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Posted: 8/18/2005 12:57 AM
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TheAxeMan
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Joined: 7/17/2004
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Location: The FLOATING CASTLE
Wow, this is going great! As far as chapter 5, I believe you do need all the characters before Balzack moves into Santeem castle, preventing you from advancing. You need to pick up Mara and Nara before going into the cave of betrayal. Chapter 5 starts out pretty linearly, until you get the ship, after which you've just got open sailing. You'll need to collect all the zenithian items and a few other things. You can definitely skip stone of drought, hourglass of regression, and metal babble sword (by far the best sword but takes too long to get.) You may be able to skip flute of uncovering and sphere of silence as well, avoiding a nasty boss fight. Let's see: Hero starts in his burnt-out hometown Go through Taloon's tunnel from Branca to Endor -- maybe you'll be lucky and be the 10,000th person through... In Endor, pick up Mara and Nara Go back through the tunnel and into the cave of betrayal The party gets split up and your hero has his first required fight Pick up symbol of faith and exit cave give symbol to Hector, he'll give you the wagon and join Cross the desert, where you can fight large groups of metal slimes if you want Go to the lighthouse. Pick up the fire of serenity, beat the guardians, and fix the light. Back to Konenber, Taloon joins and you get the ship. Now the following may be picked up anytime before climbing zenithian tower: Pick up Panon in Monbaraba, take him to Stancia to tell a joke to the king so you can get zenithian helm The zenithian armor is in a cave by the castle of the king who collects small medals, but you need magic key to get in Ok, some of these things may be movable, perhaps you can get Ragnar first? Anyway: Go through the Padequa cave to get the padequa seed. Grow it in Soretta and get the padequa root. Give Padequa root to sick Cristo in Mintos and the Chapter 2 gang joins, which means you have thief's key. Brey will join first if you visit Mintos before the cave, not sure if this is necessary though. Go into the cave by Kievs and get the magic key. In Keeleon castle, beat Keeleon and Ragnar joins, completing the party. In Santeem castle, beat Balzack. Then you can pick up the magma staff. Magma staff opens up the pass to Gardenbur. In Gardenbur you'll be framed for a crime and forced to leave someone while you find the real thief--this is where Brey is most useful :) The thief is hiding in a nearby cave, go there and whup him. Back in Gardenbur, the queen gives you final key and zenithian shield. With final key you can go into the royal crypt and pick up the staff of transform. Here are your metal babbles. if necessary you can fight them in the entrance room without final key. Go through riverton and into the collosus statue. Move it to the other side of the lake, and go to dire palace. In dire palace use staff of transform to turn into a monster and spy on the meeting with necrosaro. Go deep into Aktemto mine, into the castle and beat Esturk. Get the gas canister on the way out. Give gas canister to the dude in riverton and get the balloon. Take the balloon to the world tree and climb it to find zenithian sword. Take the balloon to the special island, land and walk around to zenithian tower. You'll need the four zenithian items to get in. Climb the tower to zenithian castle and talk to Master Dragon. Jump in the hole in the clouds and enter the cave. Go through the cave to the underworld. You'll need to beat four bosses around the underworld to unlock Necrosaro's castle. Then go through Necrosaro's castle and on to beat him and finish the game!
Posted: 8/17/2005 11:18 PM
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TheAxeMan
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Aha, thanks for the info, but I did see the levelup stats for all characters in the almighty character FAQ. If you've seen my run so far you know that max HP is not a big concern, though it looks like I will stop at the inn at crescent lake. (I can't beat the three-wizard fights in ice cave without taking some damage.) On this pass through I will try hard to go through all areas without extra movements to manipulate encounters. I may try to do the Sea Shrine before the waterfall though. Haven't decided whether or not wizard staff will be useful. Kraken should not be a problem as he has a 1/4 chance of essentially doing nothing. In the Sea Shrine though I will have to face up to battles which are probably impossible with a solo, unarmored, low-level fighter. I believe two ghosts should be doable (may require taking a hit) and one water as well, but the WzSahag/R.Sahags and three Waters will not be, so some avoiding may be necessary. Inzult is probably right, I think that one character will run faster overall. Thanks for looking at the battle order, FreshFeeling. One thing I may try is to always manipulate a preemptive attack. I'll always go first and run 100% of the time, so it will be easy to pick the frame I need to make the next battle preemptive. There will be extra waits for some battles to keep the cycle going, but if the wait is never too long then I think it's a win overall.
Posted: 8/17/2005 5:31 PM
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TheAxeMan
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Watched your chapter 3 and it looks good. I didn't see any mistakes besides what you already listed. Your chapter 5 plans sound good, with Alena and Taloon you should have all the tools you need. Also, Alena and Ragnar will always fight, so Taloon will be the only who needs to have his action manipulated. With that party you should always be able to make everyone do what you want. I would say the main limiting factor will be getting a good weapon for everyone, so if you can find a good weapon for Ragnar, it may be worthwhile to take him. If I remember right, experience doesn't get split in this game, so 4 chars levelup just as well as 3. Since you have such great control of luck, I was wondering if you had thought about the Tarot cards or maybe even the chance spell? Most of the useful effects might be negated by bosses, but if not then they will give you some pretty amazing power. Chance would require quite a few levelups though.
Posted: 8/16/2005 5:20 AM
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TheAxeMan
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Wow, that was pretty sweet. Some of the tricks were a bit slow to watch, but overall very interesting. Saturn clearly knows this game inside out. The timing of this submission is an amazing coincidence, I just finished playing through this game for the first time in years. I highly recommend FuSoYa's 2-player hack, though it wouldn't be allowable in a TAS.
Posted: 8/14/2005 10:20 PM
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TheAxeMan
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Ah thanks everyone, it sounds logical. So the thief really is worthless after all. Despite his better chances of running, a living thief is probably more harm than help in a TAS, since he's essentially worthless in a non-running battle. I don't think I'll be making it to level 15, and my fighter hasn't been doing great with luck at levelups. Ok, so my next question for the gurus is this: if I have two characters alive vs one, what happens to my chances that one of them will go first in battle, before all the enemies? If the answer is about double, then it may be worth investigating a two-character run. Two fighters could probably fight pretty efficiently, it might be possible to manipulate decent damage from both with a miss from the enemy, and there would be two ally attacks for each enemy. As a bonus, both would have decent chances to run. Definitely iffy though, when I had two characters on the wizards I wasn't able to get things to go exactly my way--I wanted to be able to kill a wizard in one turn and have the other one miss or hit the sacrificial fighter. It could have potentially been a two-turn battle but it just wasn't possible to luck out that far. A fighter-thief combo would run much better, but I don't think it would be enough to earn the thief's keep. One more thing, when are the levelup stats determined? At my last one I noticed that at different frames for end-of-battle I still got the same stats. Conveniently, the fighter gets the all-important strength and agility every level for almost as many as I'll get, but it would be nice to get more luck.
Posted: 8/13/2005 1:06 AM
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TheAxeMan
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What's wrong with "Death as a shortcut"? Usually it makes runs look much better instead of backtracking. As far as redoing everything, do whatever you want. It didn't seem to take you long to do everything so far, but since you haven't made it through the entire game yet, it's likely that you will keep finding points of improvement. Just keep track of them all, and you can do an improved run later. Attempting to make a run perfect in one pass is doomed to fail. By the way, there are definitely other areas to use this technique. How about after picking up the golden bracelet in the cave south of Frenor? Get in a fight and get your ass kicked to get out of the cave real quick. You can optimize this by letting the Tempe fight leave you close to death. I guess in chapter 1 you don't have to worry about other party members, in chapter 3 you'll only get one character revived when you die. But you'll be at a house of healing so you can revive right away, and if you're only level 1 it's cheap too. As far as the comments of using death as a shortcut, I would say that if you don't do it someone else will and they'll probably obsolete you.
Posted: 8/12/2005 6:07 PM
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TheAxeMan
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Well, if it's based on bittorrent then I would guess it's not real time. I would guess that it's just close to real time, with all the watchers uploading to other watchers to spread around the bandwidth usage.
Posted: 8/12/2005 3:56 PM
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TheAxeMan
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Looks great, I hadn't thought of how to equip Alena for the tournament. I have a couple things for you though, one small and one kinda big. First, did you see any of the previous runs that used the item->equip command in battle? It equips a weapon and attacks with it, might be slightly faster than doing it in inventory. Ok, now the big timesaver you missed is using the wings from the top of the birdsong tower instead of going all the way back down. Besides that everything is awesome, my favorite chapter is coming up next!
Posted: 8/12/2005 3:39 PM
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TheAxeMan
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I read somewhere that luck calculation while running is bugged, and it looks at the luck of the character two slots down. I really should experiment more on this to determine what the optimal configuration for running is, though my solo guy is running pretty well. Using one character isn't just for show, it's much faster! A single character can run from battles faster because I don't have to input commands for everyone. It doesn't seem to require any more manipulation than the old run did. Also, with one character, I only need one weapon, which saves time getting and equipping junk. I can also spend my gold on a silver sword when I don't have to blow it on spells for a mage. Think I'm screwed in battle? No way, one character can actually fight more efficiently than four due to a small number of things to randomize. The battles take more turns of combat, but are faster in real time. After the wizards, every boss fight is just one enemy, and most of the inescapable fights can be manipulated down to one or two enemies. Admittedly, some fights will not be practical, like the WzSahag/RedSahags, and more than two wizards would be tough. About the HP, I'll admit there were a few spots where I definitely wished I had some to spare. In particular, I really had to drag out the Lich battle to manipulate the shadows afterwards. I decided that I'd try to go without backtracking to fix the encounters if at all possible. This is mostly so I can get a baseline for a future version. Also, there's no really convenient spot to heal so far. The house in Marsh cave is off the path, the items in Dwarf Cave are too far out of the way, and though I walked right by the inn in Elfland, I didn't have any gold to spare. I probably will break down and heal eventually, since I'll have to walk right by item shops and inns in both Crescent Lake and Gaia. Also, the two-wizard fights are pushing the manipulation to its limit, I don't think I can beat three without taking some damage. In a future run, I'd consider maybe picking up the house in Marsh and using it in the same inventory trip I equip silver sword. But a big point about taking hits: it takes time for the hit animation, so there really aren't many spots where taking a hit will be faster. Another thing is that, shunning armor greatly increases my evade, so enemies completely miss much more often.
Posted: 8/12/2005 2:11 PM
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TheAxeMan
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http://home.comcast.net/~f_amoroso/FinalFantasy-TheAxeManv0.2.fcm Ok, I won't leave you hanging any longer, here's what I got so far. I'm just past Earth Cave with over five minutes lead on the published version.
Posted: 8/11/2005 6:33 PM
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TheAxeMan
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Mr. Kelly R. Flewin wrote:
And in regards to that extra set of Wyvern wings, they may help in Chapter 5?...
But out of the chapter 2 characters, Brey joins first in Chapter 5. There are a few situations where you won't have access to the wagon characters, but it probably won't matter. By the way, I still need to watch act 2, but you're doing very well, keep it up!
Posted: 8/10/2005 12:31 PM
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TheAxeMan
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Ok, I've been experimenting with some new methods for a faster run at this game. Timeattacking this has given me a lot more respect for the currently published movie (not to mention this classic game,) but it's definitely improvable. Using some radically new strategies, I've produced a test run which has just beat Astos about 98 seconds ahead of Mookish. If my ideas work out, I'll continue to pull ahead. There are some potential pitfalls, but if all goes well and I'm also able to improve on the encounter manipulation--there's definitely some room there--I should have a pretty good margin by the end.
Posted: 8/8/2005 8:55 PM
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TheAxeMan
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Aha, just what I was looking for, thanks. Edit: Aha, some experimentation reveals a technique which could be used to manipulate the enemy order in a timeattack. FCEU seems to have no problem recording a power cycle, so a run on this game could save and then power cycle to reset to the beginning of the encounter list. Of course this won't be real easy to do since there are only a few spots where it's convenient to do this. But if this method can somehow remove all the no-run battles then it may be worthwhile to grab some extra saving items.
Posted: 8/8/2005 1:35 AM
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TheAxeMan
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Can anyone point me to the encounter listing? I've tried looking for it a few times and haven't been able to find it anywhere.
Posted: 8/2/2005 12:36 AM
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TheAxeMan
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Clear yes from me. True, less than a second isn't an amazing difference, but faster is better. It helps that in this game there is a clear end point, and Phil has clearly not lost any entertainment value in the process. There's no reason this shouldn't obsolete Sleepz version.
Posted: 7/29/2005 11:19 PM
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TheAxeMan
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Ok, as everyone probably has, I've always wondered why the Gameboy Mario Lands are so different from the other Mario games. Well, I recently came across this article which explains some of the internal Nintendo politics behind it (and many other interesting things as well.)
Posted: 7/28/2005 7:30 PM
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TheAxeMan
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I had thought about this game as well, and I have to agree with Walker. It's very slow, though optimized use of the weapons would speed things up. Beating every level would be very tedious. Unless you can find some really cool glitches I don't see it being very interesting.
Posted: 7/22/2005 3:02 AM
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TheAxeMan
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Great job guano, I'm also voting yes. This was very entertaining, I'm very impressed with the improvement in your timeattacking abilities. Great use of the many glitches available. Keep it up! On a side note, I love your new avatar.
Posted: 7/21/2005 5:51 PM
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TheAxeMan
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Matty, why don't you start from the beginning and get all the jewels? Now that would be interesting, though a little tedious in places. Hey, anyone who can watch the full 1-hour+ run probably won't mind an extra 20-30 mins to see all the jewels collected. Good luck!
Posted: 7/20/2005 6:07 AM
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TheAxeMan
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Hey dood, could post an fcm? Maybe I can work it out but I'm too lazy to figure it all out myself.
Posted: 7/19/2005 1:02 AM
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TheAxeMan
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Hala, you should do Soul Blazer. You already did one of the Enix adventures, though admittedly Soul Blazer will be much harder as a TAS. There was a thread which is buried aways now, but someone did the first level with a decent amount of planning.
Posted: 7/14/2005 11:00 PM
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TheAxeMan
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Thanks for asking, but sorry, no. I did do that Boy and His Blob run which was a nice timeattacking fix. I haven't even opened up this game in a while, I need to examine that trick in the waterfall. I guess I'm less than excited about doing the long levelup sequence in super-high quality, though I know it will look impressive when I'm done. I'm sure once that's over, I'll be on a roll.
Posted: 7/11/2005 4:54 AM
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TheAxeMan
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Wow guano, you really know how to pick em. This game has the hilarious RCR-style animation, and it's very original. However, it gets old long before even this timeattack is done. Did they ever make that ice challenge? I forget, is that the best ending? Maybe it would be better as a playaround. Also, you do need to go through everything until the ending starts.
Posted: 7/10/2005 3:37 PM
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TheAxeMan
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Actually, if I was able to do everything I had theorized, the run would be well under a minute. Of course, this glitch helped a lot, but if anyone can figure out how to get that apple to the cage without having to get into the room, then go for it. I don't think the trampoline will work due to delays in whistling and the time it takes the ketchup to fall.
Posted: 7/10/2005 3:24 PM
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TheAxeMan
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Hmm, not sure what changes were on the ROM, but it seemed to play every posted fcm, so I didn't worry. Glad everyone like it, as an encore, I'll show this outtake glitch: http://home.comcast.net/~f_amoroso/ABoyAndHisBlob-Outtake-TheAxeMan.fcm
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