Introduction
Lunacy, also known as Torico in Europe and Gekka Mugentan Torico in Japan, was a 1996 adventure game by System Sacom. The third entry in the Mansion of Hidden Souls trilogy, the player controls the traveler Fred who tries to remember who he was in the City of Mists. This journey leads him to the mysterious City of Moons where he learns the truth of what happened to him 4 years ago. The visual style is prerendered FMV when moving between nodes of the cities but plays more like a traditional adventure game. Disk A has the issues of a 1980s Japanese adventure game with arbitrary event flag triggering to get later events to happen and needing to repeat the same action multiple times to obtain one of the items. Disk B is a more standard, and personally enjoyable, adventure game affair where you wander around the City of Moons to find items and free the butterflies found in the elemental towers. It's a weird game but that's probably why I liked it enough to make a whole TAS of the game.
Game information
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.11.1
- Saturnus core
- BIOS used: Bios v1.00 (U+E)
- Spans two disks, requiring the Multi-Disk Bundler
- Lunacy (Disc 1)
- Lunacy (Disc 2)
- Genre: Adventure
- Best ending
- Minor luck manipulation for one puzzle
Extra notes
- Was it possible to skip the movement FMVs?
- Nope. No option to turn those off so you're gonna have to savor those movements.
- Routing
- I mainly used harum3's "best ending" RTA world record since it seems to handle the nonsense event flag routing of disk A quite a bit. This TAS wouldn't have been as good without this RTA run as a resource.
- What constitutes best ending
- The best ending is determined by saving all the possible people in disk B. Each one of them will show up with their own scene during the ending sequence at the end of the game, and saving all of them also enables seeing 5 otherwise unused cutscenes on disk A after the credits have played. Nothing in disk A affects this, so only extra actions on disk B are needed.
- Optimal turnarounds
- A number of sections in the TAS require turning around. For the most part turning left or turning right takes the same amount of time as expected. However, there are several cases where due to the animation differences there's an optimal turning direction that's usually a frame faster than the opposite direction. This mostly manifests in the form of getting the herb after the tree sap due to the 1 frame difference turning at the T-intersection.
- Music box RNG
- The music box puzzle chooses which music box needs to be played upon jumping down the wind shaft after getting the wind key. This is frame based so a minor bit of waiting is done to get an optimal music box, which is either near left (the one selected in this TAS) or near right to the door that needs the key.
Special thanks
- Shentok, who was where I first learned about this game from
- Playthroughs by supergreatfriend and patcdr which finally pushed me into making a TAS of this silly game
- harum3 for their RTA world record run as a routing resource
- Spikestuff whose Myst TASes were also an influence on why I TASed this game
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: This game doesn’t offer much in the way of exploitable optimization. As a player, you essentially need to stay alert and keep moving smoothly—any hesitation can cost valuable time, often in fractions of a second that add up.
With that said, adjusting the RTA time would mean you’ve beaten the WR by 1 minute and 49 seconds, which is a strong result for a game of this type.
I’ll also say this: you play the game so well that it feels almost cinematic. When this is published, I’m planning to watch it like a film. :)
Accepted into “Standard.”
inconsistent: Processing...