Super Castlevania IV PROTOTYPE! - Tool-Assisted Playthrough

This is a tool-assisted playthrough of the recent Castlevania IV prototype leak. The purpose was to explore around the game and have good video and audio quality. There are important things to know when watching this:
- The prototype is not fully functional. After Stage 5, the player is sent back to the title screen, beating Zapf Bat softlocks the game, A-1 is a broken mess that has no progression, and B-2 is impossible to progress due to "spikes" being below the stairs. Passwords let us bypass this, but because the game uses the filename KONAMI, the 'normal' passwords we use don't work. I changed a value in Bizhawk's HexEditor to access everything past Stage 9.
- After every orb grab, there must not be 0 hearts leftover or else the game will underflow the value and softlock. This is why you see deathwarps from Stage 8 onwards.
- ANY candle I did not whip is a small heart. The only exceptions are at 01:52 (Axe), and at 15:30, where the bottom-right corner has a candle containing a small health refill.
- The blue circular things that are mostly under stairs are spikes.
- I did a lot of extra exploring in A-1, but there's nothing interesting I found. One thing to note is the vanilla Stage A starts out as Block A-2 in this prototype. I would've loved to see what the idea behind this block would've been (or if it was an experimental block and it was planned to be scrapped the whole time).
- The in-between cutscenes are not skippable.
- Dracula is not in the game, so I don't know if there are credits. I did not find anything in the HexEditor regarding this.
- IF YOU WANT TO PLAY THIS ON CONSOLE, YOU NEED THE PASSWORDS TO PROGRESS PAST STAGE 5. Check out this video to access all passwords! • Super Castlevania IV P...

[@LoveFor298Yen]

It’s always fascinating to see the ideas that were originally floating around at Konami. The Mode 7 map looks way cooler, IMO, wish they kept that.

[@TylerVanCleve]

Yo this prototype version of Simon's theme kinda slaps doe. I like it a lot

[@CyberDragon10K]

A-1 is so fucking weird. It's like they wanted you to climb up around the inside of a tower in Mode 7, but couldn't get it to work and just made A-2 the starting point in the final game. _Fascinating._

[@ramongiovane]

it's bugged af to say the least lol

[@ZippletTech]

A very interesting prototype - so many changes to the music etc. I wish they had kept the rotating tower concept!

[@GawainSSB]

Funny how the mud guys still cause lag despite not splitting up haha. Very interesting to see all the item and enemy placement differences. Some of the songs are completely different too, like the forest

[@Tsukoblue]

It would have been cool if the beta included the Dracula fight

[@themadmallard]

holy cow, simon's theme had this long B-side before looping? interesting. (the keychange up in production works better tho.) And the treasury was a map theme? And stage 2, i wonder did that get used in any other game? Its interesting, but the production was a much better '2nd stage' tune to keep you energized as you play thru.. and another B-side to 3-1?? Now the length and a-b-c of 3-3 makes sense if multiple tracks were like that... 4 became 8 without a fade in...and whatever decision led to 5-2 becoming a re-versioning of the 2 prelude sections was exactly the right call.

[@mikaelsza]

24:34 Tri-Cross Purrfect!!

[@TES_735]

Damn you could really spam the fuck out of the whip in this prototype

[@LaySuperMarioLover]

The first couple levels are relatively the same as we know them in their fully finished state. But after the stage with the haunted ballroom, it gets... trippy, to say the least. You can make out the layouts of the Library, the Torture Chamber (of which a very early version of its background music plays during these stages), the Treasury Room, the Clock Tower, and the Boss Rush at the end against Slogra, Gaibon and the Grim Reaper, which function pretty much without any issues as far as I can spot. It's very impressive that they had a base skeleton (Heh-heh... get it?) of basically the entire game well before they actually started working on the environments and their respective details, gimmicks and enemy placements.

[@magggg2797]

The stage 2 theme is pretty good

[@ramongiovane]

I'm so glad that they changed the Stage 2 music!

[@bsmith6646]

Why? Stage 2 final cut is brilliant, this one is wank 😂

[@calanon534]

The only thing I like from this.. and I like it _a lot_ is the "world map." I wish they'd kept that part. The rest of it, I can see where and why it was polished and refined.

[@speedut2004]

this prototype simon theme version is arguably better in some parts.

[@cardetailingstudioaustria4121]

Best Player i See 👍

[@AP-jl3rs]

Lovin the bongo drums

[@magnusdiridian]

Thank you simon, but our dracula is in another game

[@CameronLestat]

Thank Tou

[@castlevaniadatabase]

I couldn't find this prototype. Where can I download it?

[@robertlauncher]

Seems a lot of music was unfinished. Songs are reused a lot here

[@KajuTheRudeMonke]

Duh, it's a prototype. What did you expect?

[@Spriven]

ooo interesting

[@alkonte1903]

It's great but in my opinion it would be better with the original music

[@soundtea4939]

Except this **is** the original music. At least the prototype versions of the songs.

[@guillermoarjonaniebla2035]

ROM please

[@questionblock8949]

Did you ever located rom? Thank you

[@PsychomachineryEBM]

Somebody should port CV IV to Genesis

[@PSXMicha]

the death at 24:50 was so unnecessary, especially when playing tool assisted

[@sairanalberto2724]

- After every orb grab, there must not be 0 hearts leftover or else the game will underflow the value and softlock. This is why you see deathwarps from Stage 8 onwards. Read the description bud.

[@samikaze1862]

so strange

[@AyaneOfDeath]

ough!

[@fred_derf_]

I prefer the most choices made in the prototype, the difficulty is real, the sprites colors are better, better map, too bad the last levels were unfinished, let's hope another protoype will be leaked one day. I prefer the golems and the dragon head skulls in the final version tho.

[@aweirdredtoad3637]

That's the biggest stretch I've heard ever.

[@Hadoken.]

You must have been drinking when you wrote that comment bud.

[@bsmith6646]

A couple of the sprites are nicer. Aside from that, yeah its a prototype. Nice to see though. For all you SOTN fanboys, this prototype is still better than your game 😂