Submission #9512: eien86's DOS Sword of the Samurai in 11:36.84

Yet another of those forgotten DOS gems. This time you are a lowly samurai with his own small fiefdom within one of the many provinces of Japan. Through honor, warfare, friendship, plotting, deceit, treason, and assasination, you stand out among your peers and climb the ladder of power to become the local chief, a Hatamoto. Once again among the ranks of competing lords, you find your way to crush their ambitions of power and become a provincial lord -- a Daimyo. As Daimyo you fight others on the field of battle or through subjugation to become the lord of the entire Japan: the Shogun!

I used to play this game time and time again, just to discover every single hidden event and adventure in the most unlikely ways. You can play this game in so many ways, it's guaranteed fun for many hours. I hope the clunky graphics and sound doesn't prevent anybody from giving it a go.

I wanted to TAS this game for the longest time but wasn't sure how to approach it. In the end, I figured the fastest way to ascend the ranks was through quickly gain warriors (improving my rank among my peers). This served pretty well to get to first rank as samurai and quickly assasinate my lord to become Hatamoto. As Hatamoto I repeated this process but had to insult my biggest competitor so that he challenges me to a duel. After the duel, his heir turns out worse than him so I gain first place. Then I just assasinate the Daimyo to become it myself

As Daimyo I just invade others willy nilly, trying to subjugate as many of them (avoiding battles) and fighting duels to gain honor. Once I got enough momentum (warrior count), I just piledrived all the others to declare myself shogun at the first chance I had. The last input is the beginning of the last battle. My warriors win the battle on their own.

I made this movie to explain the mechanics of the game first, and then I go on explaining the TAS a bit more. I hope it serves to clarify the decisions made therein.

None. This is a manual TAS.

There is this table I created a while ago for the Cheat Engine community.

https://fearlessrevolution.com/viewtopic.php?t=11467

Please use this movie for publication; it contains extra inputs to show the full credits

DrD2k9: Claiming for judging.

DrD2k9: Nice work on an obviously very complex game. My only other comment is on submission notes: For runs made in jpc-rr, please include in your submission notes exactly what settings (floppy/harddrive, standard geometry, etc) you used when importing the game so that others can make sure that their imported image will be accurate for your movie file. In this particular case, the imported image is creaeted from a disk image instead of a folder of files which is also an option. In the later case, you would also need to list all the files with the appropriate hashes (these can be found in the .jrsr file) that are part of the folder used so that others can confirm they have the same versions of games/files.

I'd also be interested to see how long a "max score" branch would take.

Accepting.

despoa: Processing...