Ryu, a member of the White Dragon clan, is on a mission to stop the Black Dragon clan. He must collect the 8 goddess keys before they do, in order to avoid the end of the world

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: SNES9x 1.51v6
  • Aim for the best ending
  • Aim for the quickest completion
  • Take damage to save time
  • Use death as a shortcut
  • Some entertainment trade-offs
  • Manipulation of luck

Comments

This submission is my 4th. I never thought I would actually complete it! That's because, chronologically, I played BOF 2 BEFORE BOF 1, and since the former caught more of my attention, the latter seemed rather pale... But BOF 1 is indeed the prequel to BOF 2 (the Goddess will leave seeds of evil that will grow up to be Deathevn in BOF 2).
Here are general tricks to save frames
  • Random battles are totally avoidable, except in Mogu's conscience (for some reason)
  • Having people die is a big plus, especially before Nina gets Renew. This way, she gets it more quickly.
  • Dead people can cast magic outside of battle. So when Nina gets renew, she can play dead.
  • I try to minimize the use of the status window. Therefore, I plan ahead and to every change (equipment, spells, change of rows) at once.
  • Death warps are a time saver.
  • Towards the very end, Agni is a time saver. Goda and Jade have such high defense that Rudra and Puka can't do enough damage to compensate 999 damage each turn.
  • Similarly, with Agni on AB, I can program the bosses so they only attack. Jade hasn't cast any magic, and the Goddess can keep attacking for up to 8 rounds
  • Karn, in his transformed status (Puka, Shin), becomes a killing machine. It's a little detour getting the spells, but it's worth it.
  • It's fairly easy to have bosses (not) dropping items. It depends on the course of action during the battle.
  • Very low HP characters seem much stronger. And if it's combined with attack-up, it's even better
  • No need for most chests. I either buy everything in a store or maniuplate battles so I won't need to heal
And now, for the battles...
  • Frog : I needed it to drop a fire stone. That's why I wait for so long in the last round.
  • Knight : With a lot of luck, I was able to save a fire stone AND get another one.
I bought my marble 3s (for mogu's dream) in here plus any herbs I needed for the whole game)
  • Morte/Mortea : Using that extra fire stone came handy. After Mortea, only one of the soldiers was still alive, this way, the 2ns wizard fight was quicker.
  • Wizard : I only needed him to cast thunder, the weakest spell.
  • Dark D Fort soldiers : the little detour to get a boomerang was worth it. They all die at the same time
  • General : Down in 3 rounds. PLus he kills bow, making the death warp quicker
In Romero, I bought all the acorn I need
  • Wisp : Not an easy fight, especially because of his multiple hitting attack.
  • General and lancers : the boomerang always comes in handy.
  • Gremlin : a long and tedious fight. In his second phase, he only casts his multiple target spell. In order for it to be weaker, I needed to kill him before destroyed 87,5% of his health. Otherwise, he would have been about 35% stronger.
  • Talon : My protnB got useful. But it's still difficult to fight alone.
In Auria, I purposely sold all my Cures and other expensive items so I could avoid the faery sidequest. This way I could buy the gold bar quicker
  • In Bleak, there is a nice cameo by Chun Li from Street Fighter
  • The Sandworm is easy, and so is letting Bo die
  • However, I did need him against Spyeye, so I resurected him for a round
  • Cloud : Since I ran out of life 1, I needed him to cast single target spells
  • Knight and archer : my dragon powers come handy sometimes
  • Secret base : watch out for the boomerang!
  • Squid : water-based fiends and weak against lightning
  • Dark D Ship : again, the boomerang is useful against stacks of enemies
  • Octo : another water-based enemy
  • MOrteo : an undead enemy. Need I say more? I had Kain die here
  • Toad : he needs to aim at Ox as often as possible. This way he dies...
... and the Death warp inside Krypt is instant.
  • Grimfowl : a fire-based enemy.
  • SLimeX : the toughest battle of them all. I wanted Nina to survive so she could get renew earlier. But the bastards wouldn't let the Hero do critical damage against them...
  • Myst : I have to calculate the number of damage so he doesn't use Cure 3
  • Pincer : another water-based enemy
Right after Gobi can transform into the big fish, he can buy (in a flea market) Karn's most powerful dagger, the DarkDR. And since I use luck manipulation, I get it quite quickly
  • K Roahc : they have very low defense. And with counterattacks, they are taken care of quickly
  • RugaX : I took advantage of the low HP strategy here...
  • G Fly : ... here...
  • FLowerX : and here. thankfully, it's too busy poisoning. Also, I've never been able to hit it critically on its second wind...
  • Horntoad : contrary to what FAQS say, Horntoad doesn't always use its body slam on its second wind
  • Dream World : The geyser field has unexpected shortcuts throughout. They all look the same
  • Mothro : when he is complete, he can easily be taken care of.
  • MOte : a tricky fight. If he is hit more than 15 times, his defense rises to 320. I was able to kill him before that. PLus, a low HP Ryu was helpful
  • Cerl : Puka does the trick with his rolling attack (that uses less frames than the regular one)
  • Dragon powers : Bain is easy on AB. Avian is a pain because I couldn't lose time healing.
  • Zog : Rudra and Puka were on fire for this fight! Despite Jade's wishes, I didn't use Dragon HEart...
  • Sara : it lowers white dragon's HP to one, and that includes Sara.
  • GOda and Jade : Agni does the trick. The use is optimal; their high defense prohibits the Puka/Rudra strategy
  • GOddess :The longest sequence I got without her using her spell is 8 rounds.
Possible improvement : pray for better luck in the battles, try buying more life 1, try the money glitch on the GBA in the future Screenshot suggestion : 263 164, the Chun Li cameo

FractalFusion: I'll be judging this one.
mmarks: Added DailyMotion module
FractalFusion: Accepting for publication. It's a RPG TAS that does what RPG TASes should do. That is, a whole lot of planning and luck manipulation.
GabCM: A new baby will be born...


TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #2930: janus's SNES Breath of Fire "best ending" in 4:14:52.20
GabCM
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Will encode this in SD. And in HD, but there is low chances that it would be uploaded on YouTube, due to the time, so be surprised if it appears in HD on YouTube.
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Mister Epic wrote:
Will encode this in SD. And in HD, but there is low chances that it would be uploaded on YouTube, due to the time, so be surprised if it appears in HD on YouTube.
Well I guess I had a little break for now
[18:51] <scrimpy> Oh, nothing [18:51] <mmarks> oh [18:51] <Nach> I think scrimpy is just jealous of you mmarks
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Will definitely get around to watching this later, probably on the weekend. I actually played this one (the GBA version, that is) all the way through, since I've had BoF III and IV on my "want to play" list for a while (and playing games on my DS is easier for me since it's mobile). I hope watching this movie is interesting, since the dialog and story are fairly minimal (though I still enjoyed playing it).
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Mister Epic wrote:
Will encode this in SD. And in HD, but there is low chances that it would be uploaded on YouTube, due to the time, so be surprised if it appears in HD on YouTube.
Just split it into 20 gigabyte parts. :3
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Whew, marathon is over. I've never played this RPG before, after watching this movie, I wish I had, that's what I look for in a long RPG TAS, I'm tired after watching it, but that's because of the length of the movie, the run itself was very enjoyable and worth these four hours. I have a few points: 1) Most of the time you did alternate A-B mashing to pass through text, which is the best way, but there were others you went with A-A-A and B-B-B, this has 50% chance of losing a frame, did you check both parities (one with presses only in even frames, other in odd frames) each time you did this? 2) There were a few situations where you could have walked to a box/ talked to a person facing them and instead you took the same number of steps, but ended up having to turn to the box in the last step, this loses one frame, judging by what I tested (one of the times this happened is around frame 46500). 3) You took some extra steps to manipulate encounters and waited more frames than I expected for some manipulations, but I really don't know how the RNG in this game works, so it may as well be impossible to improve these. Overall, the luck manipulation was good and, because of the long time it took to make this, route planning must be good too. None of these points are sufficient to doubt the quality of this run, the first two are actually so small that can actually provide no reduction of time, given the amount of luck manipulation here. Yes vote.
GabCM
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The screenshot, as suggested by janus.
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Most of the time you did alternate A-B mashing to pass through text, which is the best way, but there were others you went with A-A-A and B-B-B, this has 50% chance of losing a frame, did you check both parities (one with presses only in even frames, other in odd frames) each time you did this
actually, when I did look more closely, only A seems to be working.
You took some extra steps to manipulate encounters and waited more frames than I expected for some manipulations, but I really don't know how the RNG in this game works, so it may as well be impossible to improve these
it's actually quite easy to see it. The damage done by monsters is cyclical. However, the rate of drop depends, as I said, on the course of action. It could probably be improved against the first boss...
There were a few situations where you could have walked to a box/ talked to a person facing them and instead you took the same number of steps
If i understand correctly, I think I corrected it in Scande to fix the elevator. do you have other examples of that?
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Congratulations on finishing another classic RPG! It's long but seems very well planned to me.
Wren
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Fantastic run. The level of planning is delightful to see. Yes vote.
<i>A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day.</i>
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Tagging for later. I'm looking forward to watching this.
Working on a mod of an old favorite in my spare time. PM for updates!
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janus wrote:
There were a few situations where you could have walked to a box/ talked to a person facing them and instead you took the same number of steps
If i understand correctly, I think I corrected it in Scande to fix the elevator. do you have other examples of that?
Sure, I've seen it around frame 127000 when you turn to talk to a guard. Another similar situation near 129500. When you take a chest at 249000 and when you talk to someone near a bed at 563500.
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I'm roughly 60% through the video right now and I realized something that I should have realized much earlier. Why haven't you gotten the Dragon Sword yet? You can get that I believe before you get Bo. If not sometime after. Definitely before you gain your 4th player. EDIT: I couldn't remember where the sword was exactly at the time I said this, but now I know you definitely need Bo to get it. Maybe Ill create a video to show you how to get it early on. I believe you can get the Slab early as well.
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getting the dragon gear early on was 50k frames longer. plus, the dreagon sword is awfully heavy.
GabCM
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Yeah! I actually MADE IT the day after I claimed the encode. You'll get a downloadable encode later, since I also have Super Mario 64 to deal with. EDIT: Stupid Dailymotion destroyed my encode. You'll deal with an Archive stream in a Flowplayer module. If an HD encode is too big for my time and/or for YouTube, a 2x encode will be for YouTube instead.
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janus wrote:
getting the dragon gear early on was 50k frames longer. plus, the dreagon sword is awfully heavy.
I did start to realize that there would be a fairly large time difference when you look at the big picture. Besides, the DarkDR or whatever is stronger than the DragonSD and eventually, the EmporSD is stronger and lighter than them all. I remembered something else earlier that could be done but it's now slipped my mind. Maybe Ill remember later.
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Mister Epic wrote:
If an HD encode is too big for my time and/or for YouTube, a 2x encode will be for YouTube instead.
So, you're going to make the image smaller than 1080p or you mean something else, because I do not understand
[18:51] <scrimpy> Oh, nothing [18:51] <mmarks> oh [18:51] <Nach> I think scrimpy is just jealous of you mmarks
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He's probably talking about a video that's twice the size of the SNES's resolution. Due to the way video is compressed, double resolution will make it possible for the resulting video (that is downloaded, not streamed) to look almost exactly like the original video output. SD encodes, which are at the same resolution as the SNES, have bleeding pixels due to chroma subsampling. However, video cards normally perform bilinear smoothing when resizing videos, which means a double resolution encode will look fairly blurry when playing it in full screen on a high resolution monitor. Bilinear smoothing works well on films and drawn animation, but 2D games look best in their original pixelated form or when resized with a pixel art scaling algorithm (like hq2x, which is normally not available when playing back video). Additionally, YouTube does not stream videos in their original resolution (unless the uploaded video's resolution is beyond HD), so the downsize from double resolution to 480p will suffer visibly from resize smoothing (plus some issues with chroma subsampling). tl;dr: the first sentence in this post is the answer to the question above.
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GabCM
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Archive collection's page Download from Archive (MP4, 256x224, 515.9 MB) Stream from Archive (MP4, 300x224, 675.3 MB)
mklip2001
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Ok, finally done. That was really long, but it was also good. I had a harder time following this than BOF2, for some reason... I certainly don't have any real idea what's going on with the time distortion segment of the game. The "mad" gimmick, with bosses having more health after their main health bar goes, also made this difficult to follow. However, it's clear that the fighting is manipulated really well. Apart from very repetitive-looking fights in the end and some other places, this looked quite impressive. Yes vote. What in the world was Chun Li actually doing in the game, anyway?
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
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Probably just a reminder like 'Hi, we're Capcom, we made this game, and that Street Fighter game, buy them both!' Capcom loves throwing cameos in their games, whether in the same series or not (Megaman X getting Hadouken and Shoryuken for example). Voted yes, the battles are really well done.
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Mister Epic wrote:
Archive collection's page Download from Archive (MP4, 256x224, 515.9 MB) Stream from Archive (MP4, 300x224, 675.3 MB)
Hmm, perhaps it's just on my end, but the second link stopped playing around 3:50:00. No such issue with the third link, however. Anyway, nice TAS! Been following this one for quite a while, so it's nice to see it finally finished. Voting yes.
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Korzic wrote:
Hmm, perhaps it's just on my end, but the second link stopped playing around 3:50:00. No such issue with the third link, however.
The second link is made to download and save the file, not to stream it (the third link is made for that)! :P
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That's what I did, downloaded and saved the file (both of them, actually). Only the second link had that problem.
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I'll take the time to judge this, this weekend, if no one else claims it.
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