rotated in to block now and then. Still, that did not stop him from observing and summing up certain patterns.
He first crouched and swept sideways, smashing the hammer side of the Hand Axe directly into a zombie's knee and shattering it in one strike. As the zombie lost its balance, he rose and drove his shoulder sideways into it, knocking it away.
Without choosing to finish it off, he immediately turned around, sprinted forward, and jumped. At the back of the zombie that had slapped Cheng Tian and was trying to continue its pursuit... the Zombie Duck, he delivered a crooked Knight kick—
You could call it a flying dropkick if you wanted.
And surprisingly, although that flying dropkick looked rather ugly, it really did land squarely on the shriveled Zombie Duck's torso. The dried-up Zombie Duck rolled down the dirt slope.
Among Chosen Space's many template instances, there were surely well-rounded hexagonal monsters. But the zombies of Demon World Village were definitely not among them.
When it came to straight-line movement speed, the zombies here were already outstanding among monsters of the same type. That naturally meant they each had weaknesses elsewhere, though in this case, one word summed it up—
Paper Defense.
This Paper Defense did not merely mean their HP was generally only 10 points. Their Strength Attribute was also far below that of a normal adult human male.
In Chosen Space, whether Players or monsters, physical attributes were comprehensively quantified through a four-dimensional chart of "Strength, Agility, Spirit, and Charm." Among them, Strength Attribute directly corresponded to physical attack, Max HP, self-healing ability, load-bearing mobility, resistance to blows, and other related data.
Similar settings could be found in Warcraft and Dota; as Strength increased, HP increased as well.
Strength and constitution should have been complementary physical attributes. Whether it was high strength with low constitution or low strength with high constitution, either felt somewhat unreasonable.
Because Demon World Village's zombies were driven by magic, and their material was also corpses that had already decayed to a certain extent in graves, rather than fresh parkour zombies infected by biochemical or rabies viruses that had broken their muscular limiters and gained rather than lost Strength, Strength was instead their weak point.
As for why they could break Drunk Brother's arm in one blow, that was entirely because his alcoholism, reversed day-and-night schedule, and lack of sunlight had given him osteoporosis, along with the Dark Magic within the zombies at work.
Any seemingly dangerous scenario mission actually had a correct solution. It simply demanded more courage, knowledge, teamwork, and the like.
It was worth mentioning that different units also had different HP conversion ratios.
As ordinary Earth Humans, Cheng Tian and the others had a Strength-to-HP conversion ratio of 1:10. Naturally, 10 points of Strength converted into 100 HP.
Demon World Village zombies, meanwhile, averaged around 5 Strength, but their decayed bodies left them with a pitiful HP conversion ratio of only 1:2. At most, they only had 10 HP. No wonder Cheng Tian could blow them apart with a single whip strike.
As a "Treasure Chest Monster," the Vampire Magician could teleport, transform into a duck, and possessed the vampire race's innate talents. His Strength, Agility, and Spirit were all formidable. Judging by his four-dimensional stats alone, he was already brushing the threshold of a "boss" unit. Yet the opponent he faced was Cheng Tian, the sort of person who treated precious sacred relics like bicycles and pedaled them for all he was worth.
Like a heated dinner knife slowly cutting through butter, Vampire Killer slowly yet smoothly strangled through the magician's neck. As the top hat and head rolled to the ground, the magician's headless corpse finally stopped struggling.
At the same time, the Gentleman's Cane still tightly gripped in the headless corpse's hand became covered in a gleam indicating it was "lootable."
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