Submission #4596: zwataketa & GoddessMaria's Genesis Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon "playaround, Venus" in 28:20.04

Venus Power! Make-up! I am the sailor of justice! The sailor-suited beautiful soldier, Sailor Venus!

And don't forget Artemis!

-The Earth Direct Throw (EDT) is Sailor Venus's special move which grabs a nearby enemy, spins them around, and throws them back down to the ground. Any other enemy that is next to Venus and the enemy being thrown will be hit as well. The EDT is the strongest move that Sailor Venus has, dealing a bar of damage to the thrown enemy. There are only two enemies that are unaffected by the EDT; the first being Zoisite and the second one being Queen Metalia.

-This only applies to a Stage that contains a fan weapon (Stage 2). When you attack with the fan within the same frame as an enemy preparing to attack you, the fan's attack animation is canceled by the enemy hit and still hits the enemy(ies) for half the normal damage without knockback. Normally, you can take up to 2 hits before you are knocked down, but more can be added by waiting a second before repeating the attack again. This allows for damage to be abused for damaging while not losing time.

-Not exactly huge, but the Neutral Chain Lock (NCL) trick works only when Sailor Venus is within a specific position and uses her Neautral Chain attack (ground A button). If done correctly, the enemy will not be knocked back and the attack can be repeated again. Although you don't have a light frame window to do this so it is used best 1 frame before the last attack's animation.

-This glitch currently only works when the player is about to face Prince Endymion in Stage 5 during the transitioning. By doing the Jump Dash Kick (JDK) during when the player is first appearing on screen, the kick will connect with Prince Endymion thus causing the boss fight to activate and he will attack you while you are locked due to the cutscene auto moving you to the proper spot. Once hit by Prince Endymion, you can freely move and fight him during the cutscene without waiting for it to end first. This saves about a second overall in comparison to waiting for the scene to end first. Doing this also keeps the music on the boss encounter theme until the next fight.

This submission aims to complete the Sega Mega Drive version of Sailor Moon in a timely manner while making a bit of room for a little entertainment. The game has 5 different playable characters. This submission choose to use Sailor Venus due to her long range from her whip and the EDT which does the most damage overall.

Area 1 - The EDT takes out most of the enemies here. When it doesn't, a normal throw or standard jump kick would be used to finish them.

Area 2 - Early on, the focus was to just knock the enemies out of the elevator but was changed midway to do a bit more for the sake of entertainment.

[Z]]: To sum up what GM said, at first, I was just going to use the normal trick of staying in the corner and jump kicking to know the enemies out of the elevator. Then I decided to switch it up at the second wave and try more entertaining things. I just had to make sure all the enemies were dead and off the screen before the first frame the next wave could appear to avoid losing time.

Area 3 (Boss) - Couldn't exploit the cutscene glitch as Venus is coming from the closed elevator doors and cannot move at all until the start of the fight. EDT and Chain Whip spin to finish this one.

Area 1 - I made use of the oncoming trains to further damage enemies while using the EDT to finish them. When I get the folding fan, I start using the fan for alternate means of damaging enemies. I also use damage abuse on an enemy by taking damage from the enemy while attacking them with the fan at the same time. Took out some clowns and moving on to Area 2.

Area 2 - At the start, I immediately pick up the fan and and alternate between the EDT and damage abuse with fan. The JDK is used for the walls as we approach them. For the boss, Jaedite, I continue to utilize the alternation between damage abuse and the EDT, finishing him with the spin on the first frame that he becomes vulnerable.

Area 1 - [Z]: Unlike the elevator level, there's no set first frame an enemy wave could appear in this level, so the goal was to kill the enemies as fast as I could (while still being fancy and entertaining), and use the time in between waves for some entertainment. Can't stand around in a section like that in a TAS, no-no!

Area 2 - Before the fight against Nephrite, I use the Jump Dash on a particular frame to cause the Area music to overwrite the Boss Confrontation theme and took on Nephrite using EDTs and a Spin Attack finish.

[Z]: Talking about the main area, the main trick here was the EDT combined with the down air. Sometimes I even locked enemies into down air combos before hitting them with something else. Not much to say here, other than the fact that you have to go backwards for the health upgrade, which is obviously not optimal. :P

[Z]: Because GM changed the AI of the boss with that glitch, my fight with Nephrite isn't shown. So here it is! (Beautiful boss AI. I hold it in high regard.)

Area 1 - For the most part, the EDT is the most primary attack here for majority of this area. Once I make it to Zoisite (Fake Sailor Moon), things become very tough as he isn't affected by grabs and throws, including the EDT. That being said, I had to make use of every other moves that Venus has in her moveset while mixing a little bit for entertainment. Finished him with the NCL and moving on to Area 2.

Area 2 - Now that I can start using grabs and throws again, I make use of them and Spin attacks to change things up a little from the EDTs. Once the goons are disposed of, I had to break the wall to escape the breaking floor behind Venus and face Kunzite. This moves used are a bit varied to avoid repetition and still be effective. Fight over, now onto the final stage!

Area 1: [Z]: An ice level with no ice physics!? O.O ... *ahem* Anyways, this was the point of the game where enemies were getting harder to predict and not often cooperative. I don't know how to do the "Neutral Chain Lock", which probably would have made the stage go faster in terms of how long it took to make that part of the run. In terms of actual runtime, I don't think it'd be much faster, though.

Area 2: During this one, I use a few different means of damaging some enemies while waiting for the second enemy of that wave to come close and use the EDT the rest of the way.

Area 3: Here is where the Cutscene Glitch is used. At the very start of the screen load, I utilize the JDK to hit Prince Endymion to trigger the glitch and proceed to fight him with a little variety. After the last move, I quickly position Venus where the cutscene with Queen Beryl would start so that it takes less time to start it. Same deal with the Prince Endymion fight, I vary the moves a little during the fight until she is done.

[Z]: HEY! I was supposed to do the Queen Beryl fight! Oh well, GM said she felt a flow after finding the glitch in the Endymion fight, and you can't go against the flow.

Area 4: This cutscene cannot be sped up nor can it be glitched so I had to wait for it to end. JDKs and spin attacks are the only effective moves that work on Queen Metalia. JDKs do 2 hits of damage to her while the spin attack does only 1 damage so I had to use the spin attack to avoid the dark sphere attacks while using JDKs when possible afterwards until defeated.

~The End~

After finishing the Pokémon Emerald TAS, I was going to resume/restart some old projects that I had left behind. It was soon that I saw a topic of the Mega Drive version of Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon started by zwataketa and he wanted to do his first serious TAS with that game. Having played through the SFC game that came out sooner and this one, I felt that it wouldn't have been too great for TASing due to CherryMay's rejected "Sailor Mars" run due to repetition and the way that Beat 'em up style games tend to be. Plus the lack of 2-Players made me even less convinced. After he posted his first WIP, I became a little intrigued so I spoke to him on Skype about the run and the game itself. Once he showed me the finished Stage 1, I then decided to "try" the game out myself from there and we could work together on this. By joining the project, I began to learn and understand the enemy behaviors more as well as other things. I then looked back at CherryMay's submission and noticed how very poorly optimized it was in comparison then shared it with zwataketa so he can see as well. From there, we took turns on Stages until I found the aforementioned glitch with Prince Endymion and felt a bit of momentum from that so I finished the rest of it myself despite zwataketa was supposed to fight Queen Beryl and I finish the run against Queen Metalia. Overall, I'm fairly pleased with this and hopefully this doesn't bore you (My comments are likely already more than boring enough... zzz).

[Z]: I first found out about this game while at my Aunt's house, and actually found it fun. So fun, and simple, I thought I could be patient enough to TAS it (at least, more than what I've attempted in the past). I was going to use Mercury, until I saw CherryMay's TAS, and ... well, that should be pretty self explanatory. Then I found out Venus (aka EARTH DIRECT THROW LADY) had the strongest move in the game, and her abilities would limit her to being forced to cause entertainment instead of locking enemies into infinite combos each time (GM found out that you COULD do that, but it's very situational, so it's not preferred.) So yeah, this whole thing was my idea. ^v^

When GM said she would help me, that really helped a lot, given my schedule ... doesn't give me much freetime. ^^' And her contributions made me find things in the game I never expected to see, like the Endymion glitch. So, really glad for the help. Even if it did end up making it so my only contributions shown were in stage 1 and 3 areas. ^^' Oh well, it's better.

I believe considering we broke CherryMay's rerecord count by stage 2 that it's safe to call this "optimized." ^^'

Now, with that out of the way, I think I'll have to actually watch Sailor Moon sometime, so I can understand what the heck is going on!

Frame 95559

Noxxa: Judging.

Noxxa: This is an odd run to judge. It suffers from an identity crisis, to start - it was submitted as a speedrun, but was intended to be more of a playaround in the hope of getting a worthy and entertaining run of this game on the site. That's a noble goal in itself, but in the end, the game just doesn't hold up well enough. The "speed-entertainment tradeoffs" are severe enough that it basically disqualifies this run from being a speedrun, as they make clear that the run does not even attempt to go for speed at all. On the other hand, as a playaround this run has too little to offer and fails to impress the audience, which is largely due to the limitations of the game. Audience response was not good enough for the site's standards of a publishable playaround.

As this run fails to hold up as either a speedrun or playaround, I'm rejecting this movie.