Submission #7349: Fortranm's DS Chrono Trigger "all bosses, glitchless" in 6:23:13.96

(Link to video)
Nintendo DS
all bosses, glitchless
DeSmuME 0.9.9
1375639
59.82609828808082
166820
PowerOn
Submitted by Fortranm on 3/7/2022 9:38:09 AM
Submission Comments
  • Genre: RPG
  • DeSmuME 0.9.9, Advanced Bug-Level Timing: on
  • Forgoes glitches
Note that this movie uses the same inputs for the first 2 hours and 48 minutes from a previous submission.
Part 6 - the antagonist of Middle Ages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b085nJXpTDU
Part 7 - the antagonist of Prehistory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FZYOUk1duI
Part 9.5 - the catastrophe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7izkNazFpg (continues from the 5:25 mark of the previous one)
Part 11 - the black wind and the sun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Extn2gyKXag
Part 12.5 - the reunion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT4FdE6O3t0 (continues from the 10:00 mark of the previous one)
Part 13 - the Nu and the stone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20FJtwhZ2Gs
Part 15 - the tower, the desert, the shell, and the volcano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkkHpF4dY0o

Goal

In this version of Chrono Trigger, there is a bestiary associated with each save file. The enemies that are considered bosses have a label, and all of them are gathered toward the end of the list, making up the 159th to the 246th entries.
This run aims to... mark all of these 88 entries on the bestiary, and this implies getting into a battle with each of them at least once without getting a game over, and without using glitches. I'm not using the phrase "beating all bosses" here because:
1. The goal is not to fight all possible battles that involve a boss entity in some way. I'm not going through Black Omen for three times to fight Queen Zeal three times, as an obvious result. A less obvious one is that the last battle in Ozzie's Fort is not done either because that doesn't register any new entry on the bestiary.
2. Not all boss entities are "defeated" per se. The most notable examples are Ocean Palace Lavos and Golem Boss. The former battle is allowed (and expected in the first playthrough) to be lost for story reasons and the latter enemy simply runs away after a certain amount of time.
After the credits, if you choose to save the game and open up the bestiary, you can see that all 88 entries at the bottom of the list have been registered.
Why not choosing to register all entries in the bestiary instead, you may ask. Well, marking non-boss enemies on the list generally just involves entering a battle and then running away, which isn't exactly interesting to watch. More importantly, as many of you might know, Spekkio has a form that can only be battled against when at least one team member is at Lv.99. Since each of its forms makes up an entry in the bestiary, actually completing the bestiary would require grinding until a character reaches Lv.99, which is... not quite feasible for a movie. Luckily, the bestiary does not label Spekkio as a boss.

Route details

Coming soon™

slamo: Claiming for judging.
slamo: Solid run! Let's start by talking about the goal. Your definition of "all bosses" is pretty clear by what the game classifies as a boss, and I can confirm that all boss entries in the bestiary are filled in. The only useful glitches in this game are the arena item duplication glitch and the Dream Devourer HP overflow, both of which are obviously avoided. The optimization looks reasonable enough to me.
So what do we do with this? Well, it doesn't fit any standard goal, since it is somewhere in between "no major skips" and "full completion", so that would leave Moons, which has some entertainment standards. The general consensus in the thread was that the pre-Lavos content was good, but the postgame content was difficult to watch. Personally, I thought the first few hours were entertaining enough for a JRPG, with minimal grinding. However, the postgame content, which is mostly the Lost Sanctum fetch quest, was lacking. I found it incredibly tedious to watch the characters run through the same areas and escape from the same encounters repeatedly. With this being such a significant part of the run, I don't think I can say that this meets the entertainment requirement for Moons.
Thankfully we have Playground now, because I still think there's an audience for a run like this. The goal is pretty tame for Playground and I don't think it would be controversial to allow it. I also want to stress that no decision is ever really final here, because rules can change over time. For example, we may not be done adding goals to Standard, and it's within the realm of possibility that this would become eligible one day.
Moving to Playground.
Last Edited by slamo on 5/1/2022 3:12 PM
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