Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom
Completed in 1:21'49"070
This is a 16 minute improvement to Acmlm's run, published November 11th, 2006. In fact, I posted in that run's submission thread the day after it was submitted the previous April. Nearly 18 and a half years have passed, hm. hm. hm.
Anyway, since that's a long time to pass, it shouldn't be surprising that some new glitches have been discovered since then! With newfound knowledge and massively improved tools, I figured it was time for a new coat of paint for this maligned game.
ABOUT PHANTASY STAR III
I feel like "Phantasy Star III is the black sheep of the series" is a phrase like "Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell." If anyone knows anything about the subject, it's this exact sequence of words, and not a whole lot else. The game was almost intended to be this way from the very beginning, too--the plot takes place an indeterminate time in the future, far away from the previous games' location in space. As if to say "yeah it's not entirely canon, we'll get you the proper game soon, hang on." (And they did, PS IV is the best jRPG on the Genesis and one of the best of the 16-bit generation. It has an easter egg side dungeon that references this game, and an easter egg monster elsewhere, but otherwise this game never needed to happen.)
Phantasy Star III's story takes place over three generations, and you direct the story as you choose who you want your hero to marry. Of your two choices, the story changes and your son changes, who becomes the new hero and has their own marriage decision at the end of their adventure. Of the four possible grandchildren, they all take the same quest to conquer the Dark Force and save their worlds.
Essentially, the worlds as we know them have been split into two factions--the descendants of the hero who sealed away Dark Force 1000 years ago, Orakio, are hardy and are associated with cybernetics. They fear the residents of a land of magic and monsters, who descended from Laya, another hero who helped Orakio but eventually went to war with him after their quest was complete. As the game begins, the Orakian prince, Rhys, has forsaken his duty-bound engagement to an Orakian princess, Lena, from a neighboring nation, as he has fallen in love with a mysterious woman named Maia who washed up on-shore without her memories.
On the wedding day of Rhys and Maia, a dragon steals her away, proclaiming she was a descendent of Laya and never would belong to a filthy Orakian! Rhys valiantly begins a quest to save her from capture by her own country, and proves his love to her through challenges arranged by Princess Lena and Lyle, the man later revealed to have been a Layan prince who can transform into a dragon. They give their blessing to Rhys, and shift the moons into a position to reveal a sandbar, allowing the Prince, who is NOT a dragon or a magic-user, to enter Cille and rescue his bride. At this point, you can either choose for Rhys to marry the Layan Maia, or the Orakian Lena, and rule over their people. This decision decides which nation has a hero to defend themselves when the moons attack 20 years later--Lena and Lyle's actions awoke powerful forces from 1000 years ago, and your chosen son has to conquer one of the moons to save his kingdom. The third generation gets the task of conquering the great evil that arranged the entire plot, the demonic form of malevolence from millennia past, Dark Force.
PS III is hard to play, mostly because it's kinda boring and slow-paced. Storytelling elements, while they exist, are kinda lacking in-game, and just kinda happen through occasional conversations. Once a character joins your party, they often never speak again or have much of anything to do with anything. The game mechanics are very unusual for a jRPG--characters start with all the spells they ever learn, their TP costs never change, and you can make them stronger by re-balancing your focus in that class. Either your single heal is strong or your group heal is strong, that kind of thing. As you level, you get more points to balance around, but since bosses are strong against magic and dungeons are largely exercises in tedious attrition, it's generally just easier to focus on making your characters' physical attacks stronger to the point of ending battles fast. Grind, buy stronger knives, win, repeat.
And the story falls a little flat, as all four possible Third Generations devolve almost immediately into the same set of fetch quests: Get 5 party members, get the 5 weapons, unlock their hidden power, conquer the evil. The endings are different but kinda all the same, too, so it's a little disappointing.
All to say, it makes sense that, while the game originally got TASed because hey, it's a Phantasy Star, no one ever bothered to update it because, cripes, it's The Bad One.
GLITCHES USED
The Escapipe Glitch
This is the most well-known glitch in Phantasy Star III--this is the one that ACMLM used in their run. Escapipes are your "escape the dungeon" item in Phantasy Star games. In PSIII, at the completion of a generation, the game forgets to re-set where the Escapipe is supposed to send you, meaning you can immediately go right back to the entrance of the final dungeon of the previous generation! However, this is really only useful in one particular place: The start of Nial's quest in the Second Generation, if you chose to marry Lena. All five other possible uses of this glitch either send you to a locked city you have no means of escaping, or they send you right back to where you already are, saving no time at all. With Nial, however, you get the opportunity to do the First Generation's final dungeon again, and fight Rhys's final boss again, and upon the victory, the game acts like it's the end of Nial's quest, you can marry his two choices, and then the game continues to the Third Generation!
The Pron Glitch
At the moment during the Third Generation that the five sacred weapons are powered up with the secret word, the game searches your character inventories and replaces the sacred weapons with the data values of the Nei weapons. If a character's inventory is completely empty, however, the game bugs out massively, and writes weird values in certain spots of memory. Player sprites are glitched out, theire locations on screen are temporarily misaligned, and most characters have their names altered permanently, usually by changing the first letter to a P. (Aron's name is changed to Pron, for example, hence the name of the glitch. Teehee, Pr0n.) This is why our final party is Pron, Pieu, Para, Paya, and Wren. Someone didn't want to Play along...
Along with these cosmetic changes, though, there are also incredible stat changes that can occur for the first character found whose inventory is empty. While the men often get downgrades to some stats, the women become faster than anything else in the game and gain a defense stat so high that even the final boss can only do 0 damage with a non-magical attack! These stat changes only affect one character, so I chose Laya in this TAS, as I will explain later in the walkthrough section. Mainly, this glitch is used to give Dark Force someone to target to keep my offensive characters alive as long as possible without any time-wasting healing being needed.
The Surprise Glitch
This glitch provides the bulk of the time save for this run, and was what influenced me to make this improvement. If you Surprise the enemy to start a battle, you get a free turn to attack without response. If, during a Surprise turn, you attempt to cast a Technique, but do not have enough TP to do so, the game wigs out and just ends the battle, declaring you the winner and handing you the XP and Meseta (money) that you would have obtained if you had won legit. This obviously saves a ton of time, not just through ending the battles immediately, but also by changing the game routing: No longer do I need to enter towns and buildings to buy weapons for the path to the bosses, I can just glitch my way through with an un-equipped party! Since you cannot Surprise a bossfight, however, one does still need to bring some weapons to those. Thus, the First Generation in this TAS becomes a balancing act of running from as many battles as possible while using this glitch as often as needed to buy a sword and a gun and just enough levels to beat the first bossfight in three turns. We're set up for the rest of the game at this point--after the Lyle fight, all battles are run from until the very final dungeon.
Other Glitches
Other glitches do exist--the Inventory Underflow Glitch is the star of my TAS of the GBA port of this game, linked here. This glitch DOES exist in the original game and all other ports, however it crashes the game when attempted. Check my other run instead to see the details of what fun stuff it can do in the only port of the game where it works!
There is also another glitch that occurs when your sacred weapons are made Nei--if a character had their sacred weapon equipped when the transformation happens, they keep the boost to their Attack stat! And then when you equip the Nei-weapon, you get the full increase of the new superweapon added on! ...However, this glitch is entirely cosmetic for the stats screen, and the actual in-battle stats are calculated properly, as if the inflation never occurred. So, while this glitch technically happens for both Kara and Laya in this TAS, it does nothing in actual gameplay, TAS or not, and I will not be mentioning it further.
Also, while this is not a glitch, the most famous exploit in PS III is also related to Escapipe usage. As soon as you begin a new game, if you sell your Boots and buy an Escapipe before you start the wedding abduction sequences, you can use that Escapipe while in the castle dungeon, and reappear back in town! The exit is still blocked, however, and the developers were clever enough to put in a secret message if you talk to the king again, who tells you that while what you did would normally be smart, you're instead trapped and have to restart your game! A very cute addition by the devs, but obviously pointless for a TAS.
TAS WALKTHROUGH
First Generation
- In prison, you have to pickup the Knife and the Monitor to continue. You do NOT have to take the 300 meseta from the center chest, although the free money is very useful in this run.
- Once Lena sneaks in and breaks you out, you're free to explore three villages and ask around for info. The passageway to Aquatica, home of the Layan kingdoms, is locked by a Sapphire, and a thief has stolen it and holed himself up in an island cave. The boatmaster won't take anyone there who doesn't have the protection of an Orakian cyberdroid, however, so Rhys has to find one. Talking to a certain villager in Ilan town reveals that a Layan was spotted near a lake to the north, which unlocks Mieu, who is actually the Droid he is looking for! She stays with the party for all three generations, and never speaks again until the ending cinematics.
- In Yaata Town is the boatmaster, but we take a pit stop in the General Store first. Selling Rhys's Boots and Knife, as well as Mieu's Claw and Vest, gets us enough meseta to purchase 9 Escapipes, which, along with the 1 Wren is holding when he joins the party, is enough to last the entire rest of the game. As we sail, the boatmaster points out the Undersea Palace, the place where Dark Force is sealed, until we someday will unseal him in order to kill him.
- In the Island Cave, we run from every battle. With Mieu in the party, we now have the ability to use the Surprise glitch. However, setting up the glitch before the cave costs time going into the menu, so we just run from battles until we meet Lyle. Once he hands us the Sapphire and departs, we would go into the menu to use an Escapipe anyway, so we have Mieu waste Res spells until her magic is spent.
- The Sapphire allows access to the...bridge? From the...planet? of Landen to the...planet? of Aquatica. All is revealed in later generations, you're not really supposed to realize anything's weird yet. Aquatica is frozen over due to malfunctions with the Weather Control Center on planet Aridia, but that requires an Orakian droid named Wren to fix. We take the hidden bridge to Aridia, which people in the nearby town of Rysel would point you towards if you didn't know already was there.
- On the desert world of Aridia, Wren is holed up in a cave to the west. He joins our party and comes with a free Escapipe. We leave and head to the southeast of the planet.
- The Weather Control is where the meseta and XP grind come to the forefront, as the second floor has by far the best enemy formations in the entire First Generation. Calculating the best number of battles in this dungeon without spending any extra time was a heavy consideration during the creation of this TAS. Of the 1790 Meseta needed to pick up before the first boss fight, 546 is obtained in just three battles here.
- The way Random Encounters work in PS III is very rigid. After a random battle, a screen transition, or a cutscene, the game selects a random number from 16 through 79. That becomes the number of steps you take before the next random battle. You cannot manipulate away battles, only the number of steps before the next one. This TAS is completed in the fewest number of battles possible (other than the two on the second floor of Weather Control here,) so many are manipulated to be Surprises for grinding, since the battles are mandatory anyway.
- Lyle joins the party here in the Weather Control Center, as he was just using us to get Wren to fix his planet's climate. We return to Aquatica, and with the seas unfrozen, we can sail to the island that houses the castle Shusoran. In town, we purchase a Steel Sword for Rhys. In the castle, we use six final random battles to get all the Meseta and XP we need for the next 45 minutes of gameplay.
- The secret entrance to Shusoran's dungeon is hidden in a fountain in town. In Shusoran's throne room, Lena is already there, and Lyle challenges Rhys to a one-on-one fight. With our levels and the powerful Steel Sword, our Rhys is *just* able to defeat Lyle in three swings. He would not survive a third from Lyle here, but this works out just fine for us. Lyle reveals that he and Lena were in cahoots to test Rhys's love and dedication for Maia. Lena joins the party and the two direct us back to the Weather Control center.
- Before we leave town, however, we sell Rhys's Steel Sword to purchase a Ceramic Shot for Wren. We take the bridge to Aridia for a third time, head to the second floor of the Weather Control Center and use Lena and Lyle's gems to move the worlds's two moons into alignment, causing the waters to recede back in Aquatica, revealing a sand bar for Rhys to cross and reach castle Cille--After taking the bridge between Aridia and Aquatica again for a fourth time, of course.
- The entrance to Cille's dungeon is also hidden in a fountain. The quest through both dungeon and castle is long and tedious, as the level design in this game is pretty uninspired. Usually dungeons are not even really maze-like either, just long windy passages most of the time. Cille is worse, as to get the minimum amount of fights, you have to coax the RNG to give you step-counts extremely close to the max of 79 steps over and over.
- The King of Cille is holding Maia captive, and he has 6 Dryads in front of him to support him in the fight. Wren's Ceramic Shot shines here, since it attacks an entire row of enemies in one fire. Boosted by Mieu casting Fanbi, a 1TP support spell which increases a character's attack power, Wren is able to defeat all six Dryads in one turn. Wren's guns are treated like magic in this game, in that his Attack does not influence their damage, but enemy Defend also cannot protect from their bullets, so Wren is the perfect character to directly mow through King Cille's high Defense as well.
- Now, King Cille concedes defeat to Rhys, and Rhys is given the choice of marrying Maia, the Layan woman who his quest was for, or Lena, the Orakian princess who supported him on his quest even though he changed his mind on marrying her. If you choose Maia, Rhys becomes king of the Layan kingdoms, and their son, Ayn, is born half-Orakian and half-Layan, meaning he is able to cast some magic as well as use strong swords and armor. A powerful warrior, a great hero!
We marry Lena instead.
Second Generation
- Nial, the full-blood Orakian prince, is given a defensive quest. When Lyle and Lena realigned the moons, they accidentally woke up ancient beings of great power that had been imprisoned on them, and in the 20 years since, these beings are now bringing war upon the worlds of PS III. In this storyline, the cyberdroid Siren, based on the blue moon Azura, has already defeated the Layan kingdoms, and if we were there, Prince Ayn's quest would have ended after Siren's defeat. But we are in Landen instead, and Nial is charged to defend Orakian kingdoms from Lune, an ancient Layan attacking from the purple moon, Dahlia.
None of this happens, as we glitch passed the entire Second Generation using an early Escapipe. We get to challenge King Cille again, Wren defeats the Dryads again, and then we get to choose to marry one of two strange and unfamiliar women. If you'd like to read what we were SUPPOSED to do, continue on, otherwise, skip to the Third Generation.
The Orakians have enraged Lune further, as they captured Lune's sister, Alair. She was actually looking for help in calming Lune down, and Nial releases her to try to make amends. He then looks for Laya's long buried treasure, deep beneath the river in Aridia, and finds that it is...Laya! Who is not the fabled Laya herself but actually Laya's little sister, well actually the little sister of the daughter of the original Laya, also named Laya, and...okay it's confusing. Anyway, Nial and Laya's journey would have them visit the descendants of the Ship Pilots, and take a space shuttle to the purple moon to challenge Lune directly. During that flight, the truth starts to be revealed, as Nial discovers that the seven "planets" he lived on were actually connected sections of one gigantic spaceship, named the Alisa III, and the moons were just satellites of that same spaceship.
In the Third Generation, there is an optional city that houses Storytellers that explain the rest of the story: This grouping of worlds is just one of numerous identical spaceships that were created during the time of Phantasy Star II. A major plot point during that game is the explosion of the planet Palma, home of this universe's analogue for human beings. Before the cataclysm, apparently, there was enough time to build several gigantic spaceships to send all of Palman civilization into outer space, to hopefully find new solar systems to call home, far far away from the reaches of Dark Force. But Dark Force hid a piece of itself in each and every ship, and by PS III's time, only two of the ships have survived, Alisa III and Neo-Palm. It is not revealed how Neo-Palm survived Dark Force's attack 1000 years ago, but Alisa III found success with five heroes: Orakio, Laya, her brother Lune, and Orakio's two droids, Siren and Miun. They each had a special weapon which now must be powered up to defeat Dark Force once more, and for good.
In Aron's story, the Third Generation begins with the Alisa III firing upon the Neo-Palm and destroying it--Dark Force's victory over them finally achieved. Nial and Alair task Aron with finding who ordered the attack and destroy them. It was Dark Force, of course. The other three options have similarly apocalyptic scenarios: Nial and Laya's son, Adan, tries to seek the cause of a powerful earthquake that was foretold by his sister Gwyn. Ayn and Sari's son, Crys, has to basically travel Nial's whole journey to stop a monster invasion before he can challenge Dark Force. Finally, Ayn and Thea's son, Sean, live on the blue moon, and it explodes. But he's okay. So his is a quest for vengeance. He also travels Nial's path again. Developers couldn't think of unique ways to unlock Laya's Necklace or Wren's transformations, I guess.
The Third Generation
- Aron's journey begins on the purple moon, Dahlia--a very convenient place to start, as it houses the Aero-Parts, which allow Wren to morph into an airplane at airports. We have to first enter, then exit, then re-enter Dahlia's dungeon, though, to override the Escapipe glitch. Otherwise using an Escapipe would teleport us all the way back to Cille *again,* except this time in a weird state where the people think it's the Second Generation (meaning we can't fight the King, he has been replaced by Rhys) but Aquatica is frozen over again like at the start of the First Generation, leaving us completely stranded.
- With the Aero-Parts, normally we are supposed to go under Aridia and collect Laya, but the Escapipe glitch has rendered many of our event flags un-set. See, PS III works on event flags, not inventory. So even though we start this gen with Laya's Necklace, Wren's Sub-Parts, and the Twins Ruby, none of them are functional, so we need to collect them again if we need their functions. This means that Aron has to do parts of Nial's quest as well before he can finish his own.
- After our spaceship lands in the town of Aerone, on the world of Elysium, we use Wren to fly west to the Second Generation's Rebel Cave. There, we pick up a set of Sub-Parts from a chest, allowing us to dive underneath the river in Aridia. We can never re-collect the Twins Ruby in this playthrough, though, and since we do not have a functional Laya's Necklace neither, we have to take the LONG way around to Aridia.
- We fly to northeast Elysium and take the bridge to Landen. There, we fly over to an airport near Ilan, and walk to the bridge to Aquatica, again.
- We take the bridge between Aquatica and Aridia for a fifth and final time, passing right by two treasure chests each time. There's a Dimate right there! So neglected and sad, forever and ever! edit: When I first wrote this into the submission notes, my route through the GBA run actually picked up this Dimate, and I was going to comment how happy I was to pick it up after spending a month walking passed it over and over again. ...But then the route had to be completely re-done and the Dimate ended up neglected all over again. Sorry, little fella!
- We ride Wren beneath Aridia and awaken Laya, who put herself back into deep freeze after Nial chose to marry someone else at the end of his journey. She claims no hard feelings, though, promise! We take a bridge southwest to the frozen world, Frigidia.
- Here, we have two important stops. Nial would have walked to the town of Mystoke once he awoke Laya so that she can obtain Laya's Necklace, and Aron will have to do the same. At least he can fly there. With that relic, we can use the Laya's Temples to immediately teleport between all seven worlds without even having to traverse any bridge dungeons! This is the only way to the final world, Terminus, as all three land bridges are completely unopenable. In fact, they (and a few other land bridges that can never unlock) don't even have maps in ROM to traverse at all, although there are several enemy slots that are dummied out in the ROM that hint at those maps originally being intended at one point.
- However, we go to the other important stop in Frigidia first: The flying city of Skyhaven. The sages here can power up our sacred weapons once we learn the keyword, but we do not have that yet. What we can obtain first is the Aqua-Parts buried in Skyhaven's dungeon. This allows us to turn Wren into some kind of water-scooter!
- Now that we have both Laya's Necklace (working) and the Aqua-Parts, we head back to Landen, and use the Aqua-Parts to enter the Undersea Palace. Here, we take out Orakio's black sword, which was supposed to have sealed Dark Force away. We release him fully and he taunts us as he departs. Aron learns the destructive spell of Megido. This does not matter until the ending cinematics.
- Now, we travel to Aridia. You may have noticed someone who looks like Mieu travelling the deserts earlier. This is the great hero Miun, who has been waiting 1000 years for Orakio to return to her. When she see's the Black Sword, though, she believes he finally has come back to her! She dies.
- We take Miun's Claw and head to Aquatica. With our full array of Wren transformations, we can approach Sage's Island. In a cave, the Sages know the secret power word to strengthen the sacred weapons, but will only reveal it once we have collected all five. Kara had Lune's Slicer at the start of this Gen, Laya had Laya's Bow when we recruited her, and we just picked up Orakio's Sword and Miun's Claw. So where's Siren's Shot?
- It's over in the corner of that same cave. Siren has holed up with the Sages, and at this point in the story, he has finally come to his senses and repented for his prior sins. He dies. So we take all five weapons, learn the secret word, and now have to go all the way back to Skyhaven to get them upgraded before the final dungeon opens itself up to us.
- Now that we can use Laya's Temples to travel, it's actually faster to not go directly to Frigidia, since walking across the entire Aridia desert takes forever and requires multiple battles. Going from Aridia into Terminus and then Frigidia saves about eight and a half seconds.
- Once we speak to the second sage in Skyhaven, the Pron glitch activates. Read above to catch all the details, but mainly what happens is almost everyone is renamed, and Laya here becomes practically undamageable by physical attacks. We also can enter the final dungeon.
- With the Nei-weapons in our possession, the city of LaShute in Terminus drops its pretenses and the citizens now proudly talk about how they're ready to kill everyone and embrace the void. Yikes. The city also has random battles now--we win a couple of these to quickly obtain dozens of levels. This primarily is to increase Kara's ATK stat for the next bossfight.
- At the end of the city is Orakio's brother, Rulakir. His great scientific mind discovered immortality, and, with Dark Force's influence, it caused him to lose his mind. Instead of embracing life forever, he is happy to reveal that his plan is to kill everybody once and for all. In battle, Fanbi is cast on Kara so that her Slicer can kill all 6 fires in one turn--she then spends her other turns repeatedly Fanbi-ing the boys. Rulakir's Defend is the highest in the game, so we're back to focusing on Wren's gun to finish him off. Aron's sword also helps, despite not doing much damage, because equipping the Neisword before the fight is faster than unequipping his starter sword and then going into the menu after the battle to re-equip him.
- After Rulakir is slain, there's one more small dungeon under the city where Dark Force is hiding out in a treasure chest. He has three parts: Right hand which attacks, the Left hand which heals, and the Body which has a devastating full-party Tsu spell. The battle ends as soon as the Body dies, but it can't be attacked by Aron until the Left hand is killed.
So the first turn is Fanbis, plus Wren and Aron killing the Left hand in one turn. Now they can go to town on the body, and it has incredibly low DEF compared to other bosses, meaning Aron, after even just a couple Fanbis, can do a half-thousand damage per swing. Manipulating Dark Force to not use magic is rough--60% chance every turn per body part!--but we grind down his 8000HP before we run out of our own low-level quantity of HP, and that's game.
- Dark Force taunts the party one more time before going back to a 1000 year sleep, the hero destroys LaShute with a Megido spell, and Mieu saves the party with a Grantz spell she picked up back on Sage's Isle. Then the ending plays. For Aron, the Alisa-III is sucked into a black hole, and when they come out safely on the other side, they are approaching planet Earth, for a good future! For Nial's other son Adan, the ship is instead saved from the black hole, and then they also approach planet Earth, for a good future! For Ayn's son Crys, the ship is saved from eartquakes, and then they approach planet Earth, for a good future! And for Sean, the ship meets up with the Neo-Palm, and the sister ships promise to travel the stars together for mutual safety, presumably so they can eventually land on planet Earth, for a good future! ...All of which is weird, because according to the ending of Phantasy Star II 1000 years ago, planet Earth had already been destroyed, and the humans came to Palma in their own spaceship, and were the reason Palma exploded in the first place! This contradiction goes unexplained (can black holes cause time travel?) and PS III's Earth reveal was entirely corny anyway.
So now what
This run could probably be improved by someone with solid botting powers. I assumed I could do this run in like a week and I just repeatedly kept coming up with ideas that took way too long to implement. I'm glad I'm done with this and can move on to something else.
Except then I had to make a sister run, check it out here.
Samsara: I'm pretty sure the published run is the second TAS I ever watched. I feel it's fitting for me to judge its potential successor.
Samsara: Honestly, it's amazing how a single new glitch can both streamline and complicate the game so much. You'd think being able to instantly win every non-boss battle would make things way easier, but it was clear watching that it turned the EXP/Meseta routing into a careful dance of figuring out what's most profitable and manipulable. Weirdly, I feel like the endgame would be the worst part of that, since you could in theory instantly clear every battle on the way, but the little bits of extra time might pile up too much in comparison to the time that could potentially be saved on Rulakir and Dark Force with the extra levels. I think you did a great job with the balance on that. The few battles that actually needed to be fought throughout the run felt like they couldn't possibly go any faster, and that's saying something given how every other battle that was "fought" ended instantly.
Anyway, I guess it's time to break the adult games policy and accept Pron to TASVideos. Accepting as an improvement to the published run!
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