Castlevania: Maria of Sorrow

[Kyoski]

M+: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/7505/

MoS: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/6690/

After feedback I have decided the title should be changed to Maria of Sorrow.

Hello! I am new here. This is a hack that I've been working on during some of my free time in between my college courses with one of my friends.

My original intention was to create this hack just for myself, but decided to release it publicly for everyone to enjoy. The point of creating this hack was to add maria playable in Aria of Sorrow. She's one of my favorite Castlevania characters and I wish they included her in more games.

I originally wanted to add her into Dawn of Sorrow first, but after my inexperienced attempt of messing around with replacing sprites, I settled with adding her into Aria of Sorrow first. (soma has far less frames to replace)
Her sprite fits well into the game since she's not much taller than Soma, but her size is still a little off putting when compared to some of the other characters and enemies.

In addition to adding her, I also wanted to mess around and create some custom armor, weapons, items, modify some souls, enemy difficulty, etc.
Going into this I'm glad the 1.0 release had received a lot of positive reception, I still have a lot planned for the future of this hack.

Here is a personal todo list I've been using to update the hack for the 1.1 release.

todo:
more balancing
more weapons/armors/accessories


WIP ideal 1.1 update notes: (this will most likely be expanded upon as more ideas and changes come)

updated maria's portrait colors to match her sprites.
nightmare HP typo fixed.
changed blue crow soul to dove.
changed smaller cat on student witch soul
changed balmung attack animation.
updated story to reflect maria's size(?)
update story to fit maria more.
changed evil soma to evil maria on throne screen.
changed guardian cagnazzo to maria's guardian spirit.
changed manticore to maria's tiger (limited color palette and size)
heavy armor changed.
berserker mail adjusted
julius spell costs being 1mp was unintentional.
changed maria's voice to female.
bunch of new weapons added too.

strikethrough=complete

I would appreciate more feedback, I'm open to ideas and help on what could be added and what more could be done to make a more enjoyable hack, One of the ideas I have but not sure if possible would be turning the blue crow soul into a weapon, for a more canon Maria experience.

Changed Maria's voice, finally figured it out,
just need to balance out weapons a bit and I'll release it.

anyways, have some progress screenies for the next update.

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[Dzumeister]

You need to change the title screen now to say Maria of Sorrow! 

Instead of a Julius mode, maybe you can do YOKO to add Yoko to the game lol

[nanashi89]

Can you do "Vanilla Difficulty" for those not into the "Souls Difficulty?" Or are you sticking to the "Souls Difficulty," only?

[Kyoski]

You need to change the title screen now to say Maria of Sorrow! 

Instead of a Julius mode, maybe you can do YOKO to add Yoko to the game lol

I will most likely try to make the title screen say Maria of Sorrow! (or mAria of sorrow). I have messed around with the idea of changing Julius with another character like yoko, alucard, etc. Julius' sprites are structured differently than Soma's so would definitely have to look into doing something like that.

Can you do "Vanilla Difficulty" for those not into the "Souls Difficulty?" Or are you sticking to the "Souls Difficulty," only?

with some minor effort it would definitely be possible to add the vanilla difficulty as a separate patch, yes. I might do that for people that don't want a harder difficulty, but it might be too easy with all the buffed up stats.
I made most of the changes with hard mode in mind and didn't actually think about normal mode balancing or enemies without 2x stats yet, I've only been working on this for a few weeks so far in between my college courses.

[Kyoski]

1.1 Update

Changes:

-Hard mode -> calamity mode
Hard mode was changed to calamity mode.
This mode gives you the calamity armor/ring from the
start of the castle, this armor and ring give you
0 negative con so your armor is always at 0, effectively
making every and any enemy a threat.

-Voice
Soma voice changed to female to accommodate Maria.

-Mariacula
The Chaos death screen has been changed to Maria.

-Story
The story was changed around a bit to better include maria, basically,
it takes place in-between RoB and SoTN, Shaft found maria and used magic
to send her into the future (why? possibly to become the new dark lord by
combining her powers with draculas during the eclipse.)

-Nerfs
The armor on chaos was nerfed a bit so he's easier in normal mode and
still killable within a reasonable amount of time in both hard mode
and while using the calamity set in hard mode.
Julius also received an armor nerf as well, trying to balance out the
stats for normal to hard mode is quite challenging, since stats are
doubled the 20% buff to enemies in hard mode is technically 40% from base.

-Armors
Most armors were changed, stats as well.

-Weapons
Most weapons were changed, some stats as well
Weapons were also moved to maria's hands, crouching is still a few pixels off, but that's mostly due to her actual sprite having the arms farther back while attacking than standing.

-Souls
There were a few soul additions, all the Rush souls were updated as well.
All of maria's animal friends and guardian should be available
as soul abilities now.
Souls were also buffed a bit, some of the canon maria abilities received
small mana nerfs in order to be used frequently.

-Stats/scaling
It's tough trying to rebalance out everything with stats doubled, and
some bosses don't seems to scale properly when increasing or decreasing
stats, as so, they're not properly scaled. I tried my best to balance
out the weapons and make sure there's plenty amount of mid-game/end-game
viable weapons to have fun and choose from. Balore's second phase seems
to be a static amount of HP no matter what his base HP is changed to, it
might be located somewhere else in the data.

I like to look at the game balance in terms of maria's appearance in RoB.
she was pretty strong, did high damage, but also very squishy.

There are some new item locations on the map, some were moved around, and
some item drops from enemies were removed to accommodate the new item locations
and hard mode equipment (such as the calamity gear).


Hoping for the future I'll be able to add maria into Dawn of Sorrow as well.



Unfortunately player height cannot be adjusted at this time, or at least I wouldn't know how to go about that in dawn of sorrow, so maria would be possible but she would still have the player collision size of Soma, which would be off-putting. Not sure if it's worth testing farther than this.

[UltimaSolus]

Looking forward to playing Maria of Sorrow 1.1 on Normal and Calamity to give feedback. I had a lot of fun with 1.0 and I came here to post encouragement upon seeing this thread.

I would really like to see you make Dawn of Sorrow with Maria happen even if it's not perfect. I also hope to see if you would be willing to go further and do a Maria Mode for Portrait of Ruin like having two Marias with differently colored ribbons over Jonathan and Charlotte. Since Portrait already has Maria via Richter Mode, I don't know if that would make it easier or harder to edit.

[Kyoski]

Looking forward to playing Maria of Sorrow 1.1 on Normal and Calamity to give feedback. I had a lot of fun with 1.0 and I came here to post encouragement upon seeing this thread.

I would really like to see you make Dawn of Sorrow with Maria happen even if it's not perfect. I also hope to see if you would be willing to go further and do a Maria Mode for Portrait of Ruin like having two Marias with differently colored ribbons over Jonathan and Charlotte. Since Portrait already has Maria via Richter Mode, I don't know if that would make it easier or harder to edit.

https://youtu.be/FmrSL9KF8hA

I actually did test that with Portrait of Ruin! it is definitely possible and easier than Dawn of Sorrow to do since she is already in that game, I would need to just adjust a few of her animations for attacking, jump-kicking, etc. but entirely possible. I did think of eventually making a replacement for her over Jonathan or Charlotte in the future as well so she could use all the equipment and weapons, but I wanted to do Dawn of Sorrow first since that was my favorite. Order of Ecclesia is most likely possible as well but haven't gotten to test that one out yet.

[UltimaSolus]

https://youtu.be/FmrSL9KF8hA

I actually did test that with Portrait of Ruin! it is definitely possible and easier than Dawn of Sorrow to do since she is already in that game, I would need to just adjust a few of her animations for attacking, jump-kicking, etc. but entirely possible. I did think of eventually making a replacement for her over Jonathan or Charlotte in the future as well so she could use all the equipment and weapons, but I wanted to do Dawn of Sorrow first since that was my favorite. Order of Ecclesia is most likely possible as well but haven't gotten to test that one out yet.

I really wanted to play Portrait's story mode as Maria. I've had to settle for using the Randomizer until I get Maria over Jonathan or Charlotte and I've seen the issues you've mentioned. It's a brutal challenge to find a weapon that properly animates because she can't swing the Vampire Killer properly.

Edit: 1.1 completed, new ideas:

Maria was the first character in the series to ever perform a Double Jump what if you move the Leap Stone to the beginning of the castle so we can perform a different route than Soma?

Since Maria is being infused with dark powers, could we get a Bat as a weapon option to go along with weapons like the dove? It could be dark element. Really, any animals - perhaps even an owl?

Also the Tsuchinoko is incredibly tanky due to the stat changes and all it does is delay your ability to get the discount at Hammer's shop, you could argue that adds to the difficulty, but I don't think it really adds anything but tedium.

Due to the Cat soul being Thunder element, the Great Armor boss can be easily killed by simply entering the boss room and throwing cats, you will probably kill him before he even attacks even on Calamity Mode. I'm not sure what can be done about that, it might be simply realistic that Maria would decimate such an opponent due to her powers but it certainly makes him a joke boss.

I also ran into a string of really bad RNG where the Succubus soul didn't drop for me until I got the Soul Eater Ring and killed several more Succubi. I'm not sure if I just had incredible bad luck or if it was a bug. Maybe you could put the flame demon and succubus souls in soul containers?

[Kyoski]

https://youtu.be/FmrSL9KF8hA

I actually did test that with Portrait of Ruin! it is definitely possible and easier than Dawn of Sorrow to do since she is already in that game, I would need to just adjust a few of her animations for attacking, jump-kicking, etc. but entirely possible. I did think of eventually making a replacement for her over Jonathan or Charlotte in the future as well so she could use all the equipment and weapons, but I wanted to do Dawn of Sorrow first since that was my favorite. Order of Ecclesia is most likely possible as well but haven't gotten to test that one out yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAE7BZmM44A

Coming back to this, I do have some progress to show off, essentially, it's Maria and byakko cat replacing jonathan/charlotte for the main story mode.

Almost done, just need to fix up some animations, and weapons. Will probably show off more and create a changelog of everything.

Sorry I haven't been updating this thread as often as I'd like to, college has taken a lot of my time. I still plan to do more with dawn of sorrow as well.

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/7505/

(yes the title is a cat pun)

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[UltimaSolus]

Glad to see you again and with a new romhack!

I've been so eager to play Portrait of Ruin again, thank you for giving me a reason. I'll try to leave a review when I get around to it.

[Kyoski]

Currently working on 1.02, I plan to nerf the iframes, they are a bit too overpowered and lead to just spam sliding around the castle the entire game (which is quite fun, but still, makes enemies pointless) Really not sure how to go about implementing iframes without having them as overpowered as they currently are. They're very fun but clearly imbalanced for a game that never intended such a mechanic.
Also introducing new weapons I been making, some armors, accessories, stat changes, and some new additions, like Maria's normal spells added back.

Also thinking about how to implement Guardian Knuckle back into this, same with Genbu, since I can just use Maria's palettes over Jonathans, which include the additional palettes for Genbu and Guardian Knuckle.
Maria's tech right now is default to Jonathan's for maximum compatibility with quests and such. Still thinking about how to get around that.
I will update the 1.02 patchnotes with more changes before release.

Patchnotes for 1.01, and some for 1.02 (still wip)

1.01
event text errors fixes.

1.02 (wip)
event text errors fixes/additions.
added new save icons
added maria's default spells to nest of evil rewards.
added additional nest of evil spell rewards.
added back toad morph to default location (magus ring obtainable now)

1.03
I might rework iframes, need to think of a way to include them without them being blatantly overpowered lol. I really love them and would like to include them in somehow.
possible new weapons/armors


Save Icons, might add more so there's a complete list of custom ones.

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