(Link to video)

Game objectives: Beat Dark Falz and become Queen of Algol

  • Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.3.2
  • Aims for fastest possible completion
  • Manipulates luck
The Phantasy Star series has enormous nostalgia value for me, and I wanted to try something a little heftier for my 2nd TAS, so here we are. I watched the previous TAS by nfq and was so impressed with the cleverness of the routing. Much of that routing remains unchanged here, but two key changes helped to bring the time under 2 hours.

Why the Japanese ROM?

  • Better sound
  • Less text
  • The cake (price) is (not) a lie

Notable route changes

  • Additional meseta gathered in Casba cave allows earlier Laser Gun purchase and eliminates some meseta farming
  • Experience lost from meseta farming is recuperated later from the more efficient Evildeads
  • Experience farming is now done in Bortevo cave to avoid lengthy battle screen transitions
  • A few other minor differences (e.g., skipping the 10 meseta chest in Odin's cave)

Gameplay changes

  • Heavy use of the magical Pause button to manipulate luck
  • Luck manipulation allows for semi-reliable control over: enemy selection, enemy numbers, turn order, which characters and enemies get hit, and damage rolls

Route information

  1. Iron Sword
  2. Roadpass and Passport
  3. Myau
  4. Odin
  5. Dungeon Key
  6. Cake
  7. Governor
  8. Noah
  9. Luveno
  10. Polymaterial
  11. Hapsby
  12. Luveno - get Spaceship
  13. Uzo - top left house
  14. Casba - right house above shops
  15. Hovercraft
  16. Flute
  17. Laser Gun
  18. Tarzimal cave
  19. Light sabers
  20. Meseta farm BARBRIAN
  21. Blue dragon
  22. Magic lamp
  23. Silver claw
  24. Experience grind EVILDEAD
  25. Doctor Mad
  26. Sell gear
  27. Ice Digger
  28. Eclipse torch
  29. Titan
  30. Laerma tree
  31. Ceramic shields and Zirconian armors
  32. Robotcop
  33. Darmor
  34. Light saber
  35. Gold Dragon
  36. Shadow
  37. Lassic
  38. Dark Falz
  39. Become Queen

Glitches and Notes

There are no bugs that I know of. Considering the inventory glitches in the later games in the series, I'm surprised. There IS, however, a bug in the Phantasy Star Collection GBA version of Phantasy Star. I read a lot of old forum posts talking about how, at certain character levels, a certain monster would always miss. But after some investigation, I found that the bug is a little more interesting than that. It seems that the variance in damage rolls is broken, and as a result, with the right defense values, you are guaranteed to dodge. I made a table that illustrates. Ultimately, I suspect this bug isn't all that useful for a TAS, but I wanted to document it here for posterity.
If anyone's interested, I also took a bunch of notes while making the TAS and looking into disassemblies of the ROM.

Masterjun: Judging.
Masterjun: Replaced movie file with one that has additional input to actually reach the credits.
Masterjun: Accepted to Vault as an improvement to the previous run.
Stovent: Processing...

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #6489: ninespaces's SMS Phantasy Star in 1:55:56.04
Challenger
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Posts: 1033
Encode please? I'm currently unable to acess current BizHawk versions since my laptop (which is 64-bit) wasn't fixed yet.
My homepage --Currently not much motived for TASing as before...-- But I'm still working.
Spikestuff
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Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6324
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ninespaces has done an encode on their previous movie. looking at ninespaces YouTube. If they're unable to this time around I'll whip one up and I'll edit this post.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account. These colours are pretty neato, and also these.
CoolHandMike
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Never played this, but it looks optimized. I did notice a little moving back and forth to get the next lich (english evildead). Would it have been possible to always get the next lich on the next tile? That last boss looked tight. It hurts entertainment that about 85% of the entire run is comprised of grinding though, but that is par for the course for rpgs like this I guess. There is an English Phantasy Star on the site already so how would you calculate time saved?
discord: CoolHandMike#0352
Judge, Skilled player (1274)
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Wasn't Zoboner already working on this game?
my personal page - my YouTube channel - my GitHub - my Discord: thunderaxe31 <Masterjun> if you look at the "NES" in a weird angle, it actually clearly says "GBA"
Active player (314)
Joined: 7/19/2019
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Sure! https://youtu.be/bCb_IcKLSFY
Challenger wrote:
Encode please? I'm currently unable to acess current BizHawk versions since my laptop (which is 64-bit) wasn't fixed yet.
Active player (314)
Joined: 7/19/2019
Posts: 51
Hmm, I can't say definitively whether you can get a guaranteed battle every tile. From my testing I'm leaning towards 'no', however. I'm not sure how to precisely calculate time saved, unless all text in both versions was timed (ugh!).
theripper999 wrote:
Never played this, but it looks optimized. I did notice a little moving back and forth to get the next lich (english evildead). Would it have been possible to always get the next lich on the next tile? That last boss looked tight. It hurts entertainment that about 85% of the entire run is comprised of grinding though, but that is par for the course for rpgs like this I guess. There is an English Phantasy Star on the site already so how would you calculate time saved?
Experienced player (945)
Joined: 10/13/2014
Posts: 408
Location: nowhereatthemiddleofnoone
ThunderAxe31 wrote:
Wasn't Zoboner already working on this game?
Hi, Yes I work on it and manipulate luck with scripts :) I'm curious to watch it! What a pity that haven't a route planning to explain this run! Sorry, I don't seen the link at the end of explanation. I think that I will have a lot of questions after watching it...
GAW sms... Totally destroyed
Post subject: Very unexpected result. Now 3 dega movies left!
Challenger
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Watched your encode. Thanks a lot! What a surprise! Although I'm not much familiar with this game and the published run (I watched a few times), this new run impressed me: - Japanese version choice, because I like this FM sound, especially the dungeon themes. - That "pause button"! Never knew that this game could be very manipulated with that. Seems that your work wasn't so painful after all. - Every battle now looks more solid. - New location for second experience farming. Well, despite a lot of maniuplation, could be still possible to survive the last battle with 1-3 less levels?
My homepage --Currently not much motived for TASing as before...-- But I'm still working.
Post subject: Re: Very unexpected result. Now 3 dega movies left!
Active player (314)
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Posts: 51
Thank you! Noah needs to be level 17 for the spell that opens magically locked doors, so I think this is the bare minimum unfortunately. You did just give me an idea though. What if during the Evildead experience farming, you deliberately let Odin die to speed up the experience farming for the other 3, who all benefit from some level-dependent spells? It sounds good in theory but I'm not sure if it would end up being a net time save, because you'd need to boost Noah's attack to ensure reliable Evildead kills, and you'd have to revive Odin before Dr. Mad. Hmm!
Challenger wrote:
Watched your encode. Thanks a lot! What a surprise! Although I'm not much familiar with this game and the published run (I watched a few times), this new run impressed me: - Japanese version choice, because I like this FM sound, especially the dungeon themes. - That "pause button"! Never knew that this game could be very manipulated with that. Seems that your work wasn't so painful after all. - Every battle now looks more solid. - New location for second experience farming. Well, despite a lot of maniuplation, could be still possible to survive the last battle with 1-3 less levels?
Joined: 6/22/2012
Posts: 81
Watching your speedrun, one question: Why you didn't have used the Flowmover/Hovercraft in lava from Baya Malay? I think if you have used you can have saved some HP's from characters and some frames too
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It's almost 500 frames faster to walk over the lava, because of the screen transitions required to use the hovercraft. It's the same reason the Ice Digger is not used to traverse one area on Dezolis. Even though it looks like it should be faster, surprisingly, it's not.
Hikaruon wrote:
Watching your speedrun, one question: Why you didn't have used the Flowmover/Hovercraft in lava from Baya Malay? I think if you have used you can have saved some HP's from characters and some frames too
Masterjun
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I played back the movie but it seems to be missing a final input or something. It beats the final boss and then gets to the final dialogue in the throne room. There it ends input after answering a question, while there is still some dialogue to go through. Unlike the submitted movie file, your encode includes the full credits, so did you maybe upload the wrong file?
Warning: Might glitch to credits I will finish this ACE soon as possible (or will I?)
Active player (314)
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Ah, sorry. I stopped it on the input for the prompt for Alis to become Queen. I uploaded a version that has the final two inputs.
Masterjun wrote:
I played back the movie but it seems to be missing a final input or something. It beats the final boss and then gets to the final dialogue in the throne room. There it ends input after answering a question, while there is still some dialogue to go through. Unlike the submitted movie file, your encode includes the full credits, so did you maybe upload the wrong file?
[/userfile]
nfq
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Didn't notice this until a few days ago. Amazing improvement. It's not going to be easy for zoboner to improve on this. Regarding bugs, I noticed two, but they're most likely not useful: 1. Once when Noah was at level 26 and I went to the hospital to heal him when he had 0 MP and only 8 HP, it only took 6 mesetas to heal. I think it's because it would have cost over 255, which it couldn't, so it reset to 0. 2. When you use the flute during a fight, it says that the enemy falls asleep, but in reality nothing happens. Fighting evildeads in dungeons was something I also considered back when I did my TAS, but I couldn't trigger the fights fast enough for it to be worth it (or worth my sanity? :P). Did you just do it by trial and error, or did you have some deeper knowledge of how the fights work? Also, did you try manipulating fights by bringing up the menu in dungeons? Bringing up the menu can trigger fights sometimes, and maybe it could have some advantages to walking. I didn't know about the 5000+500 mesetas chests in the Casba cave. Probably those were discovered after 2010, like the dragon in that cave. Incredible time saver. Would be useful if there was some way to show/know secret passages in dungeons, because who knows, there might still be some that haven't been discovered.
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [4041] SMS Phantasy Star by ninespaces in 1:55:56.04
dart193
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When you walk over lava on Parma, you seem to take a route which have 1 lava square more (you enter a "corner" of lava instead of entering one tile above from the tree tile) than "safer" one. Since taking damage from lava flashes the screen AND freezes you in place for few tens of frames, wouldn't it be faster to walk through one less tile of lava? Or is there something I miss?
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Thank you! For the dungeon fighting, I would describe it as ... not especially deep. I did try to make some sense out of the game's assembly, but I'm not a coder by trade so I only really grasp the basics. I noticed that if moving generated a battle, you could use the pause trick to add frames to cycle through the selected enemy type (and number of enemies). If moving didn't generate a battle, then I would wait a frame and try again, and repeat this process until it did. Generally, that triggered a battle in fewer frames than it takes to walk a whole tile. I wish I knew a bit more... like what register values lead to returned RNG values that predict battles etc., but unfortunately that's where the dive into assembly has me in over my head. I didn't know the menu could trigger fights. That... is very interesting. I wonder if that would be a net time save or loss in certain parts. Hmm! I'm not sure if I said this elsewhere, but I made an earlier version of the run where I didn't know about the 5000+500 MST. Credit should go to a youtube commenter, on your TAS, who pointed it out and gave me the idea to re-route. The various websites that have maps for Phantasy Star are inconsistent -- some have the secret passages and some don't! Does make me wonder if there's more to discover...
nfq wrote:
Didn't notice this until a few days ago. Amazing improvement. It's not going to be easy for zoboner to improve on this. Regarding bugs, I noticed two, but they're most likely not useful: 1. Once when Noah was at level 26 and I went to the hospital to heal him when he had 0 MP and only 8 HP, it only took 6 mesetas to heal. I think it's because it would have cost over 255, which it couldn't, so it reset to 0. 2. When you use the flute during a fight, it says that the enemy falls asleep, but in reality nothing happens. Fighting evildeads in dungeons was something I also considered back when I did my TAS, but I couldn't trigger the fights fast enough for it to be worth it (or worth my sanity? :P). Did you just do it by trial and error, or did you have some deeper knowledge of how the fights work? Also, did you try manipulating fights by bringing up the menu in dungeons? Bringing up the menu can trigger fights sometimes, and maybe it could have some advantages to walking. I didn't know about the 5000+500 mesetas chests in the Casba cave. Probably those were discovered after 2010, like the dragon in that cave. Incredible time saver. Would be useful if there was some way to show/know secret passages in dungeons, because who knows, there might still be some that haven't been discovered.
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Posts: 51
Oh good spotting. I think that's a mistake!
dart193 wrote:
When you walk over lava on Parma, you seem to take a route which have 1 lava square more (you enter a "corner" of lava instead of entering one tile above from the tree tile) than "safer" one. Since taking damage from lava flashes the screen AND freezes you in place for few tens of frames, wouldn't it be faster to walk through one less tile of lava? Or is there something I miss?
Post subject: Dungeon Mapping
The8bitbeast
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Scripthawk can help to map out the dungeons using the data in the ROM: https://github.com/Isotarge/ScriptHawk