Rolf and his friends, tired of all the violence they’ve seen, decide to take a pacifist route to save the Algol system with zero bloodshed. This beats the previous movie by 15818 frames, or roughly over 4 minutes.
Glitches:
- Inventory Underflow:
By removing all of a character’s items, going to the central tower and withdrawing an item from their ‘empty’ inventory we can underflow it. You first must select a character that actually has something in their inventory then select the character with no items. By doing this it allows us to access the “items” that are below slot 16, which is the last slot of a normal inventory. What we access below that are various things corresponding to the characters in the party, including stat values, equipment, items and even their names. Exploiting this allows for us to get every item we need to beat the game. Whose stats/items you can access is determined by natural party order. For example, Rolf can access Nei, Nei can for Rudo and Rudo can access Amy. You can go to a maximum of 3 characters ahead of you in the natural party order before the inventory ends.
- Duping:
By selecting an item, then going to the second page and hitting B+C on the ‘next’ button, the game believes that it has selected the previously selected item. This is used to dupe a fire staff for Amy (アンヌ).
- Dupe Equipping:
The same principle as above, except used in the equip screen. The object selected to act as the replacement must not be currently equipped. This is used to give Nei an additional Ceramic Claw.
- Escape from Bosses:
There is an extremely low chance to escape from a boss fight. This is exploited to skip Dark Force and Mother Brain.
- Glitched Characters:
This requires a group of 4 to accomplish. If up is held while hitting C in the reorder menu, the game creates a variety of glitched characters who contain some important items for the run: the Glassgear, Neislicer and Neisword. The Neisword from the glitched character acts like it was in the spaceship Noah, allowing for a warp to the final dungeon of the game. This glitch is exclusive to the Japanese version.
- Broken Teim Cutscene:
Purely for entertainment value. By hitting A on the same frame you enter the bridge-pipe, you’re given some control over your character. This allows you to make the cutscene play out from a variety of places. This doesn’t lose any time.
Route Notes:
The difference between this submission and the currently published run is that there are no battles that need to be fought in order to manipulate the stats of characters to get the Nei items.
Rolf is named “アイカホ” because the values of these characters in the glitched inventory respond to the Ceramic Knife, Ceramic Claw, Laser Knife and Teim respectively, all of which are extremely important in this run.
The knife is taken to give to Amy for later use. Emptying out Rolf's inventory allows for the implementation of the inventory underflow. The quickest item to take to underflow the inventory is the Key Tube above the 2nd page's next button.
Before leaving Paseo we go to slot 24 in the glitched inventory and take out the ‘ホ’ which gives us Teim, allowing us to cross the bridge to Oputa. Additionally a Telepipe is bought.
Overworld is pretty standard fare, occasionally waiting a frame or two before moving in order to avoid encounters.
We need Rudo for our third character, so we go to Arima to get him. After this we head to Oputa to grab Amy.
We name Rudo “ケフ” to get the fire staff and Neishot from his name. After this we get our full party and get the glitched characters we want. It’s interesting to note that doing the glitch with all 4 characters actually crashes the game occasionally in Bizhawk, which never happened in Gens. Additionally, it saves time only using two slots to perform the glitch. We get the items we need from the glitched characters and get our normal party back in order to prevent the game freezing later.
Underflowing Rudo’s inventory is much faster than having Rolf go down to Amy’s stats in his glitched inventory, so we do that here. His boots are additionally given to Amy for later use.
After grabbing the items from Rolf and Rudo’s names we can begin manipulating Nei and Amy’s attack stat (inventory slot 54) to get important items. By (dupe) equipping the Ceramic Claws Nei’s attack value now equals the value for the Neiarmor. Similarly, a single firestaff on Amy will give us the Neimet. After this, Amy is equipped with a Knife and Laser Knife, which gives her the Neicrown.
The next step is to get the rest of the items from Amy’s defense stat (inventory slot 56). Some equipment setups require two fire staves. Unfortunately trying to dupe equip these essentially softlocks the game, so that’s the reason we had duped one earlier. The setups are as follows:
Neicrown + 2x Fire Staff + Carbonsuit + Boots = Nei Emel
Glass Gear + 2x Fire Staff + Boots = Neishield
Neicrown + Ceramic Knife + Fire Staff + Carbonsuit + Boots = Storm Gear (essentially a junk item, but I never found a faster set up that got all the items)
Boots Only = Neicape
These items combined with the Neishot from Rudo, and the Neislicer from the glitched character gives us everything we need to complete the game. The Neisword sends Rolf and company to the end of the game where they heroically run away from the bosses, somehow saving the Algol system from the evil Earthmen.
ars4326: Hi, Jiseed. Very nice improvement made here! Watching through, it was interesting to see how an improved understanding of the item underflow glitch saved so much time (and the fact that it cut out the need to grind, entirely). The 'broken Teim' cutscene gave some added amusement to things, as well. Overall, impressive job here, and congrats on your first published run!
