UPDATE 6/12/12: Alucard's Weapons (video included) and some info on how elements now work

For the last few days I have been hard at work completing all of Alucard’s sword animations. As I said some time ago, in the original SOTN there are literally 40+ swords that use just one animation. For the most part very very few of them had unique animations; that was something that I wanted to change, and have succeeded in doing. I also wanted to remove a lot of redundant ones and minimize how often you have to go into the menu to change weapons. To be straight up, nobody wants to keep having to go in and out of a menu, just to change to the same weapon again with just another point of damage added on. It disrupts the game play and is just plain annoying.

 

Keep in mind that great swords, knives, and katanas fall into their own category and are not considered swords. THIS LIST IS FOR THE NORMAL SWORD TYPES ONLY!

 

I succeeded in minimizing the # of swords Alucard will have to 12; before any moans and groans start let me assure you guys that while some of the swords with neat effects weren’t included, the effects on them will still be used, just for other weapons. Thus allowing me to expand on Alucard’s other weapon sets more. To list some of these as an example:

 

• Instead of an icebrand sword you now have a frost flail
• There is no thunderbrand sword; instead there is the gungnir spear
• The terminus est is now a dagger weapon
• The rune sword and sword familiar are now considered great swords, and thus not included in the list below.
• Gurthang: it’s special effect when bloodied has been added to a katana and improved upon
• The holy sword is gone; it’s effect and special ability were added to the holy rod and improved upon.
• The mourneblade is now gone; it was definitely a game breaking item. However when using the critical art for the holbein dagger (which costs MP) there is a % chance that it will steal a soul and recover some health for you with each hit.

I also removed all of what I call the “downgrade weapons” (the firebrand sword which is a poor man’s levaetian, the vorpal blade which is a low quality valmanway, and the alucart sword as well) as they just cannot compare with their full powered versions.

I also removed useless weapons like the tyrfing and the werebane. And sadly there were one or two unique weapons that I just did not include in any form at all for various reasons:

 

• There is no badelaire: it would have been game breaking if I left it in as is! The only alternative would be to put some limits on it, which thus negates the purpose of having a sword whose attack goes up with game time. I also wanted the ultimate sword to be the Alucard sword.
• The mablung sword is gone: Alucard no longer uses shield spells (which will be used by someone else). Thus making this a pointless weapon.

And lastly, here are the 12 swords that I DID include (AGAIN, keep in mind that katanas, great swords, and knives have their own category and are not listed here). The base critical art for every sword is to do a single valmanway attack that does about 2x normal damage, and is an excellent defensive move:

 

1. Short sword: lowest range of all swords
2. Shotel: has more range, and a unique critical art where he throws the shotel like a boomerang
3. Gladius: slightly better range and attack than the previous one.
4. Broadsword: yet even more range and attack (YAWN!)
5. Mormegil: a dark elemental sword with a great range that is almost a necessity against one particular adversary….
6. Milican’s Sword: a sword with lass range than the mormegil, but that can petrify with a touch
7. Joyeuse: the remade jewel sword basically; a sword made of pure gold, that spit 1-8 coins out every time it hits an enemy and increases the chances of enemies dropping more gold when killed (note: jewels were removed from the game).
8. Damascus Sword: a powerful sword with a great range, that can actually do critical hits (25% chance)
9. Leavatain: a sword that spews out gouts of flames and has a 2nd critical art that will incinerate enemies all around you.
10. Alucard Sword: a devastating weapon, and the ultimate sword. It’s 2nd critical art is powerful and teleports you out of danger. Alucard my even be able to make this sword even more terrifying if he unleashes the darkness within him…..
11. Heaven Sword: a sword that will always return to it’s thrower; it’s critical art is the old special that was done with both attack buttons when you had 2 heavens swords equipped.
12. Valmanway: unleashes 4 slashes that will do more damage the closer you are to Alucard when they hit, but still do pretty weak damage overall. It has been remade, 3d primitives and all, and balanced to be a useful weapon, but not overpowered anymore. It also has NO critical art.

Another subject I want to discuss is elemental damage. The be blunt, the system used in the metroidvanias is shitty. It makes no sense hitting a frozen shades with an ice sword for example, and her being invulnerable to it or recovering health. The sword itself should still lop a tit right the hell off! It is also annoying as hell having to switch between say a club, and a sword, over and over, NON-STOP, just because some enemies are strong to strike, and others are strong to cut.

 

With that in mind I have revamped the system to include a # of changes to it when it comes to damaging enemies. Here are some of them:

 

• There are 3 base weapon types: cut, strike & pierce. Enemies are very rarely strong to any of them (the exception being some unique spiritual enemies who are designed to be killed with magic or subs, and armored enemies which have special attributes)
• There are 7  magic types: fire, ice, lit, dark, holy, spirit, and explosion
• Holy water and the dive kick have their own unique type.
• for strike, cut, and pierce, if the enemy takes normal damage we then look at the element attached to the weapon: if weak to it, they take 1.5 or 1.25 dmg. If strong, immune or absorb this element, they take normal dmg. 
• If an enemy is weak to strike, cut or pierce they just take 1.25 dmg or 1.5 dmg based on how weak they are to weapons and the element attached is ignored.
• If strong to strike, cut or pierce, we look at the element attached again; if weak to the element they take 1.25 or 1.5 dmg; if strong or absorb they take 0.5 dmg.
• If immune to cut, strike, or pierce, the element attached is irrelevant.
• The damage levels are normal, weak to (1.25 dmg), very weak to (1.5 dmg), strong (0.5 dmg), immune, and absorb. This was inspired by the damage system in lords of shadow.
• Status effects are no longer elements; enemies can either be afflicted with them, immune to them, or EXTREMELY affected by them (ex. for stone normal is to be petrified once and un-petrify after a set time; for weak to it, they stay as stone forever. AND NO… you will not still take damage if you run into them, lol). The current status effects are stone, curse, poison, armor shatter, stopwatch effect, and a special type of stun called paralyze.
• Enemies with armored status have unique properties: they are strong to some attacks (cut type attacks, some pierce type attacks, some subs, etc.) by a % based on an armor level that goes from 1-3. Also some sub weapons will bounce off them or shatter on impact (bwaka knife, cross, daggers, axes, etc). Armor status CAN be removed however with certain attacks.

As you can all hopefully tell, the system above is designed to make attacking enemies much less tedious, but also allow me to implement some strategic type mini-boss & boss battles as well.

 

Last but not least, here is a video of Alucard using each of his swords (sorry about the lack of sound), as well as a demo of one weapon of every other type being used (except katanas, which are still WIP). Enjoy!