Jiji the Cat continues on his journey to the land of fish after Jiji's Osakanakuzushi. He sights a flying school of fish and chases them into a deep forest. As he walks deeper he finds himself getting lost; Jiji will need to explore the forest and get to know its residents in order to cross through it.
Jiji and the Mysterious Forest is the first of three child-friendly RPGs in the Jiji series. The player directs Jiji using the mouse cursor and selects options from a mouse-driven menu. It features simple Dragon Quest-style combat and a simplified inventory system.
Objectives
- Used Emulator: Bizhawk 2.11 (DOSBox-X core)
- Contains speed/entertainment tradeoffs / Best Ending
- Plays through the intended route, although it is possible to go to the exit from the start.
- Genre: Adventure, RPG
About the run
Recently, I've been digging up old games of the Windows 3.1/9x era, both for nostalgia reasons and to dwell on good memories, as well as to consider them for TASing projects. This was one of my childhood games and was part of a shareware collection CD-ROM from 02/1995 by media Verlagsgesellschaft. So, naturally, Jiji was up for consideration, especially since it is a fairly short game.
There are two ways to complete it. You can either complete the intended tasks:
- Talk to the Rabbit
- Talk to the Old Man
- Get a spicy fruit from the tree
- Go to the Grandma's House to defeat the wolf
- Go to the Mountain cat to get a pair of scissors
- Go to the Grandma's House to rescue Grandma. You are then automatically transported to the exit.
Or you can go to the exit directly, but I think that would not really be considered "finishing the game" so I opted for the intended way in this run.
The game features random encounters with stray dogs, as well as a battle system. Berries can be used for healing and are found throughout the game or when defeating a dog.
While encounters can be dealt with very quickly, they are still undesirable in a speedrun. I found that, in any given situation, an encounter will inevitably happen after a certain number of steps, and subsequent encounters are already pre-determined as well, regardless what you do in the game or how long you stand idle. If you save the game and load it, the number of steps until the encounter will be saved and loaded as well. In battle, the success of actions also seems pre-determined - if fleeing is not successful, one of the other three actions (Jiji Scratch, Jiji Punch, Lunch) must be used and then fleeing must be tried again.
However, I found a way to manipulate steps, and that is save-quitting. If you save, quit, reopen and load, the steps to the next encounter will change and you can manipulate encounters to not take place, this way.
During TASing, something amazing happened though. After the second encounter, further encounters became very sparse, with only one more encounter happening until I finished the game. Thus, three encounters in total, which is a lot less than I expected when I started the project. Jackpot! :)
And so, the save-quit trick didn't need to be used. There was no need to optimize anything except movement and the run was completed within hours.
...Onto the next game!
Japanese Original
There exists a Japanese 1.0 version of the game, but loading it with the usual w311.hdd would show garbled text, so I guess a certain font or maybe even a Japanese Windows 3.1 is required. The game would run slightly slower, with the cursor stuttering and not showing up as an arrow all the time, causing delays. The English version's README mentioned that bugs have been fixed, but besides the stuttering cursor, I haven't found any.
Verification Steps
1) Create w311.hdd
Use the steps outlined at this time of writing under the "Windows 3.11" tab here to create the HDD image containing Windows 3.11.
2) Find the game files
Find the game files. The file hashes:
| Filename | Filesize | MD5 hash |
|---|---|---|
| FILE_ID.DIZ | 1 KB | 60 fd c2 e8 b7 b9 a5 48 93 9d 30 38 39 52 4b 3b |
| JFGRAPH0.DLL | 53 KB | eb d3 21 57 10 f9 aa 7e 60 cc 6d b4 c6 25 f9 b2 |
| JFOREST.EXE | 149 KB | 5e 04 f0 fb e3 24 32 56 51 5e e4 b9 80 ba 61 09 |
| JIJI.JBS | 1 KB | a6 c0 fd 6a f3 6a e2 a4 e0 59 6f f6 3e 1f 75 21 |
| JIJI.MAP | 7 KB | 47 c5 54 90 12 da 1c b5 25 8c 9b 30 39 4b 3d 5b |
| JNAZO.JRF | 1 KB | 2f 7a 47 a9 44 b5 0c 0e 09 a1 4a 50 c2 d1 bb e8 |
| JNAZO.JRL | 14 KB | 7d 20 b4 fa 61 a5 16 35 51 a9 15 11 d2 8e fb 38 |
| NYA.WAV | 6 KB | 47 b1 61 a0 8d 6d ad f8 f1 11 07 db 77 3e 3b 5b |
| NYAO.WAV | 8 KB | 03 f9 ca f8 c2 e0 aa 0c 74 e1 9a 7f 5f f1 8b 85 |
| README.TXT | 8 KB | 59 f5 e0 0f 89 24 fe 7f fa 42 4d c6 ae 62 41 74 |
| WAN.WAV | 10 KB | 8f 73 a4 e7 7f 3d 6e e6 72 df e0 50 6a 86 2e 5e |
3) Create ISO of the game files
Use ISO Maker Windows v1.7 to create an ISO with all of the game files in it.
| Filename | Filesize | MD5 hash |
|---|---|---|
| Jiji.iso | 630 KB | f6 32 a9 15 f9 6b ff e6 97 3c 90 ef 57 6b 21 40 |
4) Verification Movie
Load an XML file into Bizhawk 2.11 with this content:
<BizHawk-XMLGame System="DOS" Name="Jiji and the Mysterious Forest verification file"> <LoadAssets> <Asset FileName=".\w311.hdd" /> <Asset FileName=".\Jiji.iso" /> </LoadAssets> </BizHawk-XMLGame>
Load this bk2 movie file and on frame 270, export HDD.
What the verification movie does:
- Switch Display to S3 Trio(...) 640x480 64k
- Copies the game files to C: and sets up a program group so the game will be in focus on restart
| Filename | Filesize | MD5 hash |
|---|---|---|
| JijiPlay.hdd | 515,592 KB | c0 3b 0e 7b 4e 4c 50 52 c9 eb 9f 2e 51 68 19 9e |
5) TAS Movie
Load the .hdd directly into Bizhawk, then load the bk2 movie file from this submission.
I verified the steps and there should be no ROM hash mismatch.
Note about mouse cursor when movie ends: When the submitted bk2 movie ends, the user re-gains control over the mouse which will cause the mouse cursor to go to places unintended. Please make sure during encoding to extend the input so the mouse will not move until the end of the encode.