Tool-assisted movies

This is a 20 frame improvement over comicalflop's previous movie.

Note: This movie starts where the main quest movie left off. We do not usually accept movies beginning from a save. Please read our rules to see our reasons.

This is a 56 second improvement over the author's previous movie.

However, if you still think there is not enough zipping through walls, make sure to see the second quest completed in less than half a minute!

Selected quotes from JXQ:
Come follow on the adventure through a castle that contains no less than eighty clashing colors in each room! Be amazed as Juste Belmont, Simon's grandson, has to do the usual vampire hunting despite looking nothing like his grandfather (or a man at all). Question his motives when he takes time out of his rescue mission to decorate the basement he will soon destroy! Feel the pain as Juste struggles to understand that there actually are two castles!! (Ouch my brain!)

Cheetah 7071 manages to complete the game in just over an hour with only 94 turns though abundant amounts of luck manipulation.

This run improves on the author's previous run by 96 seconds, mostly due to using a different Pokemon a third of the way through. Mudkip, the chosen starter, is a Water Pokémon that has Water/Ground evolutions. After the third gym, Machop, a Fighting type, is used. Its ability allows the Attack stat to be multiplied by 1.5x if it receives a status condition. The paralysis effect is no accident.

Note: You need to have Real Time Clock on and use Flash 128k as Save Type.

In case there are white-screen ROM issues, the run is also reported to work on the following ROMs:

• Pokemon Sapphire (U) [hIRff]
• Pokemon Sapphire (U) [h1] (Clock)

Here, DonamerDragon obliterates what is normally a many hours-long game through heavy luck manipulation.

This movie plays through Pokémon Gold in a fairly fast manner, catching only a half dozen Pokémon in the process, but acquiring all the gym badges, and ultimately beating the protagonist of the earlier generation Pokémon games.

The author of this movie, FractalFusion, has written very extensive details of anything regarding this movie, including even some of the mathematical formulas used by the game. As usual, we recommend reading it.

This run is so glitchy that it's near impossible to follow what's going on without help; reading the author's notes is highly recommended.

Note: This movie uses a hard reset (akin to turning the system off and then on again) and will desync unless you have a version of VBA that supports reset recording. For more information, see the forum topic for VBA.

Watch MattyXB defeat the evil Dark Lord and others using the "Power" option for every level-up, and glitching out the game where possible.

It's easier to follow the story in this run, but still tricky at times because both main characters were named "A".

In this run, MattyXB demonstrates how to flawlessly beat the game. What's unusual is that he also uses some glitches to completely skip parts in the game saving over 20 minutes. The "Power" option is selected on every level-up.

Those trying to follow the story in this movie will have a hard time, since the main characters were both named "A" and integral points in the story were skipped.

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest is the story of Simon's horrible weekend without sleep. Two years after defeating Dracula, the hero is physically weakened by Dracula's curse. He must gather Dracula's remains and incinerate them at the ruins of Castlevania in order to end the curse.

This movie is 2 minutes and 23 seconds faster than the previous effort by the same author. We recommend to read his comments for explanations on how this improvement was achieved.

This movie involves using a warping cheat code ― holding A+B on first controller then hitting A on second.

The battling style of this game can be described like Final Fantasy meets Pokémon; your team of warriors versus the opposing team of warriors, and any opponents freed from their posts can be later picked up in the wilds and converted to your side!

We recommend reading the rest of the author’s comments; it helps understanding the movie better.

In Bisqwit's opinion, the soundtrack of this game has a lot in common with Duck Tales.

• All unnecessary random encounters have been manipulated into not happening
• The player dies several times in order to get transported back to the beginning
• Action commands are often intentionally not entered as soon as possible to manipulate critical hits and such

Note: The first AVI release of this movie had wrong author name in it. The AVI was replaced a couple of hours later. Download statistics of 91 downloads was lost.

Dragon Warrior is an epic RPG series which now spans 8 games across many systems. The second game greatly expands on the first to include a party of three heroes (all descendents of Erdrick and the hero of DW1) and battles that may include many enemies.
The world is much bigger and there are many big dungeons to explore as well. Luckily there are new abilities and items to make this easier. Enemies can randomly drop items when defeated and there is a lottery which is the precursor to the casinos which appear in each later DW game. Finally, you might notice that many of the enemies in this game appear in later games, particularly DW8.

The author has left detailed comments explaining this glitch.

This game is known in the TAS world as being a pain to play due to the RNG (random number generator) being much harder to manipulate than most other games. As a result, seemingly random actions throughout the game are actually intentional manipulation of the RNG to ensure favourable outcomes, such as avoiding monsters or good battle outcomes.

To give you an idea of how surprising this time is to most players, the previous run is about 24 minutes longer than this one. Even before that, any run that was under 3 hours long was deemed to be very difficult to perform.

The author intentionally kills off his party in order to save some travel time.

The game features an inventory and equipment and a spells system, all of which were rare to see in NES games when this game came out.

This is the 3rd published version of the TAS, now over seven minutes faster than the previous version.

The author has written comments describing all the planning and tricks that went into this movie.

Unfortunately only one of the warriors is actually a hero; the rest are sissies who died early on during the quests. Strange as this may sound, much time is saved by doing so since fewer commands need to be entered every time the player runs from a random encounter.

This version is almost 3 minutes faster than the previous movie, predominantly by the use of a computer program to assist in battle planning and by walking in no-encounter areas more often.

This one of the few games (the only one?) where the level grinding sequences are actually entertaining, while the boss fights aren't. Hitting a boss decreases your own health as well as the boss's, after which there is much waiting for more health until you can hit him again.

It was suggested that this movie be published with a "Music from Hell" warning label.

In his movie, Sleepz enters ZELDA as the player's name to start the 2nd quest without having to complete the game first.

The major change in this submission is the leveling of magic over attack in the first part of the game. Other time saved was due to various scattered improvements.

Most of this run features Link racing across Hyrule so fast that the screen can't keep up, inexplicably warping between places that shouldn't be connected, and collecting just three items, one spell, and one sword technique needed to beat the final palace.

Dark Link, the final boss, takes the same amount of damage no matter what level attack you have. This is especially convenient for the author because he reaches Dark Link without ever leveling, or, indeed, even killing another monster.

This is a 29-second improvement to the author's previous movie due to a different route choice and better manipulation optimization, see the author's comments for details.

Normally, this game is rather long. This movie by Dammit skips most of it by using a glitch that allows the player to get all the important items in a matter of a few minutes.

We strongly recommend reading the author's comments for further details and explanations. For viewers' convenience, we included some of them in the AVI as subtitles.

It is a 65.58 seconds improvement to the previous movie by Walker Boh -- this time played by Lord Tom.

Although the route in this movie is almost exactly the same, time was saved mostly by accumulating the tone points (for Rygar's strength) a lot faster. There were other improvements as well. We recommend reading the author's comments for more details.

Note: If you are watching the FCM, don't forget to enable PAL emulation in FCEU! It's under the Config menu.

The object of each floor is to reach the stairs that take you up to the next floor. Normally this involves lots of exploring, collecting equipment, and fighting with numerous monsters; but, this being a TAS, you don't see so much of that.

King's Bounty is a turn-based strategy game. The objective is to recover the Sceptre of Order. Map pieces that reveal the location of the sceptre are gained by defeating villains and finding special artifacts.

A normal play session would involve exploring four large continents and battling hundreds of creatures, but in this movie nobody gets killed and everyone is happy.

While input length is 10 seconds long, less than .3 seconds of it is actual gameplay!

Like in other RPG runs, luck has been manipulated for many things. Although random encounters can't be completely avoided, no damage is ever taken except from bosses, and most of the leveling is done in a final rush.

Read the author's comments for more details on luck manipulation and the path taken through the game.

Pokémon is a phenomenon that made itself very famous in a short time a few years ago. Pokémon Blue is part of the first generation of the games of that series that were made.

In this movie, Primorial#soup starts, as usual, as a teenager boy in Kanto with a level 5 starter Pokémon, and through vigorously fighting, intermittently doing actions that apparently make no sense (such as bicycling in circles), beats all eight seven gym leaders, earning himself their badges, and the right to challenge the world champion in Pokémon battles ― and he wins, of course ― 23 minutes faster than in the previous movie.

It is recommended to read the author's comments as well as the discussion relating to the movie to fully enjoy it.

This run abuses a bug that was fixed in later releases of Pocket Monsters (Pokémon) that allows a player to warp freely though the world. Victory is achieved in a matter of minutes with this route. Normally, the game takes well over an hour at the fastest to finish.

To see a more substantial run of Pokémon, watch this movie.

Note: You need VBA version 20 to watch this run.

The criterion for finishing the game is to defeat Lavos. The option to do this becomes available to the player very quickly and remains available almost entirely through the game. The ending seen after winning depends on decisions made in the game and the current point in the plot.

In-game completion time at the start of the final battle is 3:48 and it shows 4:01 when the final blow is delivered. (This was checked by viewing the contents of a save-state.)

Note: This movie goes twice into the same battles again and again for the purpose of building the characters’ levels. These sections reside in the movie at 2:20:02 – 2:23:47 and at 3:37:34 – 3:55:16 (nearly 18 minutes). When watching the movie, you may wish to fast-forward over these parts.

However, this movie is different, because it starts from New Game +, which means that the equipment and character stats are preserved from a previous game completion. This run uses a save file which is specifically optimized for an optimal New Game + completion of the game; thus this run should be considered more as a concept demo than as a rule-conforming TAS.

This beats the game with perfect characters and best equipment in a very short time. The actual time from power-on until the death of the last boss is only about 7 minutes, but the ending demo does not start until the Dream Team scene (part of the ending) is completed.

The micro gate in the right-side teleporter is only available in New Game +.

In this 22.71-second improvement to the previous version, menu screens are entered in screen transitions to save time. Other improvements were also found.

It is best described as "random", in a good way. The game has a great emphasis on a humor, and indeed many things in the game are almost caricatured, from subplots to characters. It also has a versatile soundtrack.

Although this being a speedrun (tool-assisted at that), most of the plot of the game is intact, making this movie very entertaining to watch even as a TAS.
Details about each scene and decision in this movie can be read in the authors' comments.

This movie does not use a death as a shortcut. Although that was a conscious decision by the authors, what it actually means was bent to the extreme.

• The main protagonist, Ness, suffers a mortal blow once. Due to how the game works, he did not die.
• A teddy bear was disintegrated in a battle. Although a party member, it was an inanimate object, and cannot be counted as "death".
• Near the end of the movie, a death-like event is part of the game plot.

This is the third TAS movie of this game, now 8 minutes faster than the previous run by the same author.

We recommend reading the author's comments for information about this run.

This movie plays through the game in a mere 2 hours, 53 minutes and 14 seconds. It aims for real time, but has a secondary goal of lowest in-game time when that does not incur an expense in real time. The in-game completion time is 1:59:28.

The author also included many easter eggs, or surprise occurrences, throughout the movie. These have been detailed in the author's comments. We recommend reading the comments regarding this movie.

Note: This movie resets the game console a few times, first saving the game and then loading it, so to watch it on an emulator, you will need an emulator that supports recording the console resets.

This movie was made with the original English-language version. It was also encoded with the Action Replay code 0495DCFF, which keeps the music volume from decreasing while the game is paused. This greatly reduces the annoyance factor of constant pausing during battles, which is done to save time.

This movie plays through the game in three and a half hours -- TODO: explain how.

The boss battles, including the last boss, might be somewhat anticlimactic in this movie due to the use of a one-hit-kill spell (L5 Doom) which was made to work by varying means in each battle.

We recommend reading the author’s comments regarding this movie.

Note: Because this game was never released in the USA and our rules regarding fan translations are a bit strict, all text in this movie is in Japanese. However, we may release English subtitles for this movie soon.

This movie plays through the game in little over 4 hours by the means of advanced analysis of the game engine, and the abuse of certain game errors/features that give the ability to one-hit-knock-out even the strongest enemies ― most prominently (but not only) the Joker Doom lore from Setzer’s slot machine.

A glitch involving Relm’s sketch ability was not used in this run. It is highly questionable whether or not this glitch can actually be used to save time. Also the glitch cannot be performed on this version of the ROM.

The boss battles, including the last boss, might be somewhat anticlimactic in this movie due to the unusual attack technique, but besides being a very nice timeattack/TAS record, the movie is a nice trip down the memory lane for those who have played this game, and a graphically and especially musically pleasing experience for even those who haven't. This movie was made with the English-language version.

We recommend reading the author’s comments regarding this movie.

Note: This movie is three minutes longer than the previous one, because this plays the secret "Gem Mansion" which the previous version did not. Nevertheless, it is much more optimized than the previous version.

It is up to Nasir, Hero of Light, to save Lakeland from Zerah. Zerah is attempting to release the Evil Sprit and pollute all the water. This game is difficult due to the length of Nasir's sword.

We recommend reading the author's comments.

The game sports a large amount of puzzles, yet a shockingly low amount of battles. Using RNG manipulation, this movie illustrates how to avoid many unimportant skirmishes so as to cut down on wasted time. This manipulation is also used to get more favorable item drops throughout the whole run.

Note that the (U) version of this ROM contains some graphical glitches. You can read more about these in the submission text.

The author has aimed for fastest time with 100% completion.

A note about the ending: normally the full ending would take almost 40 minutes to watch, but 29 minutes worth of waiting have been edited out of the AVI. There is no sound during this segment and the image does not change. A message will appear briefly to indicate when this happens.

In this series, every action in the monster lairs directly affects the non-combat areas, and vice-versa. That being said, much planning was needed for this run.

The ending is very long and requires user input, so the movie's length is about 13 minutes longer than what might be considered "winning the game."

Because it was only released in Japan, and the first almost-complete fan translation of the game was finished only a few years ago, this game isn't well known in western countries. Moreover, it has only been supported by SNES emulators for a short time, due to a graphics compression chip used in the game to fit the huge amount of beautiful graphics into the 6 MB ROM chip.

This is a tool-assisted speedrun of the Japanese version (the rules of the Nesvideos site forbid the use of fan-translations when making speedruns).

We are sorry for the broken speech in the game intro. This is an emulation glitch. (Yes, the game actually includes English dialogue, which coincidentally has an identical twin in Star Trek.)

For a guide of the strategy used in this run, please read the author's comments.

As usual with RPG runs, we recommend everyone to first play through this game before watching the movie. It will normally take a few days of time to complete the game once ― a few months to uncover all the features: secret characters and abilities and items. Beware, it's fun, and addictive.

This run improves the previous version of about 5 minutes though various little optimizations and skipping some battles previously thought to be mandatory, including one boss battle.

TODO: Screen shot