Iji is an action-packed strategic platform shooter with a detailed story, large levels with multiple paths, powerful bosses and lots of secrets. There are alternate gameplay events, dialogues and scenes depending on what you do, a wealth of extras and bonus features, and seven stats to upgrade through a leveling system. Iji herself has superhuman strength and abilities, and can crack Nanotechnology, use her enemies' most devastating weapons against them, and be a pacifist or a killer - the story adapts to how you play.
This run is similar to the any% run I did, so if you are interested in the route notes and other tricks, got to #6298: Matslo123's Windows Iji in 27:41.87
The only rule / limitation of this category is to complete the game with 0 Kills, which awards you the Pacifist rank, so for this reason I use Normal difficulty. On the game's hardest difficulty (Ultimortal), a Pacifist run is impossible because you are required to kill a boss on that difficulty. On the Hard and Extreme difficulties, a Pacifist run would be far more time-consuming, due to required Nano farming and other factors, without a significant gain in difficulty under TAS conditions. This would result in a far less entertaining movie in comparison to one on Normal difficulty.
The .wtf file submitted is the one used for timing, if you want to get to the credits use this file: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1phQUR3hxak3d--dru4qbeD85S_Kwg5Sy
To get the run to sync, set Multithreading to Wrap. Also before you run the TAS, you need to:
- Go into the settings and set Screen shaking to low, Show time to on, go to more... and set Gamma and special effects to off/low.
- Go into a game and exit whenever (this is to save these settings).
- Exit out of the game and run the TAS.
feos: This movie has a number of issues.
The pacifist goal is defined imprecisely. The game itself calls you Pacifistic if you have 1-51 kills and provides different gameplay, dialogs, and the ending. The "fastest completion" branch that we published recently gets that rank. The author defines "pacifist" as zero in-game kills, which means the final stats screen calls you Innocent. Yet in this movie we see enemies being destroyed: the turrets count as enemies as long as they are hostile to the player, and the pacifist goal means you spare all the enemies that you don't have to kill.
Even damaging enemies without killing them may downgrade overall entertainment in the eyes of the audience, and viewer feedback is our primary factor when we judge movies that are neither "fastest completion", not "full completion". And actual feedback on this movie was uncertain indeed.
Another major problem is that this movie plays almost identically as its "fastest completion" counterpart, with a bit more delays and a few detours: it's largely the same route, just a little slower. Since the primary branch has to avoid killing enemies to keep their quantity and aggression low and dodge them easier, its main strategy is globally the same as in this run. As mentioned, any% is played as in-game pacifist, so these 2 branches are inherently similar: the pacifism approach is plain faster.
It was suggested that this movie isn't "pacifist", but "best ending". But apparently our definition of "best ending" doesn't blindly mean "the happiest ending for a human". We prefer more gameplay to be showcased in side branches, so for us, the best is whatever ending that shows the most gameplay, or involves the most challenges. We don't publish movies alongside any% branch if all they do differently is avoiding a few kills while otherwise looking the same. So if the happiest ending doesn't offer unique gameplay, we don't publish it as another branch. We may publish it when it represents maximum completion that is possible in the game. But for this game, there's already an "all items" submission that actually contains unique gameplay and completes 100% of something (to be defined what).
Rejecting.