Submission #8836: CoolHandMike's PSX Spectral Tower in 24:04.89

The Playstation game Spectral Tower released in 1996 is a JRPG made by Idea Factory the makers of the Neptunia JRPGs.

Spectral Tower is an obscure kusoge that is known for being extremely lengthy due to huge number of randomly procedurally generated floors in its towers. Below is a list of the towers and their floors.

Spectral Tower is an unusual RPG in how it approaches gameplay. At the start you are able to enter in codes you find throughout the game on papyrus to start with new characters. Each character starts with special moves and some items. Normally you start with a truly weak class, but as you continue through the game the idea is to upgrade to higher class units, or to restart with one fresh. With a guide for the codes already listed I selected the 手品師 aka Juggler class. The reason for that is that the Juggler is the only class out of 106 classes that starts with the Jump Rod that allows you to warp up floors. The Juggler class also has three special moves, Run (逃げる) that has a chance to make him run away, Strange Dance (変なおどり) that can make the enemy flee at a 7/16 rate, but has some massive downsides if it fails. Strange Dance if it misses will do 10 damage to yourself, and sometimes cause the enemy to become upset and then on the next attack they deal double damage. The other special Juggle (手品) does the same thing as Strange Dance, and a guide says it has a 10/16 chance to be successful as well and no penalties if it misses. Note that when a boss "runs" away the game considers it defeated and it will drop a key needed to open the gate to finish the floor.

Each character has HP and various levels for how effective they are at certain enemies, opening chests, food level, equipment level, and poison level. This tas does not make use of almost any those mechanics since no deliberate leveling is done and no damage is taken, but they are explained more in the resources below.

Battles in this game are initiated when you bump into an enemy. Whether you go first or they do can be manipulated by how you walk in floor. There is a standard attack and the game uses an RNG dice to determine if you kill, damage, or miss. There is always a 1/6 chance of doing a critical hit on any enemy. Enemies can have up to three hearts, and doing a heart damage would be a non critical roll of the dice. How many sides of the dice could potentially damage the enemy seems to be dependent on your skill level versus that type of enemy. If the enemy attacks you have a chance to dodge. Certain enemies can directly destroy items in your allotted 20 item inventory. many enemies also have moves that will seal your special attacks until you can cure yourself. Defeating an enemy, not making them flee, can net the character skill level up for that type of enemy. Chests seem that if they are higher level than your character you have to battle them. In that case you have to roll the dice and have good RNG to make sure to hit the chest to open it. The number of sides available on the dice to damage is dependent on your chest level. Text in the game can be sped up by pressing the activate button and holding it starting on the earliest frame the text begins to scroll, and then leaving a blank frame and pressing it again. Continually holding the activate button before the text appears will just have the text scroll at normal speed.

Each Tower consists of floors where each floor has enemies wandering around or ones that will chase you. Some enemies can go through walls or randomly teleport around. There are many different traps which sometimes makes the floor unacceptable for a speedy solution. The main trouble traps are the teleporter, confusion, enemy gets to move first in battle tile (skull tile), and slowdown tiles. The player can move in 8 directions and holding L when moving in any direction causes the player to run. You can run over a single teleporter tile, but if there is two the player gets caught and will be teleported. Each floor has a door and you need to find the key to open it to advance up to the next floor. The key maybe laying on the ground or appear after defeating an enemy. Note that on the final floor of each tower you must find and defeat the boss to get the key.

There are two warp items in the game, the Jump Rod (ジャンプロッド) and the Warp Rod (ワープロッド). The Jump Rod will randomly deposit you on a floor 1 to 15 floors above your current floor. The Warp Rod will randomly deposit you 50-60 floors above your current floor. The Jump rod is normally attainable in the Queen's Rose Tower, while the Warp Rod is introduced later in the Spectral Tower. Items have a random chance in appearing in chests of varying chest level. Both rods seem to have a 1/3 chance of breaking on each use so in human gameplay the player might want to save after each successful use. Rods will not move you above the top floor.

RNG can be manipulated mostly by waiting frames for the most part. When entering the tower or using a warp item you can delay usage to get different floors. The layouts of the floors are modular and all the various modules are in random orders, and the boss, the exit door, and your character's position are all random too. RNG during battle seems linked to what tile the enemy or boss is currently on. I only realized this later, so some OHKO attacks are used that might be faster if you wait for the enemy to move to other tiles to get the 1/6 critical hit. The Spectral Tower boss could be about one second faster if I had realized that at the time. Turn order is determined by your character's movement so I manipulate to go first and get a OHKO for each boss.

If you want to watch a good review of the game check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-skIBPWOPE

Great Guide for Spectral Tower https://w.atwiki.jp/spectraltower/

Starting tower where we use the Jump Rod to immediately and manipulating a good floor with the boss and door right near us.

More warping and manipulating a good final floor. Boss and exit door are nearby.

Normally this boss is extremely evasive if you get near it and it will run away through traps and other enemies. The boss and door are very close to one another so found a great floor here.

Manipulate the first floor to have a Warp Rod in an unlocked, low level chest. This means no dice rolling to open the chest which saves lots of time. Using the Warp Rod is not slower than using the Jump Rod, since you can move down and Use in the same frame. Then warp up 1000 floors 60 floors at a time all the way to the top.

Unfortunately the best final floor I could find had the exit door a screen away from the boss which was nearby. There was a faster floor by 150 frames, but in that one the Warp Rod broke which we need for the Final Tower. Possible improvement could be to manipulated another Warp Rod earlier on into a nearby chest.

A truly mind numbing experience to warp up all 10000 floors 60 floors per Warp Rod usage. 167 uses of the Warp Rod to get to the final floor. Was able to find an amazing floor pattern when both the boss and the exit door right next to each other. There is some minor waiting, and I was not able to get the fastest 1/6 dice critical attack, but was unable to find anything remotely as good.

There are a lot of random events in this tas so I amused myself by trying to get a rough estimate of how likely this tas is.

And that is not even counting all the unknown floor randomness, the battle rng, and the rng to get the Warp Rod.

Samsara: Claiming for judging.

Samsara: Congratulations, this is the most I've ever enjoyed an Idea Factory game! I don't know and will never know why, but these kinds of highly repetitive RNG manipulation TASes are some of my favorites on the site, and I'm happy to toss another one onto that particular pile. Accepting!

One other potential improvement I noticed, and this is definitely something that would have to be brute forced, is that it might be possible to manipulate the same floor tileset on each warp, since it looks like the game has to load different tilesets. It looked to me like each load takes about the same time as a warp, so it might actually be worth manipulating shorter loadless warps even if it means a couple extra warps are needed at the end. I could be entirely wrong here, though. I wouldn't exactly trust IF to be sensible about something like that. This is the same company that thinks a brand new dungeon means starting you at a different entry point of the same three room dungeon you've been through five times before, after all.

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