I've been playing SOTN on Luck Mode, which I didn't know existed until the other day. It makes the game so much more fun for me that I kind of never want to go back to vanilla Alucard. I swear I'm not doing a Real Gamer thing here but the two times I have previously played through Symphony I've found it so easy that it ended up getting more or less boring. This, though. This is nice. Challenging but not insanely demanding, and upgrades/equipment feel more important and useful.
I don't think it's unusual at all to try and glean new and interesting ways to interact with these games on subsequent replays, as so many of us do. I'm pretty sure I haven't played
Symphony outside of Luck Mode for maybe fifteen years or so, since it ostensibly intensifies one of the prime appeals of the game with more toys to play around with, tunes the beginning of it to be somewhat tougher... and eventually flattens out to be just as effortless as the standard mode, and potentially even more frictionless with the obscene amount of critical hits that a high luck bestows.
In that vein, I just did a challenge run of sorts in
Aria, which has a Hard Mode much like
Dawn's that isn't very interesting on its own, so you can juice it up with some modifiers of your own. I believe speedrunners often do this sort of stuff, with the added factor of utilizing randomizers, but this was just a personal ruleset applied to the base game, in brief:
1) have to immediately equip any soul or equipment that drops. Doesn't apply to duplicates.
2) guaranteed souls from bosses and the like are off-limits; same with all equipment that's lying around as treasure.
3) can't buy anything.
4) first time through a room, have to battle everything once, to give un-optimal souls a chance to drop, so you can't cling to a lucky drop too much should one happen.
5) no grinding, just traversal and fighting things as you go.
Ended up with Ronginus' Spear/Gym Clothes/Crimson Cloak as the final equipment set, and Fish Head/Manticore/Red Crow for souls. Ronginus' Spear was an amazingly lucky drop from an Erinys, from its rare drop slot, and was a big help for the end-game... even if its Holy element is exactly the wrong thing to bring to the fight with Julius, but in there I mostly relied on burst damage from the Manticore transformation, which was probably overall the MVP throughout the run for survivability and damage; Death especially would've been horrific without it since the first phase is once again the problem, and my weapon at that point was the short-range Baselard.
Randomizing the entire inventory (and layout) of the game is probably the more interesting prospect for veterans, but this was just the kick the game needed for my long-term engagement.
Aria is the most compact and briskest-moving of the games of its type to begin with, so shuffling the deck as you go fits really well with its strengths.