A Pokemon Emerald Professor Oak Living Dex Challenge TAS.
As this TAS is >10 hours long and YouTube has a max video length of 10h, part 2 is available here
Game Info
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9
- 14:23:26.49
- Rerecord Count: 202,828
- Set the initial time to 1/1/2010 12:00 AM (although, I don't think this matters)
A Professor Oak challenge is where you have to catch every available Pokemon, including evolutions, before each gym. A living dex version is where you need to have 1 of every Pokemon.
The main RNG abuse used is pickup abuse. Pickup is an ability of a couple of Pokemon that gives a random item after every battle. One of the items you can get is a rare candy, an item that boosts the level of a Pokemon by a level. I need a lot of rare candies during the run. More information (and other technical information) is available here
https://drkspace.github.io/Oak-Challenge/oak/emerald/research.html .
A small commentary video is available here
I think this TAS is 10 minutes (~1%) slower than the limit. Most of the time savings are probably from being more careful during grinding (the bot I made that does grinding for me does not avoid critical hits).
Samsara: Dropping due to personal life events preventing me from being able to judge anything with a clear mind.
ikuyo: Claiming for judging.
Before I get into the decision itself, I just want to congratulate you on this work. A movie with such an unique goal and with so many moving parts being even finished is an impressive task in itself. The commentated version and the notes were very useful for me to appreciate the technical elements of the movie, especially smaller details that escape me despite having some decent knowledge of Gen 3 Pokemon.
Optimization is a tricky one for this movie. Some elements of it look sub-optimal to the untrained eye, and I'm fairly certain it can be majorly improved. But due to both the nature of the goal and the high RNG variance of the game, I think any major improvement on it will take significant work with progressively diminishing returns. As such, I think the movie's optimization work is more than acceptable.
Now, onto the decision itself, I need to give some context.
As of the writing of this judgement, there are two and a half publication classes on TASVideos: Standard, Alternative and Playground. Yes, two and a half. I will explain.
Standard and Alternative were created from the foundation of Vault and Moons/Stars that the site first had. The main distinction between them, in concept, was goal choice. Common goals (beat the game, full completion, new game plus, etc) were allowed for Standard with no caveats. More esoteric goals (No jumping, extra difficulty modes, playarounds and showcases) would sit in Alternative. However, in doing so, we kept one requirement from all the way back: Alt runs needed to be entertaining.
Professor Oak's Challenge is a niche challenge created by some Pokemon fans, and part of its appeal is to be extremely time consuming. It is, in effect, a maximally inefficient Catch'em all. A lot of the difficulty comes form intense planning in order to make the grind as efficient as possible. In turn, this means that a tool-assisted movie aiming for this goal requires even more careful planing, and abuse of as many mechanics as possible (such as the Pickup ability) as well as efficient multitasking and use of time.
But this doesn't make for a very entertaining watch.
The main reason we held off of judging this movie for as long as we did was to evaluate the entertainment requirement for Alternative runs. After all, basically any kind of esoteric goal in a Pokemon game looks rather boring on an encode for those not in the loop or is trivially equivalent to a regular one (a Nuzlocke, the most well known Pokemon challenge run, devolves into essentially a regular run in the context of a tool assisted movie). If your average strange goal move for this game is like this, then under the current rule set, no esoteric goal for a Pokemon game can even be published on the site.
And we think that's a shame. So we are fixing it.
I am glad to announce that we are accepting this movie to Alternative.
With the acceptance of this movie, TASVideos's judges have come to rule that entertainment is no longer a consideration when it comes to goal choice for movies in the site. While we will keep encouraging and celebrating entertainment in TAS work, we understand that entertainment is highly subjective and depends on our knowledge, preferences and biases. This movie, however you feel about it, is a technically impressive piece of work that fully deserves the same recognition as any other Gen 3 Pokemon run we have published, and denying it that publication just because it is not understood as entertaining in the same way a more traditionally entertaining movie would be is wrong.
Now, those who follow developments of the site know that we attempted another fix for this, the Playground. This is the "half-category" I mentioned a while back. Playground movies were essentially movies that aimed for an Alternative goal and were technically sound, but did not meet our entertainment requirement or could not be published for any other reasons. We thought this would fix the problem of entertainment, but we've come to realize this was just recreating the same problem somewhere else. We want to acknowledge this mistake and correct it.
As such, as part of this process, we'll be looking to eliminate the entertainment barriers to publication, which would migrate many current PG runs over to Alt class publication. There are some details of this decision that we want to discuss with the community (such as Individual Level movies, as they could be put on Playground but don't currently fit our rules), but in the short term, we plan to make sure that all full game movies that have been sent to Playground make it into Alternative as full fledged publications. We've started this discussion already in our Discord server, and a formal announcement will be done soon after I've posted this decision.
Thank you drkspace, and everyone, for helping us make TASVideos better.
