18 years ago, the evil Tsarkon invaded the kingdom of Excalabria to steal the rings of power. King Eric V, trying to protect his son " " (he literally has no name), sends his servant Blade to a faraway village. Now, on your birthday, Blade spills the beans and you go your merry way to fetch the remaining rings and venge yo' papa.

Although I consider myself a veteran TASer, this game was hell to manipulate. For starters, whatever you do on the world map, you will get a fight on your 20th step. And since the RNG goes haywire most of the time, getting favorable outcomes takes A LOT of patience. Because while you might gain experience while you kill enemies (and it might even be shorter), the next fight over might happen before you take 20 steps or the enemies' RNG will not move in your favor. The magicians that throw fireballs 360 degrees, for example, don't move their RNG at all. So unless you are extremely lucky, you will have to backtrack to the previous fight (or 2 fights ago) in order to manipulate the RNG in your favor. And don't get me started on the NPC that get in your way , skewing the RNG...

Fortunately, there were ways to facilitate that tedious quest. For starters, you can glitch the game with cursed weapons in order to get "super strength" (1500 points), which is more than the normal gameplay would grant you with the most powerful sword at maximum level. And since you get it on your second quest (Parma), you can kill the first Archmonster with one strike! That strength is quite useful to plow enemies out of your way at low levels, even with the primitive bronze sword. And starting at Helwig (too late if you ask me), you can purchase a book of spells (Inaudios) that freezes the step counter. However, once it expires, you automatically get in a fight (or once you exit the city you came in). The ruby brooch, a rare drop from purple bats, resets the step counter. Although I didn't calculate it, I would wager that getting many brooches would be a waste of time because the chests take time to appear and the dialogues to open it AND get the contents is lengthy. That's why I didn't abuse item drop and instead got enough money to buy warping items instead of death-warping with banshee powder or death after Stow. Oh, and I also skipped sidequests not related to getting rings (which is why I went straight from Malaga to Swaffham) and dialogues that didn't trigger anything (like talking to the evil advisers in Malaga or the king in Stow after the demon girl destroyed the city).

Here are some highlights

Possible improvements: better understanding of the RNG to manipulate the odds better, especially before the first Archmonster.

Screenshot: I honestly can't think of any. Maybe 49204, with the caption (when hovering over): defeated after one strike on level 3?

Samsara: Judging.

Samsara: Removing branch name as it's unnecessary. This is the any%/fastest completion category for this game.

The RNG looks to be pretty fickle in this game, not leaving you with a lot of room to manipulate the fastest results for something without throwing several other fights out of wack due to the encounter rate being forced and ridiculously high. It's likely this can be improved due to that, but it would be absolutely unreasonable to reject it because of theoretical improvements due to RNG. Given that this is a solid hour faster than the RTA WR for this game/category, I think it's safe to say that the manipulation is more than good enough to be acceptable.

The game itself... Well, the music is pretty hype, but there's so many encounters and interruptions that it's hard to get into it. The run looks to be just a lot of avoiding encounters and activating quest triggers. It's not necessarily boring but I can tell from both watching and looking at the thread/votes that it's not exactly interesting either.

Accepting to Vault.

feos: Pub.