- Achieve the best ending
- Aim for fastest completion
- Use of glitches
- Use of deathwarps
- Heavy luck manipulation
An orphan boy, Ryu, sets out to catch a thief and clear the name of his best friend. Along the way he finds new companions, encounters frightening demons, and stumbles across a plot to destroy the world.
The most significant departures of this TAS from ordinary gameplay are the almost total avoidance of random encounters, and the optimization of boss fights at much lower levels than usually possible. Both of these are achieved through heavy use of RNG manipulation. The RNG function in Breath of Fire II is updated every frame, which allows even very unlikely results to be achieved with only small amounts of waiting. The RNG function is however not affected by very many other things besides time, so we have little ability to improve results beyond simply waiting longer. As a consequence we sometimes take sub-optimal results, when waiting for an optimal result would lose more frames than the optimization would save. The code for Breath of Fire II is sufficiently well-understood that parts of the TAS could in theory be automated, but all the manipulation in this video was done by hand.
This video improves on the previous run published in 2020, being a little over two and a half minutes faster. There have been no new glitch discoveries in that time, so the improvements come entirely through better routing and more optimized manipulation. There are lots of little changes and most only amount to a couple seconds here and there, so I'll just mention my favourite: taking Nina to Highfort instead of Katt. This loses a little bit of time since we need Bleu to cast Atk-Up to make up for Katt's missing damage in the Shupukay fight. However, shortly after Highfort we need to speak to Ged in Mt. Maori with either Nina or Katt, and the text with Nina is faster by more seconds than bringing Nina to Highfort loses and saves time overall. I also tested a complete reroute of this section of the game that was even faster completing the dungeons, but afterward we need to enter Tunlan during the day and the attempted reroute lined up badly with the day-night cycle and in the end was about two seconds slower than what's in this video.
The main glitch used in this run is the item-weapon glitch, discovered AndyW3321 in 2018. A bug in the shopping menu allows us to overwrite a character's weapon data with item data, and by picking a specific item we receive a powerful weapon with the hits-twice property. The glitched weapons are first available for the Joker fight, and are used heavily until we retrieve the EmpireSD near the end of the game. Other notable glitches are: the text glitch used to speed up the Circus, the unlimited money glitch used to bypass the Uparupa quest (incidentally a byproduct of the same bug that produces glitch weapons), and the intangible boulder glitch in the SkyCave. In total these glitches save around ten minutes compared to a glitchless TAS.
To see the aforementioned glitches in action:
- Glitched weapon in action: frame 152566
- Unlimited money glitch: frame 257279
- Text glitch: frame 427390
- Intangible boulder glitch: frame 658539
As a point of interest, it is known that the text glitch in the Circus can be used to trigger an out-of-bounds glitch. While this opens access to nearly the entire game world, no one has yet found a practical time-saving use for it as the game's plot triggers are linear and very strict.
Suggested screenshot: frame 917467. This is the start of the hardest and most famous boss in the game, and the same screenshot as used for the previous video.
ViGadeomes: Claiming for judging.
ViGadeomes: Great improvements over the last submission !
The new route and the luck manipulation show that the optimal run with today's knowledges is near !
Accepting over [4308] SNES Breath of Fire II "best ending" by Xujhan in 4:34:55.03 !
fsvgm777: Processing.