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 keeping the Save defeating Dracula. Once you have a Clear File from that game , you will want to keep it on your Memory Card. Having a Clear File is important for speedrunning the game , as having it allows you to skip dialogs and cutscenes throughout the game, saving when you start new games. Being able to do this saves roughly 8 minutes of time during the course of a run. Once This is vital to getting competitive times, so once you have obtained a Clear File, you should not delete it.

The easiest way to obtain 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.