Chrono Trigger - 100% TAS in 5:17
Recorded on Snes9x 1.43-improvement12 (but should work fine on future versions of the Snes9x 1.43 series as well)
Sync Settings
- WIP 1 Timing: ON
- Left+Right/Up+Down: OFF
- Volume Envelope Height Reading: OFF
- Fake Mute desync workaround: ON
- Sync samples with sound CPU: ON
Attributes of this run
- aims for fastest time with 100% completion (definition below)
- takes damage to save time
- manipulates luck
- avoids glitches for classic, natural sake
- Genre: RPG
- Total Frames: 1243936
About the Game
Chrono Trigger is a great role-playing game made by Square. It is known as one of the best RPG games of all time. The story is about time-traveling in which a group of young adventurers is trying to save the future by defeating a mighty creature called "Lavos" which has infected and destroyed the world.
Moviemaking & Comments
Finally it's done, a run I wanted to TAS for a long time already, 100% for Chrono Trigger in legit/glitchless conditions. This 100% completion requires:
- getting at least 1 of every Item/Weapon/Armor/Helmet/Accessory (186 unique items)
- collecting all Power/Magic/Speed Tabs (except of LV99 Pink Nu reward)
- opening all the Sealed Chests (Black Boxes) / Sealed Doors in every time period
- finishing all sidequests
- defeating every boss
- defeating every form of Spekkio (except LV99 Pink Nu - separate demonstration of that form available here)
- learning all Single/Double/Triple Techs for each character
Game clock completion is 5 hours and 17 minutes at the moment the Lavos Core is defeated, which is pretty exactly a 4 hour improvement over my 100% ZSNES run [dead link removed].
Thanks
- hero of the day - for the Masa&Mune strategy
- inichi - for the critical hit tables
Enjoy!
Nach: Sorry for the delay, I spent a long time analyzing this, and mulling over what everyone had to say.
Watching the run carefully, a few important points occurred to me:
- A non-typical full Chrono innocent verdict was achieved.
- Many chests are skipped which will make people question how can this be 100% if they were missed?
- A lot of planning went into route and selections to optimize this. The route and selections were very well selected. In a few places, it looks like some time can be shaved, but overall, this is superb.
- I know the game extremely well, yet I was surprised by a false wall demoed in the run which I wasn't aware of. Other people in the thread who also know the game fairly well were surprised by a few points (which I myself found surprising that some people weren't aware of them), so this game probably has something fresh to offer to pretty much everyone out there.
- A typical RPG player goes hunting around all the areas for items, and doesn't just rush to bosses like TASs do, so this run feels more natural, except for the fact it's done in a third or quarter of the time most would expect.
- Many of the interesting side things the game has to offer were skipped.
To address some of the negative aspects:
- Snes9x v1.4x was used, which doesn't emulate this game as well as it can be. However, this run was submitted right on the border, and clearly was in development for a long time prior, so I will let this slide.
- There were a few boring grinding parts, but thankfully they can be fast forwarded without missing anything, and didn't detract too much from the run, as the voting showed.
- This run is not 100%. In my opinion, a true 100% would leave no chest unopened, and would demonstrate every variation of every single ending, which would need at least two full runs through the game. However what this run did do, and do well, was acquire the maximum amount of unique equipment it could in a single pass, and dealt with all significant chests and side-quests.
- The run indeed was not perfect, but very few people know the game remotely as well as Saturn has demonstrated, to even notice or know of the flaws, with most of the commented flaws in fact being misunderstandings about the game.
- The demonstration right before Lavos indeed wasted time, but I felt was a very nice polish which made the run even better, and allows random viewers to appreciate what was collected.
All in all, after careful deliberation, I find this run publish worthy if an appropriate label is given. Accepting as a new branch for Hoshino Trigger, whatever it will be called (not 100%).
DeHackEd: Need to redo the videos since the branch name has changed. In progress.
Saturn: Way to go to turn an appropriate standard label into one based on a subjective opinion of one person. Allow me to ask this:
- How does "All techniques, Max equipment" mention things this run does that otherwise wouldn't be necessary, such as fully completing all sidequests, fighting all bosses/Spekkio forms (with one exception mentioned above), and collecting all Tabs and sealed chests/doors? You could probably save around an hour from skipping all that by aiming for solely "All techs and max equipment", for a gigantic obsoletion of this run.
Let's face it, it will be impossible to get an unanimous agreement on what a 100% run for a game like this one is, since opinions will always be different. One could argue that you have to talk to every single talkable character, max out the money to 9999999+ G, use every weapon and tech at least one time on every possible enemy, spend hours on meaningless, boring, and repetitional quests to get max cat food, cats and all clones, walk over every pixel in every possible room in the game, and other nonsense like that.
This run gets/shows the most essential things that contribute to a 100% completion in an entertainment oriented way, and there is hardly any better single-term that can sum up the actions done in it to make the watcher clear what to expect overall.
Otherwise please go ahead and rename the Secret of Evermore 100% run to something else as well, since it also doesn't open every chest.
EDIT:
So it looks like Nach isn't interested to provide reasonable arguments against the point mentioned above or the several comments in the discussion thread that pointed the obvious flaws of this incomplete and misleading label change after all. Clearly defined common sense goals like this 100% one, that were easily accepted here in the past, are apparently too difficult to recognize for some of the judges nowadays, and the other TASvideos staff members seem to be not interested to have properly named content on their site either. Alright then, so be it.