Symphony of the Night has a Save Feature and requires you to create a new Save File every time you start a new game. You obtain a Clear File by beating the game with the good ending, achieved by entering the Inverted Castle and defeating Dracula. Once you have a Clear File, you will want to keep it on your Memory Card, as having it allows you to skip dialogs and cutscenes when you start new games. Being able to do this saves roughly 8 minutes of time during the course of a run. This is vital to getting competitive times, so once you have obtained a Clear File, you should not delete it.

The easiest way to get a Clear File for someone new to speedrunning this game is to use a slightly-modified route from the standard Any% NSC route. Before you begin, you should familiarize yourself with one of these routes, (see the map slideshow below for one such example) and understand how to perform [[Castlevania:_Symphony_of_the_Night:Glitches#Death_Skip|Death Skip]], [[Castlevania:_Symphony_of_the_Night:Glitches#Richter_Skip|Richter Skip]], and [[Castlevania:_Symphony_of_the_Night:Glitches#Relic_Skip|Relic Skip]]. Of these, the only skip that can't be practiced or learned efficiently during the run itself is [[Castlevania:_Symphony_of_the_Night:Glitches#Death Skip|Death Skip]], as there are no Save Rooms prior to it and you only get one shot at it per run. Therefore, you should start out familiarizing yourself with the visual cues for [[Castlevania:_Symphony_of_the_Night:Glitches#Death_Skip|Death Skip]], in particular.