• Aim at the fastest completion
  • Aim at the best ending
  • Use death as a shortcut
  • Take damage to save time
  • Use manipulation of luck
  • Some entertainment trade-offs
In this epic RPG, you have to fight an evil religion that tries to take over the world. Normally, this quest would require hours upon hours before you could hope to conquer evil and its many spawns. Put thanks to luck manipulation, this quest can be completed under five hours.
This submission is my very first one. Boy was that hard! It took me over a year to complete it. Mainly because is always found ways to make the movie shorter. Here are just a couple I found over time
  • Using the turbo function for text makes it scroll faster without bothering to find when to press a key
  • Fighting enemies can be reduce to a certain level. Entering/exiting a room resets the count (like inside Mount Maori)
  • Although dragons do elemental damage when appropriate (ice on fire, e.g.), I only used it on the guard eyes. Otherwise, I used the thunder dragon, the one with the shortest animation (about 540 frames)
  • During frame lagging, moving/opening the status menu can save some time
  • Calculate exactly what the shortest way to complete a fight is. If it's by keeping characters alive, I do it. Otherwise, they die.
  • Inside the Tunlan Queen's body - the most annoying part -, you don't actually have to fight. Fights can be manipulated so that you only confront enemies that flee. For my part, fights had to be made because scary monsters didn't come...
  • When there is a message during a battle (like when Katt is taunting), pressing A after the 46 (?) frames delay of after can change the outcome (critical, how much damage, counter)
  • Predict which character goes where in the marching order. This way, I avoid moving the team around (uses 70 frames)
  • Minimize trips to the dragon shrine
An entertainment trade-off I took was finding Bleu, the best magician from BOF I. Her high level is more than sufficient to help my crew (with warp, mainly), which doesn't level up.
Another was showing all dragon powers and other magic spells (hence using bomb against Deatheavn)
Inside the Sky Cave, I though I found a glitch (look at my progress in the appropriate thread). However, its happening looks sporadic...
And just so you know : the last battle frame is 1031901. The rest is just showing the best ending

Baxter: This longest TAS to date had a good viewer response. Accepting for publication.
Claimed for encoding by DeHackEd


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before I forget : many thanks to everyone who helped me, especially atma, since he did a test run (but never completed it). Mastania, for suggesting a better strategy against barubary.
Joined: 11/6/2007
Posts: 2
mklip2001 wrote:
(I couldn't figure out what the point of the colored crystal was during dialogue though... does that reflect whether you're good or evil?)
It's supposed to reflect the other persons attitude.
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Build a man a fire, warm him for a day, Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
fsvgm777
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Even though this run was really long, I still enjoyed watching it. The battles impressed me.
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Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
OmnipotentEntity wrote:
http://engelsish.org/avi/breathoffire2-tas-janus.mkv (574MB)
You know, as tempting as it is to upload a 15 part edition of this run to DailyMotion... I think I'll wait until it is published. =|
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OmnipotentEntity wrote:
http://engelsish.org/avi/breathoffire2-tas-janus.mkv (574MB)
does this mean I can publish it on youtube?
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janus wrote:
OmnipotentEntity wrote:
http://engelsish.org/avi/breathoffire2-tas-janus.mkv (574MB)
does this mean I can publish it on youtube?
If you want to chop it up, sure.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day, Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
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janus wrote:
OmnipotentEntity wrote:
http://engelsish.org/avi/breathoffire2-tas-janus.mkv (574MB)
does this mean I can publish it on youtube?
Enjoy your 28ish part video series.
splitMKV.bat wrote:
start mkvmerge.exe --split 00:10:00 -o %1.mkv %1
This'll get you started.Thanks to adelikat for the original help.
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5 hours long, haha. Another test of endurance to see if this can be watched all the way through. I already got through the first hour and became highly entertained thus far! Voting Yes! ^_^
Joined: 10/7/2008
Posts: 12
Loved the run, but I had to watch it over a few days. The plot was virtually absent for the first two hours of the movie, after that, the game got much more entertaining. Can't say much about the battles, but the dragons were cool. I appreciate the work you've put in, I always wanted to see this game after reading about it in Nintendo Power years ago.
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Flygon wrote:
janus wrote:
OmnipotentEntity wrote:
http://engelsish.org/avi/breathoffire2-tas-janus.mkv (574MB)
does this mean I can publish it on youtube?
Enjoy your 28ish part video series.
splitMKV.bat wrote:
start mkvmerge.exe --split 00:10:00 -o %1.mkv %1
This'll get you started.Thanks to adelikat for the original help.
I could publish it on Google, but it doesn't accept mkv. And since all converters only make 3 min clips...
Joined: 2/1/2008
Posts: 347
I uploaded MKVs to YouTube recently. They were DivX 7 HD Plus MKVs (I didn't want to keep the original fat MTS copies, so I ran them through DivX Converter to cut the size down by half), but that shouldn't be any different than other MKVs unless you used a weird codec to make the video stream.
<ccfreak2k> There is no 'ctrl' button on DeHackEd's computer. DeHackEd is always in control.
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Okay, I did watch the MKV. I didn't reach the end until last night. If this gets published, this will be one of the longest TAS's of all time, not to mention Chrono Trigger and Lufia II.
fsvgm777
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Location: Luxembourg
p0rtal_0f_rain wrote:
Okay, I did watch the MKV. I didn't reach the end until last night. If this gets published, this will be one of the longest TAS's of all time, not to mention Chrono Trigger and Lufia II.
According to the Movie Statistics (not to confound with the stats of this movie, I mean the general movie statistics), the longest run is FFVI for the SNES with a time of 4:05:52.87 (not including credits). So if this movie gets published, this will be the longest run at TASVideos and the AVI will exceed 5 hours, as the credits go for more than 10 minutes.
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fsvgm777 wrote:
p0rtal_0f_rain wrote:
Okay, I did watch the MKV. I didn't reach the end until last night. If this gets published, this will be one of the longest TAS's of all time, not to mention Chrono Trigger and Lufia II.
According to the Movie Statistics (not to confound with the stats of this movie, I mean the general movie statistics), the longest run is FFVI for the SNES with a time of 4:05:52.87 (not including credits). So if this movie gets published, this will be the longest run at TASVideos and the AVI will exceed 5 hours, as the credits go for more than 10 minutes.
The MKV is 5:05:02 and it's actually about 50 MB less than the FF6 encode. :D
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day, Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
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I was able to convert it on a Mac. I will publish on Youtube soon
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOk3mQ79j8o the sound is desynch, but you can watch it
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Whats with the sound? It is all choppy.
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Build a man a fire, warm him for a day, Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
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That is better. Thanks!
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFRUKvEP6pE&feature=PlayList&p=E4C423E09A56A217&index=0&playnext=1 Full run, minus some segments that came out a bit too long when I split them. I'm going to have to redo those, but for now, enjoy.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day, Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
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thanks... how did you do it?
Joined: 4/29/2005
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I wish I could watch this TAS, but for some reason, the emulator keeps crashing.
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Have you tried the mkv and the youtube videos that I posted?
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day, Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
Joined: 4/29/2005
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I didn't notice there was an mkv file until you said something, so I went and looked for it. Downloading it right now. I do have a question, though. Does the sound desynch?