I feel like the Illumina/Gem Box glitching is probably not worth the time under TAS conditions, where we can just Joker Doom everything anyway.
I am very curious to see what is worth the time once in WOR. Possibly just Moogle Charm.
I would love to play this game, but I'm having an issue with the gamepad support. Analog works, but I just want to use the D-pad, and I can't figure out how to make that work by itself. I tried searching for other people who had the same issue, but came up empty.
I agree that it was intentional; I believe a townsperson clues you into it.
I was certain that it was also in the manual, but I just dug out my copy and it's not.
Sorry, this isn't the route Nintendo Power tells you to take, this can't be optimized.
Honestly, probably the best TAS I've seen all year. So many awesome tricks. I definitely said "wooooooooooooow" a little too loud at least four times while watching.
One minor correction to the submission notes, you have sword 3 against helmethead, not sword 2.
Voted yes and will continue to vote yes on fighting game runs that aim for speed instead of silly playthroughs.
Such a strange double standard for the old TAS guard to vote no on principle here.
Voting yes, for goal choice. I'll never understand people on this site voting no on fighting game submissions that try to beat the game quickly, when speed is the goal for almost every other game.
You probably intend to grab either Kaeli's second incarnation or Reuben and use her stats every chance you get. The game wouldn't have been completed, but the verification run would get quite close, having completed either half or 3/4 of the game.
As for the spells, Life also heals every status effect in the game, and is a guaranteed full heal. This being a TAS, I don't expect you to ever have any status effect, but still. Cure's healing is a percentage based off your Magic stat (50%+some fraction(possibly 1/1)of Magic), and the percentage is split evenly between both characters when you heal both at the same time.
The list of bosses Life can insta-kill is very, very small. The Minotaur, and Skullrus Rex, the first boss refight in the Doom Castle. I remember hearing somewhere that the Stone Golem can be killed with Exit, but I doubt that's actually true.
For that guy who was wondering about moving across the sand so quickly, it takes the direction you're trying to move in into account - if you move with the sand, you go what looks like 2x to 2.5x as fast as regular walking. Otherwise, you waste time.
I'm just trying to answer the questions which haven't been addressed. Use this knowledge as you will.
You can definitely kill the Stone Golem with Exit. Try it yourself!
For the Purpbird/Kong fights on the mountain, could it make any sense to have Tiger BreakG the Purpbirds and Chezni FireG them on your Strike First turn, thereby avoiding their second round attacks? Midia might Para kn the Kong - don't know if you could be fast enough to kill him on the second turn.
Why does one of these fights have Midia using Para kn and one fight using Legs? One should be better, no? (Maybe you couldn't avoid a Freeze proc?)
Is Tiger really that useless in the Jarmlx fight? If the Purpbird fights go better, he's going to have a lot more HP - he can probably get some decent damage output in before Jarmlx kills him.
If you plan to have Midia die in the Jarmlx fight, kill her off early to avoid having to input her Defend menu command. You can almost certainly manipulate future misses against Chezni.
Could it be worth it to manipulate fighting the 10 Leech battle more for more XP? I think there's a more overreaching conversation implied here too, I really believe there's a lot more to be optimized with regards to what we fight.
(Further thoughts - if we want to control for more XP early on, it's way better to manipulate more Hupman/F.Witch fights soon after; the battles are quick, it's more Experience, and you can manipulate Fire cd drops if we decide that's a thing we want to be doing)
Wouldn't you run into an issue where you need certain enemy formations early in the game, but getting the experience from them ruins your perfect stats?
You're right about those fights being terrible. They LOOK bad (even if they're faster) - but there are also noticeably less of them to begin with...
Still, Purpbird attacking and failing a run (ouch!) make it seem like there's a lot of room for improvement here...
If it works on Msl it's worth it, don't know if it'd also be worth it for Mouth but probably. Almost certainly not for all three, the spell animation is a bit long
>Because of how it works, the manipulation from one battle will actually make a difference 2-3 battles down the line when those bits shift to the high byte, making this an interesting mathematical problem.
I was worried about this, but even ignoring that, being able to memory watch for best route will go a long way. Thanks so much for your help!
It'll be easier for me to make comments on the route strategy when I see the final fights. As you're making the TAS you get to take things one frame at a time, but as a route planner I sort of need to work backwards from the end. I still worry about how much we need to level spells, I get the feeling we don't need to do that much.
The only differences I've caught so far are Fritz's fight, killing of Midia in the Jarmlx fight and NPC pathing in Conshiuto. I'm sure there are improvable fights throughout the run, it's just very tough to find everything.
Actually, I think a lot of the fights themselves are fine, it's more about what ideal monster formation we should be pursuing. There's the added problem of health management here too.
EDIT: Clarified wording
Having to walk around people in Karon looks really bad; does this at least avoid a battle by abusing the 0 boundary when you leave town? Otherwise, I would definitely try to find a way to manipulate the townsfolk movements.
She doesn't especially need levels to proc the Para kn, though. Might be more useful to have Midia die sometimes so the rest of the party get more XP. Not necessarily going out of your way to do so, just not minding if she does at times.
Another thing to maybe watch out for is you probably don't need Midia to survive all that much, though it's somewhat annoying that she doesn't stay dead after battle.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1005240083/Paladin%27s%20Quest%20%28U%29.smv
Now nearly 3300 frames ahead after Hagubo, and my levels are even higher! I might have uncovered a secret: when changing screens and the battle counter is at 0, it resets (it happened when going in the 2nd part of the cave with Smash). I will try to exploit that on the rerun
Is the reentering of the cave around frame 120000 on your latest run avoiding a battle?
Measurements are a little imprecise, this is my first time actually TASing to test:
Fritz/Goblin fight:
Fritz's attack ~116 frames
Fritz Defending: 0 frames
Goblin's attack ~108 frames
FireG animation on one creature ~70 frames
Your current run's plan:
Fritz Defend - 0
Chezni FireG - 210
3x Goblin attack - 324
Chezni FireG - 210
battle over = 744 nonobligatory frames
I think you can change to this instead:
Fritz Attack - 116
Chezni FireG - 210, kills one goblin
2x Goblin Attack - 216
Chezni FireG - 140
=682
This definitely saves some frames but also may leave you with less HP, since you're manipulating differently and Fritz isn't defending. Looks like you don't have a ton of ChezniHP to spare either in the current plan of using MiniBl twice before Alornso - using it a third time would almost certainly eliminate these 60 frames, so that's a bad idea. Is it to your advantage to have Fritz die earlier in the Alornso battle?
I like the progress being made! I will endeavor to follow along with the WIP here as well as proofreading the PS4 run when I get some more time, hopefully I can be of some use here :)