Re: Nightmare Sphere is out...
Spoilers be here.
Speaking as a Castlevania SOTN nut, this is an almost completely solid fan game. The only thing that hurts it is a minor control bug I've noticed where the game will randomly stop recognizing arrow key button presses in the middle of a series of jumps. Relm will suddenly stop moving horizontally in the air and move straight up/down until you let go of the arrow key and press it again. It makes some of the longer jumps more annoying then they have to be, and it can be distracting if you use a lot of aerial combat. However, I managed to get the Wing ability on my second try, so it's certainly not impossible. As far as game content goes...
The regular succubi are definitely my favorite enemy in the game. Gotta love how they're the only monsters who go fully nude when they catch you and corrupt you.
I'm disappointed that the corruption system is more or less pointless outside of the endings. Actual gameplay-related pros and cons to each side would be nice. Being corrupted just meaning that you automatically attack civilians is kind of stupid when you can just turn it on any time you want as a pure/mixed character. The changes in Relm's icon and status screen art when corrupted are a nice touch, but somewhat of a minimal effort when the character sprites are almost completely unchanged. And what's with that twitching her idle sprite does? If she's evil, she should be in a sexy pose.
The unique Metroid life drain, frog-slug-thing vore, and childbirth death scenes are interesting. I wish they weren't so few and far between, though. There's so much room for potential. It would be nice to expand the gimmick so that being killed by a werewolf causes Relm to contract lycanthropy and transform into one herself, or the electric chair trap leaves her as a charred body if you don't have enough HP left. Things like that.
The references to other games are hilarious. Has anybody been keeping track? Aside from the obvious Metroids, I noticed that the evil doll / teddy bear monsters all have the names Ken, Ryu, and Gouki and attack you with Hadoukens and Shouryukens. Also, one of the savepoints near the center of the map is surrounded by Hylian Shields from Zelda.
Here are some clips I've recorded. They're probably be the only ones I'm posting, since the only other ending I could find sucked (and I kept reloading and beating the game with everything between partial corruption and fully purified) and I'm not going to risk YouTube Community violations with some of the dirtier things I could record. <_<
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The Congratulations screen you get after the ending seems to be determined by how long you take to complete the game, just like in the Metroid games. There's four possible screens in all, which you can view in the /NSphere/mes/ed1 folder. bg3.img is Relm in her standard outfit holding her sword, bg4.img is Relm sitting in a one piece bathing suit, bg5.img is Relm in some sort of skimpy goddess outfit, and bg6.img is Relm sitting naked. bg1.img and bg2.img are just background graphics used in the endings. Item percentage apparently doesn't affect which screen you get. I got my initial percentage of 87% up to 95% and always got the generic Relm screen. :/
