Submission #6238: Strife's GBC Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown in 02:52.18

Shrek Fairy Tale Freakdown is part of those weird licensed games that probably shouldn't have been made, but here they are. The game is a very simple fighting game, each character has between 2 and 3 combos, one punch, one kick and that's pretty much it. It does have the merit to respect Shrek characters and to run still pretty smoothly on GBC. The game puts you through 9 fights with 2 being mirror match-ups.

- The first thing to address is that the TAS is made on easy. I know generally for fighting games it is preferred to make it on Hard, but the only thing that changes with difficulty, as far as I was able to determine, was the damage you deal and the damage you take. As such, a normal punch will deal 8 damage on easy, 6 damage on medium and 4 on hard. The damage you take follows a similar curve. Since the AI doesn't get additional power ups, combos nor does it get any smarter, I decided to make the TAS on easy, as it would just be wasting time to make it on hard.

- Another thing to notice is that I'm using Fiona for this run. If you watch an RTA run of this game you'll see that people use Farquaad as he's able to kill any ennemy in two hits. Sadly Farquaad is a NG+ only character as you only unlock it after finishing the game once. I decided then to take Fiona because she's the only one between all the starting characters that has 3 combos, 2 melee and 1 ranged, allowing for a bit more diversity and faster fights.

- The main things that change between the characters besides their combos, is their amount of HP (Thelonius has 150 HP while Pinnochio has only 58) and their invincibility frames (especially visible on Thelonius and Farquaad where I have to wait a lot before putting in another hit).

- I will use and abuse a fair bit the dodging mechanic which is extremely janky. To dodge you have to press the direction away from the ennemy for a few frames, then go neutral. Fiona's dodge is basically just her crouching, so every time you see that, you know it's a dodge.

- This is probably the stage where you could potentially save a few frames here and there. I used a lot of ranged combos and I maybe could have gone a little faster by hitting one or two melee combos instead. Other than that wolf has nothing really special.

- Pinnochio is the character with the least HP along with Gingerbread Man. He doesn't have any ranged combos so I just bludgeon him to death with my frying pan and roundhouse kicks.

- In terms of AI, Gingerbread Man is the polar opposite of Pinnochio. He only spams one ranged combo and runs away as soon as you try to get near him. In this fight, around frame 3340 you can see me using the jump button for the first time. The jump is set: if you use it neutral you'll go straight up, if you use it while pressing left or right, you'll go a definite distance to the left or right. While in the air I can queue up one combo, and I'll generally use it to start the ranged combo, the animation of which is pretty long. I don't simply keep on spamming ranged combos from my initial position because Gingerbread Man would run away far enough that I cannot hit him, since the musical notes have a range limit.

- Fiona's AI is strangely aggressive, but still likes to spam the ranged combo. I take advantage of that to hit her a first time, then another time while she's jumping in the air, before hitting her with a kick right as she sets foot on the ground,and finishing her off screen with a musical note. I could have redone that so she doesn't get speed power up and gets shrek strength instead but it would have changed her pattern slightly and the off screen finish was pretty cool to show off.

- This stage is the only one where I had to make sure that I don't die, as Hood is capable of dishing up a ton of damage fast and his AI tries to get as far away from you as possible by jumping. As it is the first time I get under 50% HP, I use the speed power up since I didn't unlock the strength power up yet. The speed power up doesn't modify much except for running speed and shortening the animations a bit. It was enough to be worthwile to use.

- Monsieur Hood has very limited iframes but has a ton of HP, making him quite hard to beat. I also had to make him take the strength power up, as if he got the speed power up he would have kept running around the stage trying to evade me.

- Dragon was a pretty easy fight, even though she has a lot of HP, because all her animations are extremely slow. The limited space on the bridge also allowed me to hit her as soon as she hit the ground every time she jumped. And yes from what we see in the movie, I think I can assume Dragon is a female.

- I did a lot more dodging in this one, as it seems the second mirror match gets tougher than the first one, no matter the character. On this version the AI pretty much only uses melee combos, so therythm was hit, dodge to wait out the iframes, hit again, dodge again, etc. This rythm comes back in the later fights.

- Thelonius was without a doubt the most annoying fight to do. He has the highest HP value, and while he doesn't have a lot of HP, you cannot just spam him with hits. One of Thelonius's combos is a chokehold, that he can maintain for a second or two, and I had to absolutely avoid that, so I hit him three or four times then had to dodge for half a second to avoid his combo, then rinse and repeat. The ranged combo is pretty much unusable as he will always charge you no matter what.

- I managed to get Farquaad stuck in a loop to avoid having him start his charge, which does a lot of damage and to inflict as much damage as possible in the shortest amount of time possible. So I hit him twice with normal punches to bring up his block during which he's invincible, then wait around 10 frames before doing a roundhouse kick to hit him right as he lets it down. After putting him down to 50% I avoided his first charge and he jumped on the lower parts of the stage and I repeated the same process to finish him off.

- This game is extremely short and honestly a good laugh to play and watch. You don't see it at all but there is minor RNG manipulation to get the power ups I want from the NPCs everytime, as the RNG is decided at the very start of the stage.

- As I said the only fight where I really see possible improvements is Wolf, and maybe Monsieur Hood. It would be small ones but it's possible.

- The game doesn't have credits. When you complete it, it loops back to the main menu after you press A on the "Champion" Screen, so that's where I imagine the movie should end. Tell me if it needs to end farther or something.

feos: It's a somewhat complex fighting game if you can't just infinitely spam one attack and win ASAP. Nice job resisting the AI. All the decisions look reasonable.

Tier choice is a bit tricky: if not this 1-fps animation, it'd all play really well. But even then it's just a fighting game with little to no viewer engagement. The feedback was feebly positive, but I doubt a lot of people with feel that this game has a lot to offer.

Accepting to Vault.

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