Strategies for this might also apply partially to VJ2. I'm considering this as a first TAS (though I don't have too much time for it and it would take a while) and am wondering what other people think about strategy/etc. It's been a while since I've played this, so I have to learn almost everything again. Any links to anything besides the speedrun and gamefaqs would be appreciated.
. Later on I'll put up a test .dtm just to make sure it syncs for other people.
It's been awhile since I played, but isn't Captain Blue basically awesome except that he can't see the warnings from incoming attacks? I'd guess that for character variations, the two most interesting would be Joe and Alastor, since they play most differently.
And the most powerful attack is the slow, zoomed-in punch, isn't it?
As far as TASing is concerned, you'll be in fast-forward a lot of the time, won't you? That should be...interesting.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Most powerful attack being very situational in this game. If I get a nicely timed, slowed Voomerang can really hurt. That mid-air spiral-dive kick, slowed, zoomed, catches on fire and does all kinds of fun against certain enemies. Of course the good-old punch, after a dodge will net you the most Viewtifuls, do a lot of damage, AND initiate the little combo thing. The catch is that to keep that combo you gotta stay in slow-mo. Even while using mach while slow is pretty slow (yes, you do gain some movement speed if you slow, then mach).
I have always wondered if it is at all possible to get all Rainbow Vs from a fresh game.
I am just a silhouette, a silhouette of a memory of a solitary night .. nothing more.
In terms of sheer damage, it seems like the slow-zoomed punch (called slow zoom red hot one hundred), i think, is the most powerful. The voomerang, however, seems to have some deal where if it hits a single target multiple times it does more damage. I'd like to see if I can experiment with some memory-watching sometime and see if I can't nail down enemy HP and attack damage values.
I'm still getting used to dolphin and tas-ing in general, and have about no free time, so that .dtm is going to be coming in the vaguely near future.
A TAS involving captain blue could be really interesting because I think he's the character most likely to lead to sequence-skipping, but I'm personally starting with Joe on Adult.
With a fresh character, which upgrades/items are necessary? Red hot kick seems like a time saver, the upgrade that decreases vfx drain seems obvious. Can any necessary bombs/voomerangs be manipulated? I forget if enemies drop them or only some boxes.
edit: with a tas, it'd seem likely to me that rainbow v's are possible with a fresh character. the fastest path may even mean rainbow v's, but I doubt that.
I'm most looking forward to seeing how frame-perfect timing interacts with the vfx powers. If we're lucky, the system allows for lots of wacky hijinks.
I don't think that the fastest time will always = Rainbow V. You can do things (ie move to the next target) faster if you tap slow, smash your target a good one, and then move on.
Oh, a little thing I found: you don't have to wait for the little skull that indicates which direction to dodge when an enemy goes to attack. If you dodge correctly they will swing and miss, so you can actually force them to attack much sooner than standing there for 4 seconds and wiating.
I am just a silhouette, a silhouette of a memory of a solitary night .. nothing more.
The game also only dizzies if you do the "right" dodge (i.e. low if they go high, high if they go low) regardless of what position you have with respect to your opponent. So for example, if you're standing above them on a slope and they go to punch, then you have to dodge high to avoid the punch but can only go low to dizzy. I think there's also situations in which you can't get hit no matter what dodge you do, but doing the right dodge dizzies them.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Yes. However da rules say:
Cheat is interchangeable with save here. So it is generally accepted that you start from a save to unlock the hardest difficulty. If it doesn't give you other advantages.
I think Ultra-V adds more than just more hitpoints to the enemies, if I remember correctly, right?
And since VJ is hard on easy, it would just be so much fun to see an Ultra-V TAS.
It's been a long since I'd played this game. From what I remember, using a higher difficulty changes the type of enemies, the higher the difficulty, the tougher the enemies will be early on.
When playing in Ultra-V you no longer can see the skulls that points where to evade (also happens when playing as Captain Blue). There are obviously more tougher enemies & bosses have way more HP than before.
The fastest character is Captain Blue (when flying), though you have to unlock him (but you would also have to unlock Ultra-V). I don't remember if he was the strongest too, but he was stronger than Joe or Silvia.
BTW, these are some pages with some videos that might be helpful:
http://www.vortiginous.com/joakley/http://zemickey.free.fr/games/viewtifuljoe/index.html
regarding difficulty:
So there are changes but enemies also have more health and you deal less damage. So that could get boring. So hard to tell what would be better.
Yeah I guess it should be a normal Joe run form a clean file.
Ultra-V doesn't seem interesting enough on it's own to warrent starting from a save.
However if somebody wants to run any of the other characters I think Ultra-V should be used.
Ofcourse then the question becomes if wit upgrades or without...
If I ever have the time, I want to do the normal run, but then I'd want to make a save and do a rainbow ultra-v run. i don't know if uprgrades or not.
speaking of which, i never plan to abandon this, it'll just go really really slow. like i said, too much real life. i'll post here again when i got something.
Pretty decent; I wonder, how would a max-difficulty run compare entertainment-wise? VFX would be in more limited supply (IIRC the easy difficulty has you with a built-in VFX Turbo Charge in addition to the one you can buy), enemies would have more health, and the player starts with less health; any other changes? Does that just make fights more tedious or does it cause a qualitative shift in how the game plays?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Taken from the GameFAQs' sticky topic
So I would say that unless you played this game, playing on Ultra-V and aiming for speed wouldn't be much appealing, but a rainbow V play-around might prove things different IMO.