VBA re-recording v19 used. Desyncs on v20 so v19 must be used. Started the movie on v19 and didn't think about it til I was almost done, heh. Not sure if it'll work with earlier versions.
- Record from Power on
- Game Boy Color
- No BIOS
- I Don't use any warps or passwords. I do however heavily abuse the path of the levels in the game to make them shorter.
- There were no programming errors in the game from what I saw, however a lot of programming quirks that make this game very fun to TAS, explained below.
- Take hits and death to save time, mostly later in the game.
- My goal was to finish the game as fast as possible while being as entertaining as possible.
Noteable programming quirks:
-Critical hits ignore target monster defense entirely and damage taken is equal to your monster's attack power +/- 1% or so. Makes for very entertaining under-level wins, sometimes taking 145x normal attacks.
-In battle, luck is effected by every button input on every frame until the number is final(even start and select). Downside: It was IMPOSSIBLE to go through every possiblity and combo. I tried to get the fastest possible but there were some short waits.
-It is possible to appear very close to the warp hole when entering a new maze. The final gate would normally take over an hour to complete, and possibly even over more than one sitting.
Dragon Warrior Monsters (Also known as Dragon Quest Monsters in Japan) is an RPG game similar to pokemon. The main character, Terry, has his sister kidnapped and he must go to a magical world where monsters exist to save her by winning the Starry Night Tournament. In the game you battle your monsters and level them up, then make them even stronger by breeding them. The game has monsters and scenarios from every dragon warrior before it so it's a very nestalgic game to play as well.
I made the run of this game mostly because I wanted to destroy it. This game is so hard to beat, yet so very linier like the original Dragon Warrior. The run is 138192 frames or 38m 23s long. To give just a little bit of an idea, 40 minutes would maybe get you past the first gate. That is if you've played the game before and know what you are doing. This game requires many hours of leveling up and breeding, which I never even got to.
General Manipulation stuff: I tried my best. If the 73K re-records I have in this game doesn't prove it, I don't know what will. I watch the game myself and wonder if it could be done faster. If you think you can beat me, please do it! If someone can beat this time, I want them to do it, then show it to me so I can watch it. This game takes weeks, possibly even months to complete normally. This game needed to be destroyed.
Start:
Very linier. I had to grab Slib and head back to the king, he's mad that his Healer has escaped and I "volunteer" to go get it.
First gate: Nothing exciting. Manipulate the warp holes best I could.
Battle with Hale: Nothing special here. I thought it would be entertaining to be left with 1 HP, little bit of suspense I guess.
G class Battles: Probably the most fair battles in the game. My monsters were even able to defeat one of the Slimes without a critical hit. Required after getting Hale to open the gates for Dran and Golm.
Second Gate: I have to collect 100 gold so I can compete in D class to move on in the game. This takes a little time, but I think that's about best I could do.
Battle with Dran: Again, nothing special. He uses all normal attacks so no problem avoiding everything he tosses at me. The battle is somewhat longer because I'm really not suppose to just go right to him.
Third Gate: Pick up the rest of my 100 Gold and continue right to Golm.
Battle with Golm: Battle went faster due to having Dran. I did not have to go to this battle, but decided that it would save the time back to gather him up. With Golm on my team I was taking about 100HP from enemies a turn instead of only 60HP or so if I had just stuck with the two slimes.
D class battles: If one was playing this game instead of just watching, they'd realize just how lucky this is. Those monsters look harmless but they would have killed me off in the first battle within the first few turns. I defeat this class which is required to continue in the game.
Fourth gate: This gate is required, the king tells you that there are monsters flooding the area and that you must stop them. This gate was a pain in the butt. I had to gather high items to take with me and cash them in for the 10000 gold required to compete in S class. At first I thought it was going to be easy but soon realized that the programmers did actually think about this a little. No matter what I did, the item was about as far away from the warp hole as you can get, and there is alway at least one enemy in the way. Random battles cannot be avoided. One of the few things in the game that can't be effected once the number has been decided. Either it was taking what I got, or not getting it. I worked for hours and hours trying to get better and couldn't. I cashed in my items and fought wrex.
Battle with Wrex: This battle was kind of long. In fact it is the only battle in the game where I go through one entire loop of the battle music. I couldn't avoid this. It certainly made me happy that I decided to grab both Dran and Golm. If there was any time to be saved from that decision it would have all been down to this battle I think. I've skipped pretty far ahead in the game at this point. I had to kill off Hale because if I hadn't then Wrex was going to continue to cast BlazeAir which kills off all of my monsters in only a few hits. By killing off Hale it gave the chance for Wrex to just attack, which was very low mind you. It took some manipulation just to get that regular attack from her.
S class battles: This looks rather uneventful, but there were a few times I was worried about having to do stuff over. Here is when monsters started having 95% chances of using unavoidable attacks. Here is when I started getting excessively frustrated with Golm. His critical hits were so rare it took me over an hour sometimes just to get one. Ugh. My monsters are so underleveled that they seem to forget how to battle. Or maybe they get scared, I don't know. Since I can't order them to attack they just miss apparently. This has a 100% chance of happening. I never got it to change. Trust me I tried. THe final battle I tried to make epic by letting my part almost lose. Dran and Golm are so weak that at this point I was not losing much time to kill them off. I had tried leaving Wrex with 1HP but manipulation of that last critical hit required otherwise. (Mettables are so hard to critical!!)
Last gate: Required gate. After defeating S class the king requires you to do a bit of personal reflection in this gate. Not sure how that would work, but that's part of the game. Here I gather two mimics. At first I was just going to go ahead with the monsters I had, but decided it would save me a lot more time to gather two more powerful monsters. This game is a little weird about monster taming. If you've never had a monster it is a lot easier to befriend it than if you've already had it. Healing the first Mimic worked fine, but after that the mere 15 "taming points" this gave me left me with a possible zero chance of befriending(never got it to happen). I had to continue on and manipulate a room with mimics and a rib. Even with a rib it took a lot of manipulation to get the second mimic. After this I go to the Durran battle.
Durran and co. battle: The servants were the hardest! One of the servants ALWAYS cast a spell, 100%. I never got it to go any other way. However the other servant has a small tiny chance of just attacking. Terry? monster was easy, using all normal attacks it was a matter of those critical hits. Durran was also easy, if not time consuming. I took 550 HP a turn and it still took 6 turns I do believe. Youch.
Starry Night Tournament: I should note that I am SEVERELY underleveled for this tournament. To give you an idea, every battle the monsters could wipe me out in one to two turns if I was lucky. In fact on the final battle with Milayou I thought I was going to have to come up with another strategy...while the other battles I could manipulate low level spells and normal attacks, when I first entered the final battle all I could get for an hour was magic attacks. Metal King has a 100% chance of using Zap. No manipulating ever changed that. Coatal has the highest chance of just attacking (which was still very low), otherwise uses Explodet and RainHawk uses Mega Magic about 95% of the time. I felt so lucky the first time I got Rainhawk to just attack. Mega Magic kills off two of my three monsters after just once.
The ending: Long and boring waiting and text. Just fast forward through that if you want, haha.
Special thanks: Silas. Man I don't know how you were able to find those memory addresses, but they were very useful many times. Especially because VBA has this nasty habit of changing what memory area it uses every time a game starts...Couldn't use my memory watch program.
adelikat: Excellent luck manipulation. This will be a good addition to the RPG's on this site. I am accepting it for publication and encoding.
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