(Link to video)
All stories done in Sonic Battle, the game forces you to play mostly all characters except for Gamma and Chaos. Controls: A for jump, or special jump in air B for combos 3 attacks and then a launcher upwards while holding back or a launcher at the direcion of your preference UP DOWN or forward L for block, if you hold the button you heal, and if you press twioe you change the camera R for specials, which differ depending of the selection.
Characters in this game have a meter they can fill, when they fill this meter they can instant kill their enemies with 1 hit. The main strategies to get meter are: use the heal mechanic, which is really good for Cream and Knuckles, get hit or block enemies attacks. Gamma the robot has a mechanic in which for each death, he explodes dealing heavy damage, which is abused to fill meter faster.
Sonic and Emerl have a glitch with the meter mechanic. They end the animation by trading hits or touching ground earlier and the meter is not spent.
Emerl is a character you can equip with attacks and skills from other characters, he needs to get points to equip more moves.
The main question in this game, why not repeat the same move over and over? Because of the special move system and your partners!
The special move system allows you to assign for the ground and aerial positions each a special move, the move you select for ground won't be available for aerial special selection, and the third move will become an autoguard against that type of move. This means you can be in the air, which doesn't allow for blocking, or getting hit and you would still block with autoguard if that type of move is used. Example: i select ground projectile and aerial power move, the third option, which is the trap move, i'll have full immunity against it. I also use this to fill enemy mete, block their instakill move and get the full meter to use my own instakill.
Another aspect is different battles have different hp and damage settings for some chracters so what is a great combo for a weaker characters might not be for a stronger one. Allies sometime make a wall or ground bounce shorter so you can combo the enemy earlier.
Aggresion tactics from AI also influence my decision to go for more meter building or just attacking as fast as I can. Finally, a mechanic I abused alot at the start with Emerl and then realized was useful with Knuckles as well is the trade damage double hit. When Emerl is fighting, if i'm not trying to go for instakill abuse, i'll surely use this strategy. Should you hit your enemy as it hits you, there's a tendency for the attack to hit twice both. This makes knuckles special punch much better if I can use it as trade interaction.
Improvements: better control of RNG, more damage taking to boost meter at the tails to Rouge Stories, trying to manipulate Knuckles HEAL very early for better emerl fights, not equipping Amy Heal maybe,a run in which the player actually understands card drops for better equippable moves can trounce this, but the main improvement surely would be earlier cream or knuckles heal, I did get a special action for Emerl which turned out to be really fun but i don't wanna spoil.
Thanks to my family and gf for their support, and obviously the Sonic battle Discord: https://discord.gg/VcuHJRV.

nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: Ok...I've been having a hard time with this TAS for many reasons. For one, it is very long and very tough to analyze everything that may have issues. Another, I don't know this game very well, which took some time to see how a speed-runner approaches it. I ended up watching your run, side-by-side. The only problem with that, is the version I was comparing it to was the WR run of the Japanese version. LOL Obviously, that is not a good comparison, since the English language is much slower. Only when you are doing your fight scenes...do it seem faster.
So, I've come to a conclusion without looking at the discussion thread. (I usually like to see if my thoughts agree with the audience). This time, they do. Yeah, there are some places that could be faster...but they are probably noticeable to speed-runners. So I think this run is good enough for a baseline here.
The other thing that left me scratching my head is...any% or 100%. This is "All Stories", so I would imagine there are some things that need to be clarified, but I'm going to call out for our "Standard" completion goals of "Full Completion". If this has to change in the future, we'll worry about that when the time comes.
So...great job. Accepting to "Standard" as "Full Completion".

despoa: Processing...

TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 14918
Location: 127.0.0.1
This topic is for the purpose of discussing #8971: KusogeMan's GBA Sonic Battle "Story Mode" in 2:43:50.13
Tuffcracker
He/Him
Active player (315)
Joined: 8/29/2022
Posts: 15
This run was really good! I've also been working on a TAS for all stories (on JP instead of US), and there are some things I noticed while watching that may have cost you a lot of time. They are really just minor nitpicks, but over the course of an almost 3 hour run the timelosses do add up quite a bit. I haven't gotten to Knuckles' story and beyond, therefore I'm not as knowledgeable about those, so I'm going to focus on the first three stories. 1. For inputs on textboxes, I noticed you have A being pressed on every other frame. This in itself is not bad, however I noticed a lot of textboxes were staying onscreen for an extra frame, which loses a lot of time over the run. My recommendation is you should go through and try to press A on the first possible frames that you can advance/close textboxes. Scrolling textboxes takes an extra frame, (for some really dumb reason) but on the card screens and at the end of other textboxes you can press A on the first possible frame that the text is done being printed to move on. And for textboxes that only print one line of text, there's always a delay between hitting A to speed up the text and hitting A again to advance the textbox. 2. On the overworld map, sometimes when you changed areas, you lost some time to not skipping the text that shows you what the area is named. 3. On the overworld map, you can hold B to move the cursor faster, but I saw for most of the map movement early on, you only do it a couple times. Doing it every time would probably save a few minutes over the entire run. 4. In Sonic's story, you put in the Tails' run card for Emerl. I believe this may have lost time, as I found out that you can continually turn Emerl left and right in battle to move very quickly without changing the run card. The only issues with this trick are it doesn't work in midair, and you have to time the turns right otherwise Emerl does his little dash and most of the time you don't want that to happen. I could be wrong but testing will need to be done. 5. In Tails' story, after the third Robot fight, you delayed exiting the card screen. I'll let this one slide, as one can assume you may have done that to manipulate RNG. 6. Throughout the run, I think with some AI manipulation, you could probably get more meter fills from blocking the enemy's special attacks when their meters are full which might help with faster kills. 7. Tails is too whiny in the run (just kidding ;D) The overall RNG looks like it's pretty good, but I think with these improvements it could potentially be better. Or worse, cause RNG sucks in general. The strategies you put into the fights are really clever! I also like how you used the Emerl skills to speed up the fights. I completely understand if you wouldn't want to improve this, since literally any improvements (in and out of battle) result in different RNG and means you have to do EVERY fight ALL OVER again, and that's really irritating. Other than that, this run was really fun to watch, I give it a Yes vote, and I wish you luck if you do decide to improve this! One final tip: If you don't already know this, (I assume you do since at a quick glance you're dealing an optimal amount of damage) in the US version you can find the health for the fighters in IWRAM at RAM addresses 1CFC for player 1, 1DF8 for player 2, 1EF4 for player 3 and 1FF0 for player 4, and with those you could bruteforce inputs/RNG to deal as much damage as you can in as little time as possible. If you put them into RAM watch, the addresses you want to put in if you view them as 1 byte is 1CFF for p1, 1DFB for p2, 1EF7 for p3 and 1FF3 for p4. i may also steal some of your strats for my run (i'll make sure to credit you) ;)
Active player (435)
Joined: 2/5/2012
Posts: 1698
Location: Brasil
1 I literally just turbo A in those sections, i really didn't bother 2 I learned that this mechanic existed only on Cream Story lol, but yeah fair enough 3 I also didn't know that as well 4 I'm aware but this limits CPU speed, the real reason for equipping cards is for Emerl's partner behavior, I strongly disagree here 5 Mistake really, the RNG in this game is very set i believe it's like set when starting the game as no actions seem to change the drops for 3 to 4 fights later, never tested a whole story later though 6 No, there was a tremendous lack of cooperation in the fights i forego that, but what really would save a lot fo time in the first 4 chapters would be Walltech instead of guard which gives more meter earlier, but trades HP for tht extra meter so it can't be abused all the time, all Stories before Amy would have multiple faster section by using the best possible Walltech setups which is: get hit by a bouncing move, wall tech for extra meter, and cut the wallbounce jump short like Emerl does in the later parts of the TAS. Obivously limited by health, but here and there would speed up all fights with some 1 or 2 faster instakills. 7 Lol. I appreciate your thoughts about this TAS, and might add as well, explore a lot of the walltech cut short to improve mostly the early parts of this TAS. I would gladly watch your WIPs to comment in some fights if you're willing to share videos with inputs or moviefiles. I sincerely hope you're able to get the Ultimate Air Action to kill Rouge and Eggman and the earliest Knux or Cream Heals as well. I'll be looking forward for your runs as well.
TAS i'm interested: megaman series: mmbn1 all chips, mmx3 any% psx glitched fighting games with speed goals in general
Tuffcracker
He/Him
Active player (315)
Joined: 8/29/2022
Posts: 15
KusogeMan wrote:
1 I literally just turbo A in those sections, i really didn't bother 2 I learned that this mechanic existed only on Cream Story lol, but yeah fair enough 3 I also didn't know that as well 4 I'm aware but this limits CPU speed, the real reason for equipping cards is for Emerl's partner behavior, I strongly disagree here 5 Mistake really, the RNG in this game is very set i believe it's like set when starting the game as no actions seem to change the drops for 3 to 4 fights later, never tested a whole story later though 6 No, there was a tremendous lack of cooperation in the fights i forego that, but what really would save a lot fo time in the first 4 chapters would be Walltech instead of guard which gives more meter earlier, but trades HP for tht extra meter so it can't be abused all the time, all Stories before Amy would have multiple faster section by using the best possible Walltech setups which is: get hit by a bouncing move, wall tech for extra meter, and cut the wallbounce jump short like Emerl does in the later parts of the TAS. Obivously limited by health, but here and there would speed up all fights with some 1 or 2 faster instakills. 7 Lol. I appreciate your thoughts about this TAS, and might add as well, explore a lot of the walltech cut short to improve mostly the early parts of this TAS. I would gladly watch your WIPs to comment in some fights if you're willing to share videos with inputs or moviefiles. I sincerely hope you're able to get the Ultimate Air Action to kill Rouge and Eggman and the earliest Knux or Cream Heals as well. I'll be looking forward for your runs as well.
4. Ahh, so it was not just to speed up Emerl fights, but also for the CPU? Understandable. 6. Ahh okay. They definitely are very uncooperative, so that does make sense. And yeah, during Sonic's story I was wondering if you were going to bounce off the wall to fill the meter quicker, especially during the Gamma fights, and I was a bit puzzled when you didn't. I'm unsure how I will upload the movies to user files, but I can definitely upload videos of each story. Progress will be slow since I've been super busy the past few months and have had little time to work on TASes, but I'll do my best! Good luck to you as well!
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 14918
Location: 127.0.0.1
This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [5907] GBA Sonic Battle "Story Mode" by KusogeMan in 2:43:50.13