This TAS aims to undo an injustice done back in 2013, when a run of this game was rejected on the grounds that TASVideos only accepted runs of "serious games," and that a TAS of Runaway Rainbow was indistinguishable from unassisted play.
Coincidentally, this TAS also aims to complete My Little Pony Crystal Princess: The Runaway Rainbow as quickly as possible while skipping all mini-games.
Playback Info
I made this TAS using a clean install of Bizhawk 2.9.1 - the only setting I changed was disabling "skip BIOS" because I understand the boot sequence is required for submissions. The BIOS used is the standard World version, GBA_bios.rom, and the My Little Pony Crystal Princess: The Runaway Rainbow ROM I used has a SHA1 checksum of 41c2a6940ed285c5f5c1604e01b2162fd2a8af60.
Summary & Strategy
My Little Pony Crystal Princess: The Runaway Rainbow is really more of a walking simulator with mini-games sprinkled in here and there - not like a budget platformer, but a game in which all you're really doing is walking around and talking to people (err, ponies) to initiate mini-games. Ironically, the fastest way to complete a run(away rainbow) is to skip the mini-games entirely, turning this from a game where you walk around, talk to ponies, and play games, into a game where you walk around and talk to ponies.
Enter the dialogue box skip, which instantly cancels out of any conversation, and now we have a game where you walk around. Webfoot really pulled out all the stops here.
Considering Rarity has nothing in terms of movement tech, much like my TAS of Elf: The Movie, the best stategy for speed is simply optimal movement and prayer that you never find yourself blocked by an NPC's random movement patterns - luckily, the RNG of these non-playable mareachters can be manipulated by something as simple as talking to another pony before they would normally move, altering what direction they go. I only needed to use it once to stop Zipee from moving in such a way that Rarity's rightward movement would be entirely blocked for a moment or two. Otherwise, the game is a lot of threading needles with an entire horse and pressing B with precognition to engage Rarity's equine telepathy, instantly beaming conversations and objects into her MIND.
You might think it's very rude how she often just stares at her friends for but a moment before leaving at a steady trot, but compared to horse telepathy, it takes a long time to say anything in the GBA's text renderer, and so they never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say. She got the message, Rainbow Dash just really wants to make a kite so we can entirely skip her kite-based mini-game. Weeeeee-
Without any context to anything, the game tells a tale of Rarity, who runs around, picks up things for her friends, fiddles with powers beyond her understanding, gets lost, gets found, does a maze, does a roller skates, and anyway, that's how Equestria was made - maybe next time, I'll tell you all how I got my cutie mark!
I'll admit, so much of this game is spent holding one direction that my brain started to go numb by the end, but rest assured I played it as smartly as I could, so I couldn't tell you why this run falls short of jlun's original TAS from 2013. Perhaps their movements were even more optimal than mine, or perhaps it was the difference in emulator. Who's to say?
If all this TAS succeeds in is getting the original run from
jlun2 properly accepted, I could consider that a victory.
I hope you enjoy the movie, thank you for your consideration, and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask in the comments!
Darkman425: I do appreciate why you made this submission. Unfortunately,
another submission shows that this one has optimization issues. Aside from a character swap that seemed unnecessary the optimization issues are all minor ones that added up over time. To be fair, dealing with lag reduction and RNG is a pain no matter the game so I can't fault a new TASer on having issues with that. I do hope that you can learn to handle and deal with those challenges in your future submissions, so don't give up!
