Based off the first season of the Japanese anime. Three school girls are sucked into the world of Cephiro to save princess Emerald. Hikaru, Umi and Fuu must endure many trials and tribulations to awaken the machines and become the Magic Knights. However, they decide to forgo all that so they can return back to their homeland as soon as possible.
- Aims for fastest time
- Abuses programming errors
- Manipulates luck
- Uses major skips
- Takes damage to save time
- Contains death abuse
I was intending to do this over a period of many months. However, a couple of major tricks allowed me to skip most of the game. Severly cutting down the time needed to do this project. Big thanks to ThunderAxe31 for finding the clip at the start of the game. I don't know if he found it intentionally or by accident, but hopefully he'll clear that up in the comments section below. At first the trick in the Tokyo Tower seemed useless until Scepheo found you could use it to take damage and warp to Polizu Village. Warping to that point of the game is a big deal, because of the long intro and mostly trivial gameplay required. Saving 28 minutes over my current TAS. ThunderAxe31 and Scepheo thought the OoB trick in the Tokyo tower could be used to warp to the credits in much the same sense the Gods run does. However, with much testing and hacking character locations to see if anything special happens. I couldn't find any use beyond dying. From what I can gather each map is 66536 grid and if you journey far enough along the X-axis you'll wrap back onto the screen. Something which takes many minutes to accomplish. Going along the Y-axis does much the same, but can cause some strange effects. Usually some form of softlock or hard crash.
As for the trick to get into the Lair of Truth, the games final dungeon. This was found by hacking the characters location to see where NPC clipping could be potentially useful. I found a location on the right side of the screen and parked my character there and left my emulator running for many hours to no avail. Until I realized it might be worth trying to do with the map glitch on. Map glitch involves trying to warp out during a cutscene. It can crash the game; cause graphical glitches or shrink your characters to map sized sprites. When I tested trying to glitch past the rocks with the map glitch on. I found out you only needed a 3 pixel boost to get into the bush as opposed to a 15 pixel boost required normally. So like before, I parked my character in same location and left my emulator running for a couple of hours, and after returning home... Voila!!! I had accomplished one of the games holy grails. For any eagled eye viewer who might ask. If I needed to do the first dungeon to activate the map glitch, then why didn't I use the cutscene before the first dungeon? Frustratingly, after talking to the village chief. The warp out button is disabled preventing any kind of shenanigans.
In terms of the movement, the fastest is clearly running. However you need a running start by walking uniterupted in a straight line for 123 frames. This can be problematic when you don't have enough room to accompish this. However you can do this even in a heavily restricted environment by letting go of the d-pad and continually tapping it. The game checks your run counter and animation cycles to see if you're allowed to run. So as long as you're not stationary and continue to move unterupted along the same trajecory. The game will activate your running ability.
For those wondering why the bosses take so long to beat. It should be obvious that the characters are greatly underpowered, as they only have entry level stats. Normally, as you progress through the game you get escudo upgrades and more powerful spells. However, since you skip right to the end of the game all of that is forgone. Umi and Fuu are Escudo level 0 throughout the game. After beating the first dungeon Hikaru jumps to level 1. She should have gone to level 2 after beating Alcione, but for some reason does not[*]. As a result of that, Innova and Zagat take twice as many hits as I initially calculated. To further add to the frustration when Innova's HP falls below 50. It gets reset back to full. Effectively giving him 170hp, which as you can understand can take a while to deplete with a weapon that only does 3hp worth of damage. For those interested, I've provided a pastebin for those wishing to know what all the hp and damage output values are.
A note about the robot battle with Zagat. Normally you'd pick Hikaru as her sword does 8hp worth of damage allowing you to beat him in 20hits. Fuu would normally be the weakest, as her arrows only do 4hp worth of damage. However, her attack has the unique ability to stack, with a close and well positioned shot you can do upto 28 damage. Allowing Zagat to be beaten in 6 hits
EDIT
[*]After looking into this more. I realized Hikaru never went to level 2, because the trigger for it is defeating Rafarga; not Alcione as I previously thought.
ThunderAxe31: Judging.
ThunderAxe31: For the current knowledge available for the game, this run is well optimized. I understand the excitement for the recent discovery of the major skip, but I have to note that on the other side the boss battles turned out incredibly lenghty and repetitive. Accepting for Vault.
fsvgm777: Processing.
Mitjitsu: Could we please clarify what techniques would be allowed in a full game run.