A "white whale" is a slang term for an object that is highly desired and obsessively chased despite the difficulty of doing so.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.10
- Aims for fastest time
- Heavy glitch abuse
- Corrupts memory
- If I was funnier I'd just copy/paste what I wrote in my previous submission text
- Good thing I've never been funny in my life
EPILEPSY WARNING
The final boss contains several instances of rapidly flashing lights.
Very Quick Advance Note
Just to make things clear in advance and definitely not to pad things out further, this entire submission text is written by Samsara and should always be assumed to be from her perspective at any given time. As evidenced by the previous line, that perspective can occasionally be third person.
What is Sweet Home?
Sweet Home (1989) is a bold retelling of the tale of Hansel and Gretel. The titular Sweet Home belongs to some sort of witch, so if you ever visit there, say hi to her for me as most of my ex-girlfriends have in fact turned out to be witches so the probability of her being one of them is very very high. Also, don't say hi to her for me, you'll probably be pushed into an oven or something at the mere mention of my name. In Sweet Home, Hansel b/w Gretel visit a sweet home in the middle of the forest, probably inhabited by gummy worms, sugar babies, and just some straight-up bisected zombies. This is a bold retelling after all. Hansel alongside Gretel are very nearly eaten by the witch after very nearly eating all of her sweet home, before Hansel with a side of Gretel burn her to death in an oven .The moral of the story is clearly that you can always eat strange houses as long as you can push a cannibal into an oven.
In reality, Sweet Home is a seminal film and video game combo, as long as you think "combo" means "they released almost a year apart". The story revolves around a five person film crew who visit the abandoned mansion of artist Ichirou Mamiya with the intent of restoring his frescos and producing a documentary about his life and his work. They're immediately met by various spooks, scares, and frights, things that you wouldn't normally find in a sweet home. Why would they name it that, then? Are they stupid?
The director of the documentary is Kazuo Hoshino, a man described by Wikipedia as firm, friendly, anxious and jumpy. Whether or not that's accurate is up for you to watch, and not me, because I'm a huge coward and I don't like horror movies. Why would I TAS a horror game, then? Am I stupid? The documentary's producer, Akiko Hayakawa, described as being the strongest personality of the crew and the main heroine of the movie, also comes along because Man Needs Love Interest. Man also Needs Daughter, so Emi Hoshino is there as well. A film is nothing without a cameraman, so Ryou Taguchi appears in the film to deliver lines. Finally, Asuka, who does not get a last name so I'm going to assume she is in fact
my favorite active wrestler and not just a plot device, comes along because she's a professional art restorer and some art needs to be professionally restored.
In the film, the mansion is possessed by the mournful ghost of Lady Mamiya, Ichirou's wife, who tends to welcome visitors by killing them, constantly enraged by the loss of her young son in an accident involving the mansion's incinerator, which had also left her permanently disfigured. I don't know if I can talk directly about one particular detail of said incineration without ending up on some sort of watchlist, so just take the phrase "prior to her death, she would seek out playmates for her son c:" as closely related as possible to the previous sentence and pretend I said the quiet part out loud. Lady Mamiya is a ghost because of this, after being caught seeking out playmates for her son, she decided to also become a playmate for her son, throwing herself into the incinerator. Oops, I said the quiet part out loud. A memorial binds her to the mansion, though prevents her from reuniting with her son despite the close proximity to his grave. Since the crew of five are indeed visitors to the mansion, Lady Mamiya promptly tries to kill them, succeeding in causing the demises of Taguchi and Asuka. Kazuo, Emi and Akiko give Lady Mamiya peace by reuniting her with her son, freeing the sweet home of the terrifying ghost. Akiko pretends to be Emi's mom at one point and probably becomes her actual stepmom afterward.
The game departs from the movie in a few ways, which is great because it'd be really hard to TAS this route if Taguchi and Asuka died. While the game still has the same cast of five and the same general plot of Go Into Mansion, Examine Frescos, Contend With A Pissed Off Mom and Free Her Spirit, a few creative liberties were taken with the game, resulting in the creation of the survival horror genre. No, like... Literally. This is the game that did it. It's a Capcom game directed by Tokuro Fujiwara, who later went on to produce the first Resident Evil game, having originally intended it to be a remake of this game, and now that I've learned that, I'm genuinely a little sad we don't live in the universe where Sweet Home got remade in 3D. In the game, the story is uncovered through Ichirou's frescos and various notes scattered throughout the mansion, eventually culminating in a final RPG battle against Lady Mamiya.
What is Sweet Home, but specifically in this TAS?
In Sweet Home, the Tool-Assisted Speedrun (2025), Kazuo Hoshino is a ghost with a lighter, Akiko Hayakawa is the vessel in which Kazuo can be interacted with, Emi Hoshino transcends all known limitations between humanity and superhumanity, Ryou Taguchi is able to psychically link himself to a teenage girl, and Asuka vacuums up a bit of glass one time.
The team of five enter the mansion before Emi finds herself stuck in the ground. After being rescued twice, she enters a state of superposition, existing twice in the same reality, moving effortlessly through the mansion through her lightning fast speed and her new psychic link to Taguchi. She carries the permanent ghosts of herself, her dad, and her future stepmom with her at all times. After the six of them (herself, her dad, her future stepmom, and their permanently carried ghosts) kill a zombie, they happen to find a diary, an amulet, and a set of keys on the body. Kazuo promptly ghostifies. They kill some bats just by looking at them, scaring the mansion itself into opening a critical door for them. Emi efficiently runs through the mansion she's never been in before and yet knows perfectly, grabbing some candles, a photograph of people she doesn't recognize, and a small coffin. She brings these items and her Ghost Family to a spooky purple area and throws them at a much larger ghost, causing the ghost to fly away. The four of them: Emi, Akiko, Taguchi, and Kazuo who has unghostified, all leave the mansion before it collapses. Asuka joins them on the way out, having decided not to appear in the ending cutscene. The game cuts to black after the most telegraphed jumpscare of all time.
This is either a 31 minute improvement over
[2352] NES Sweet Home by K in 40:05.09 or a fun new heavily glitched branch. Who wants to decide that? I'm sure it'll be fun and that I won't have very biased opinions on it!
Remember two years ago when I submitted a run that was over twice this run's current length and claimed I had no idea what was going on in it? Well, I miss those days. I miss somehow knowing both much more and much less about how this game operates. I still don't know technical information or internals, because I'm Samsara, but h*ck in a h*ndbasket can I awkwardly joke my way through a bunch of stuff regardless!
The majority of my comments are just going to be spread throughout the rest of this submission text, so I'll keep this section short.
Coauthorship and My History with Sweet Home
This run's journey started shortly after the cancellation of
my previous submission, when
Steven Q-Beatz brought some newly discovered glitches to my attention. These were discovered and routed into a new RTA record by RTA runner
kill_me, who proceeded to expand upon them with even more new discoveries into
this run, which is the basis of the current RTA route and the original route I was TASing back in 2023.
The more I looked into the new glitches, the more I was discovering on my own, though each new discovery was both a blessing and a curse. I knew the RTA route wasn't going to be the fastest for a TAS, but every new discovery I made just prompted new questions as to what the best TAS route could be. To this day, there are still discoveries I've made that don't currently have any explanations, and could still lead to further huge timesaves even over this run.
The thought of creating a perfect TAS route consumed me. I worked on theorycrafting for months straight, manually testing my ideas by hand. Most of the time, they would work fine in testing and then completely die when optimized. Sometimes, they'd only ever work once no matter what. After about a year of work, I finally decided to take a step back, partially due to burnout, but partially due to my life getting too chaotic for it. I'd still open the game every now and then and mess around, but it wasn't even close to every day like it was before.
I had, very quietly, picked the game back up after AmaizumiUni's first submission, fearing that I hadn't made relevant information to the run public enough for others to find and use. I started looking back into my old route ideas, old branches on a two year old TASPROJ with test ideas in progress, and after some further testing, two ideas seemed to actually be viable for a new TAS, so I got to work.
The improvement war continued, each time inspiring me further to keep looking into my own discoveries, if just for the opportunity to finally publicize all the findings I had made and (sort of accidentally) kept hidden for so long. While doing this, I accidentally stumbled upon a third potential idea for an improvement. Finally feeling motivated to work on the game again, I started work on a brand new input file.
Setback after setback, broken glitch after broken glitch, it took until the morning of June 5th, 2025 to finally piece together what I needed to finish out the run. I managed to get all three of my ideas to work, and while this final result wasn't the sub-10 I had dreamed of, it is still the run that I had been searching for from the beginning now with a multitude of new improvements, it's somehow far surpassed the run I had dreamed of.
Without kill_me's original research, discoveries, and routing, without stevenqbeatz informing me of said discoveries, without AmaizumiUni's original submission and the ensuing improvement war it caused, and without the 66 seconds of improvement they both directly contributed and inspired after my original 10:03 input file, this submission would not exist. The culmination of over two years of our collective work on this game would not be seen like this. They're as much a part of this run as I am. I can't thank them enough for helping me finish this and making it so much better than it would've been if it had just been me.
Credit Breakdown
- Input
- Glitch Research
- Primary Glitch Hunter: kill_me
- Additional Research: Samsara
- Improvements to item glitch
- Overall Routing
- Original (RTA) Route: kill_me
- Diary item glitch
- Inner Sanctuary door glitch
- TAS Route: Samsara
- Twin Keys and Amulet item glitch
- Mansion reroute
- Optimization, Strategy and Inspiration
- AmaizumiUni
- Their original submission inspired me to start researching the game again
- Intro through board glitch adapted from their 11:21
- Dungeon encounter stalling adapted from their 9:42 improvement file
- Also inspired the step counter overflows that brought this run down to sub-9
- Lady Mamiya fight adapted from the same 9:42
- stevenqbeatz
- His original submission and the ensuing improvement war with AmaizumiUni broke me out of my new research loop and got me working on this run
- Not to mention the pure passion and dedication he's had for this game for so long just being a constant source of inspiration and motivation, even when I wasn't actively working
- Directly implemented several optimizations tied to inventory management and better game knowledge
Additional Thanks
Well, actually, I may as well address the branch.
The
RTA boards divide into three categories: Glitchless, Dynamo Skip, and Board Glitch. Glitchless is, of course, glitchless. It's the most common and most accessible RTA branch, but there has never been a submitted TAS of it. Dynamo/Generator Skip is the category done in
K's published run, which skips a majority of the first floor by using the game's Call command to bypass a trigger that normally kicks you out of a dark area. This is pretty tricky to pull off in the first place, and makes the rest of the run significantly harder as a result, leading to the category split. Board Glitch is the final category and the most broken one, using the eponymous board glitch and its memory corrupting properties to bypass a majority of the entire game.
For RTA, this three category system works really well. You have the accessible glitchless category, you have the harder and much less consistent (but faster) dynamo skip, and you have the "oh no what's going on" board glitch. For TASVideos, it's a bit harder to divorce dynamo skip and board glitch, as they're ultimately both major skip glitches in my opinion. In the original board glitch RTA route, the board glitch (or, more accurately, a side effect of it) is even used as a much faster method to perform the dynamo skip, so for a while they were actually directly intertwined. In that sense, it would be fair to consider this an improvement to K's published run, and eventually publish a glitchless run if that ever gets made and submitted, but I don't quite think I'm fully on board with that idea. Barring the fact that we could also just have all three categories published at the same time, which I wouldn't be opposed to, if we were only able to have glitched and glitchless categories then I think it would be more fair to keep K's mostly glitchless run published as the predecessor to an actually glitchless run, instead of obsoleting it with this run that's roughly 80% glitched by volume.
As for branch names... I dunno. Not my department.
...said Samsara, who is a Site Admin at time of writing.
The Run
In lieu of my usual submission text format of starting with tricks and moving into the run itself, I'm going to go straight into the run and explain everything as it comes up, as I feel that will be easier for me to write and for you to digest. This run goes off the rails real fast. I may put together an explanation video in the future as well, but don't hold me to that.
Prenote
Hi, it's me, Samsara from several days after I wrote this entire section. This was written for the original 10:03 submission from June 5th, 2025, and as such contains outdated information. All improvements implemented in the 9:46 update are listed in the section after this.
Post-Prenote
Hi, it's me, Samsara from several days after I wrote that prenote. Disregard it, as the submission text now accurately reflects the 9:15 update. I'll see you in the post-post-prenote if the run continues to improve past this.
Post-Post-Prenote
Hi, it's me, Samsara from two days after I wrote that post-prenote. You didn't even get a chance to read it before this version of the submission text went live, but disregard it anyway, as the submission text should now accurately reflect the current 8:57.
Post-Post-Post-Prenote, or Pre-Pregame
Reserved, just in case ._.
Pregame, Step Counter and RNG Manipulation
The intro cutscene can be skipped about 8 frames sooner than you'd expect. That's... That's it. Imagine if this was the only improvement.
Anyway, let's jump straight into game mechanics. Sweet Home takes an RPG-like step counter approach to random encounters. After every battle, it rolls a number between 11 and 75, represented in the address as 10 to 74 since it usually has to drop below 0 for a fight to trigger. It's usually better to manipulate the step counter high in order to avoid as many battles as possible, however manipulating very specific values is required for maximum efficiency in a few places. The step counter initializes to 30 when a new game is started, otherwise it is kept through saving and loading.
Manipulating the few bits of RNG in the game, such as the step counter, the enemy you fight in an encounter, the attacks performed by said enemy, and how much damage your characters do, is simply waiting frames. Save for the step counter, everything cycles in the same way: The damage you do to an enemy will increase by a set amount, usually 1 for normal attacks and 3-4 for prayers, every frame until it hits a maximum value, then it rolls back down to a minimum value and repeats. Enemy encounters will cycle through a pattern set by the encounter table, which is usually just a handful of frames for each enemy. Their attacks should be the same way, though there's precisely one time in the entire run where enemy attack manipulation is actually needed so I'll admit I didn't look into it that much. I'll talk about that one time when we get there.
The step counter doesn't seem to have a set pattern, at least not one that I know of. You're usually not too far from a 70+ value, though it may take upwards of a full second or so to max it out. If you're not aiming for a specific value, it's usually best to just take the first 70+ you see unless you can get something higher within a few frames. Y'know, if you're TASing this game, and you're not doing this route that, spoiler alert, drastically minimizes random encounters.
There are certain areas in the game that I call "safe areas", where the step counter does not decrease no matter how much you move. These can be entire rooms or just parts of rooms, and they're a blessing whenever they're around.
Last quick note: Step counter enjoyers aren't going to like the second half of this run very much, but I'll talk about that when we get there.
Intro and First Floor (1)
Anyone who's been following Sweet Home speedrunning is probably familiar with the first couple minutes of this run, as it hasn't changed at all since the first heavily glitched route was created. Kazuo moves down and joins up with Akiko. Asuka is switched to so she can vacuum up the broken glass in front of the door, then she moves out of the way. Emi is switched to, joins up with Kazuo and Akiko, and the trio set off into the first floor proper.
Unlike my previous submission, the Tonic in the left room isn't grabbed. I still don't know why it was needed in that submission and not any other time. Get used to seeing "I don't know why doing X makes Y work sometimes", by the way. It's the sole reason this was a two year long journey instead of being a two year old publication. Entering the right room takes us out of safe areas for the first time and starts running down the step counter. Kazuo, for the first and only time in this run, burns the rope, killing the Grinning Colossus below.
The first Wood, hereafter referred to as just a board, is grabbed after deftly avoiding a spirit by waiting slightly for it to continue down its linear path. Boards are temporary items that allow you to cross one tile pits. After a few steps, they will break. If any character is standing on a board when it breaks, they will fall into the pit and need to be rescued. Make a note of that, it'll be very important in a moment.
Items can also be used in battle, to varying effects. The board we just picked up is immediately used to oneshot the Evil Doll that pops up very shortly afterward, as normal attacks aren't enough to overtake that staggering 6 HP in one round. A step counter of 57 is manipulated for maximum efficiency, one of the rare times in the run where it's better to be below 70. We move through the room and grab the White Wood, which is a much stronger version of the board that can withstand a lot more usage.
Here's a quick trick: Whenever we have to interact with something, such as picking up items or opening doors, we want to make sure we're approaching it directly. As long as you don't change direction, you can bring up the menu one frame earlier than your next movement frame, so any time you need to turn to interact with something, you're forced to wait that extra frame so the turn goes through.
After leaving the way we came, we have 4 steps left on the counter. The whole area below the pit is a safe area, so we're clear to set up the boards as we please. The White Wood is placed on the left, and our hero the normal board is placed on the right.
Here's where everything about this game starts to go wrong.
The Board Glitch + Party Management
I believe this was discovered by K, or at least their video from 2014 is where I first learned about it and started taking an interest in this game. It is, without a doubt, the most volatile and powerful glitch I have ever worked with in a TAS, even if it may not seem like it right now.
To start with a small bit of tech: This game heavily revolves around items, and this TAS, like most TASes, heavily revolves around saving time. Loading the item menu with a full party takes more time than loading the item menu with only one or two characters. You don't have to be in a party to load other characters' items, you just have to be standing next to them, and it will only load you and the other character into the item menu. This means that whenever we have to do item management between characters, we want to do it while disbanded from a party whenever possible, as it saves a handful of frames. This is done here by disbanding Emi before placing down the board, as her disbanding is already required to help set up the board glitch.
Emi takes precisely one (1) step onto the weaker board before joining back up with them. This decrements the step counter by 1, as the pit is right where the safe area ends, while also bringing the board one literal step closer to breaking. She then leads the party back onto the board, stepping one tile past the board before settling back on it with Akiko, decrementing the step counter by another 2. We only have two steps left before an encounter, and the board is on its final breath. The next time someone steps off of it, it will break.
Kazuo's up in the unsafe area, so he does the rational thing of leaving the party and walking down onto the White Wood, triggering a battle in this very specific spot. This is the last time you will ever see the normal pre-fight fadeout at all, and the last time you will hear the pre-fight music sting until the extremely telegraphed jumpscare at the end of the post-credits scene, so I hope you didn't get too used to them. Kazuo, from within the battle, calls out for Emi.
I briefly mentioned the Call command earlier when talking about the dynamo skip, but here's a full explanation: Calling is a battle command that allows you to briefly control a character outside of the current battle, with the intent of bringing them to the location of the battle to join it. Genuinely a pretty neat mechanic! It actually allows for all five characters to be in a battle at once if you really wanted to take the time to coordinate that. It also, in two circumstances, COMPLETELY breaks the game, with this being the first.
Kazuo calls out for his daughter, who is literally right next to him, and she happily joins his battle. Kazuo rewards her by immediately running away. Emi, taking after her father but on a slight delay, calls out for Akiko, who is literally standing on the same tile as her. Akiko has had enough of these calling shenanigans and promptly moves one space to the south, breaking the board and sending Emi into a pit. She stays out of the battle. Emi is now both in the battle and in the pit, which is a state the game never expected you to get into. After Emi runs away, the encounter ends. Kazuo "rescues" Emi from the pit, putting her "back on land". She's still in the pit state, but is now in Kazuo's party and follows him as he moves, even though that means she travels through the ground. Kazuo then joins up with Akiko as if nothing is wrong and starts moving down toward the entrance, with his daughter land sharking behind him. We then switch to Taguchi, who actually rescues Emi from the "pit", putting her back on land for real and adding her to his party.
We have successfully reached the first point of "oh god what's happening".
Board Glitch Roundup: Caterpillar System, Party Glitch, Move Glitch, Speed Glitch
You've been seeing it all throughout the run, but I'm using this opportunity to explain it because this is where it starts really coming into play. The game uses a caterpillar system for field movement, where your full party is on the map following behind the leader. It's cute, yes, but it means those characters are always there, ready to be banded with and disbanded from as you please. Normally, and I have to say "normally" for one very specific reason that I'm sure I'll forget to talk about when it becomes relevant, characters are incorporeal when they're in follower mode, allowing the leader to walk through them for efficient movement. This system, innocent as it may seem, is what truly makes the board glitch shine as a speedrun tool.
Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that I never mentioned Emi leaving the Kazuo/Akiko party before being pulled into Taguchi's, and that's because she didn't. I wasn't exaggerating earlier, Emi is now actually in a state of superposition. She is allowed to act on her own as she pleases, but she also has a one-way psychic link to Taguchi for the rest of the run.
Remember two paragraphs ago when I randomly explained the caterpillar system? This is where it becomes relevant to speedrunning. Since Emi is in Taguchi's party, whenever we control him, she will follow his movements as if she was following directly behind him. In other words, whenever Taguchi moves, Emi will always mimic his previous move, and this happens no matter where she is on the map. Whether they're in the same room or on opposite ends of the mansion, Emi is bound by the caterpillar system to follow Taguchi's movement. I will be referring to this phenomenon as the "move glitch" from here on.
I bring up the same room/different room thing because there is actually a very notable difference between them being in the same room and them being in different rooms: Because follower characters are considered incorporeal, this means she can also be moved into walls, putting her out of bounds. When the two are in the same room, Emi will follow Taguchi's movements in real time, which means if she happens to move into any fully non-walkable tile, she will fall into it as if it was a pit. The game treats most non-walkable tiles as pits, some exceptions being those with removable obstacles (such as doors and gates) as they can be walked on when the obstruction is removed.
When the two are in different rooms, however, Emi's position doesn't update immediately. It is still tracked by the game relative to the room she's in, but her actual onscreen position will only update when switching back to her. This means she can be move glitched as far out of bounds as she wants by Taguchi while she's offscreen, as long as she makes it back inbounds before being switched to. In some cases, Emi can move from an out of bounds tile to an inbounds tile if she moves on the first possible frame, but this doesn't always work for some reason.
In short, for the entire rest of the game, Taguchi can now be used to move Emi past physical barriers in the world. This, by itself, is extremely powerful, and somehow it isn't even close to the most broken part of the board glitch. There's still so much more that glitch makes possible.
Emi is also now twice as fast as every other character by virtue of the board glitch. Where the other four can only move once every 10 frames, Emi is now locked in at moving once every 5 frames. This is even faster than the game's own speedup item, known as the Pulley, which allows characters to move once every 8 frames. This is naturally incredibly useful for a speedrun, but...
Remember several paragraphs ago when I randomly explained the caterpillar system?
It is SPECIFICALLY Emi that gets the double movement speed. When she's with Kazuo and Akiko and leading the party, she will still have her doubled speed, but Kazuo and Akiko will not. They will try to follow as best as they can, but they're comparing to a teenage girl moving at quite literally twice their max speed. In the same way that Taguchi and Emi in the same room can make Emi move out of bounds, Emi's doubled speed can easily make it so Kazuo and Akiko get moved out of bounds just by trying to keep up. More often, however, they will get desynced from the movement grid, which prevents you from opening the menu and often leads to a softlock because of it. This limits Emi's movement ability when she's partying up with them, as you need to ensure that Kazuo and Akiko remain both in-bounds and in line with the movement grid.
Of course, this limitation can be circumvented completely by having Emi move on her own as much as possible. We'll get to that shortly, of course, but for now let's actually continue with the run.
First Floor (2) and Party Dupe
We put Akiko in control here and move north, up a set of stairs you'll be seeing again later, and we park this party on a bridge after a little bit of weird movement to get everyone placed neatly. Control is very briefly passed to Emi to put her at the head of the party, before we switch to Taguchi for the first proper move glitch. He moves three squares north. Since his previous move was south, Emi's first move is south. She then moves north, putting her back where she was, and north once again, putting her one space above the bridge, on the ground. When we switch back to her, she can carefully move north a couple times to bring Kazuo and Akiko down to her level before she disbands from them and can move at her full doubled glory.
The bridge is what makes this whole sequence work. Since Emi and Taguchi are both on the map, Emi can't be move glitched anywhere that would put her out of bounds, but since she's moving from an inbounds tile to another inbounds tile, she's completely fine and can subsequently move Kazuo and Akiko down in the same way.
Emi moves west under a bigger bridge, control is switched to Taguchi, who moves one space south, moving Emi north. This works the same way as before: While there's technically a wall to Emi's north, she is considered to have moved onto the bridge as opposed to into the wall. This allows her to grab the Silver Sword, a powerful late game weapon, far earlier than intended. Remember this spot, by the way. We'll be coming back later.
Emi gets move glitched back down to ground level. For those of you familiar with the previous submissions of this game, this is where the route diverges for the first time. Instead of joining back up with Kazuo and Akiko, Emi instead moves past them and into a nearby open room. In this room, Emi gets move glitched past a trigger area that would cause a huge patch of rubble to form in the center of the room, and she grabs the Polaroid camera at the bottom. This may not seem like a key item now, and it in fact does not get used at all during the run, but just wait until later. You can come back to this line and groan at a pun that you don't even know is a pun yet. We move glitch past the trigger once again and leave the room, getting into a battle on the way back to Kazuo and Akiko. In this battle, Emi chooses to attack, Akiko chooses to attack, Kazuo chooses to attack, and Emi chooses to attack.
...Yes, indeed, there are now permanent copies of Emi, Akiko and Kazuo in every fight from here on out. They're not "full" copies: If the actual character is in the party, then the clone's moves won't count. Emi's extra copy here is effectively useless, but Akiko and Kazuo can contribute as "normal". Real Emi's Silver Sword makes quick work of the enemy. Cloned characters still get EXP "normally", which means that despite Kazuo and Akiko not actually being present in the battle, they still get EXP and level up here. Emi, being in the battle twice, gets double EXP.
I'll go into more detail about this a bit later, but Sweet Home, when played normally, has multiple points in which specific levels are required. This means double EXP should be fantastic for a speedrun, as it would require a lot less grinding to hit those specific levels. You'll be shocked to discover, in fact, that it was not particularly useful at any point in my Sweet Home TASing career, not even in my previous 18 minute submission. Find out why in a few paragraphs!
Another specific step counter value is manipulated, though unfortunately not as specific as I would have liked since I couldn't find the exact value in the rotation at all. Ten frames will be lost a couple rooms from now. Fs in the chat in advance for those ten frames.
Emi passes the Polaroid over to Akiko before rejoining, and the party move into the locked door to the north, using Emi's Key to unlock it after a quick and very specifically timed save/reset. This is necessary for the next battle, and once again I'll explain why later, along with why it was done specifically here.
We don't spend a lot of time in the next room, just move glitching past the broken glass on the stairs before going up to the second floor proper. Emi disbands from the party once again, grabbing a hidden Hammer from the table, and then immediately proceeding to lose those 10 frames I mentioned earlier by taking an extra step north. She rejoins with the others, passes her Silver Sword over to Kazuo, and we get into a perfectly normal fight with a Zombie that has absolutely no implications for the rest of the run.
Cloned party members are always the first ones in the battle order, so we just move past them as quickly as possible to get to the actual ones. After the clones get told to attack, Emi calls out for Asuka, Akiko uses her Medkit, and Kazuo prays for a very specific value.
Brief Aside: Prayer, Required Levels, and EXP Glitch
Let me talk about praying for a sec, in lieu of explaining why those exact choices were made. Praying is an integral part of the game. It's a powerful attack in battle that's required for the final boss, it helps solve puzzles including the final puzzle of the game, and it helps with scripted trap encounters by being the fastest way to dodge them.
The most notable thing about prayers is that the number of points you can pray for is directly tied to your character's level. Each level increases prayer point cap, letting that character pray harder, and harder prayers are required to beat the game. The minimum required character level to beat the game normally is 16. You need 82 prayer points for the final puzzle to get into the final area, and level 16 gives you 85 to work with. This does technically mean that if you can skip the final puzzle, you only need to be level 15, as the final boss requires the exact 80 prayer points you have at that level, but currently there's no known way to skip the final puzzle.
As I mentioned earlier, the duped party means that any time the real is also present, that character receives double EXP. This, in theory, makes the required grind shorter, but in practice, there are three other factors that completely remove the usefulness of that. Two of those factors are, in and of themselves, rendered entirely obsolete by the third one!
Factor one is that, normally, a character can only level up once per battle, even if they have enough EXP to level up multiple times. This sets a pure minimum number of normally required battles at 15, and that's assuming you can actually get enough EXP to level up every single battle. Normally, you can't. Fortunately though, through yet another side effect of the board glitch, you can: Depending on your attack order, it is possible to write an enemy's EXP value to the second byte instead of the first, which is a 256x boost. Very useful, if a bit finicky to pull off because of how you need to set things up. The only problem with it is that it's one of the two obsolete factors, and you'll be seeing the third one very soon.
The Calm Before the Storm
Back to the battle at hand, Asuka gets switched to because of being called, and she actually seems to make an effort to try and join the battle, leaving the room and heading north to try and grab an Ax, but she ends up just staring at it for a second before we jump back to the battle. Akiko's Medkit does nothing, and that's intentional. Kazuo's Silver Sword assisted prayer hits and kills the Zombie. For our efforts, everyone gets two sets of 17 EXP, and the party levels up! Emi even gets a second level!
Even Asuka levels up despite not having joined the battle! Even some literal no name gets a level...? Taguchi levels up despite not being involved in any way... Kazuo's up to like 6 levels now...
Why isn't this stopping?
Nothing is Correct Anymore: The Item Glitch
As a fair warning, I'm going to do an incredibly bad job at explaining what's going on. Like I said, this by itself is why I wasn't able to have a completed run until over two years after this particular board glitch side effect was discovered. This is why
kill_me is credited as a co-author: They're the architect behind this upcoming set of glitches. At no point would I have ever dreamed of any of this being possible, and now we're at a point in this game where we've probably only scratched the surface as to what's truly possible with it. I was somehow able to cobble together some of my own improvements to their original RTA route, but without that original route, this run would not exist. It would just be a 16:XX or so using the same general route as my first submission.
Let's get into this.
What's currently happening is that whenever certain glitched level ups happen, arbitrary values get written to various memory addresses. Most notably, this includes our characters' inventory slots. Pretty much every action you can take affects what addresses get written to and what values get written to them. Sometimes the values are added onto the previous values, sometimes the values directly overwrite the previous values. There's almost no rhyme or reason to this. There's a little bit of consistency, enough for it to actually work out in RTA, but outside of that, every action I took between the board glitch and now was taken specifically to allow the rest of this route to work. All because of this glitch.
Kazuo gets the Diary as a result of this glitch, one of the four items required to defeat the final boss. The Polaroid in Akiko's inventory becomes the Twin Keys, and now you can go back to where I get it and groan at the "key item" pun that you now know is a pun. Avoiding the rubble trigger both on the way in and on the way out of that room was done because otherwise the Diary gets overwritten by a different item. The Hammer I grabbed from under the table just before this fight becomes the Amulet, another item required for the final boss. That very specifically timed reset from earlier was done to prevent what would have otherwise been an upcoming softlock. Asuka needed to be moved north out of the room because otherwise the Amulet wouldn't have been written into the inventory. She didn't have to move all the way over to the Ax, but there's no time loss for doing so since there's a set timer for calling. Kazuo needed to pray at specifically that strength or else the Twin Keys wouldn't have been written into the inventory.
Kazuo's prayer here, in particular, can lead to wildly different effects based on the strength. One specific strength level actually just... fixes the glitch and ends the battle normally. Two of them outright crash the game. Most of them just write different items into the inventory, and aren't that useful. Asuka's map position has also, in other testing, led to
outright teleportation. It's possible to get into a state where
you can just select attack on cloned party members for minutes straight, which affects your inventory in real time. I still don't know exactly how I triggered either of those last two things, and they're on heavily unoptimized test files either way so they might not even be guaranteed to work in an optimized environment.
There's SO MUCH to this glitch. I wouldn't be surprised if someone much more tech-savvy could come in and absolutely clean house with it, but at this point I'd be shocked if there was anything else that actually worked given how much breaks.
Speaking of how much breaks, let's take stock of what changed during this battle real quick.
Item Glitch Roundup: Level Glitch, Item Shuffling, Broken Things
First, let's check in on our characters. Asuka got absolutely shafted on that battle, sitting at a measly level 4 with 68 EXP. To be fair, that is pretty good given that all she did was walk around and look at an Ax. Only 16 to go before she hits the level cap! She is still holding her Vacuum, but is now wielding Akiko's Medkit as a weapon. She's carrying a Pail in her first inventory slot.
Kazuo gained just a few more levels than Asuka and is now at level 778. Only -758 to go before he hits the level cap! His Lighter and Silver Sword were untouched, and the Diary is now in his first inventory slot.
Akiko gained just a few more levels than Kazuo, coming in at level 3854. Only -3834 to go before she hits the level cap! Her Medkit was replaced with a Gem. She is wielding Taguchi's Camera as a weapon. In her first inventory slot is the Twin Keys, and in her second inventory slot is, you guessed it, Taguchi's Camera again.
Taguchi gained just a few less levels than Akiko, but he still reached an impressive level -244. Only 264 to go before he hits the level cap! He is holding, you guessed it, Taguchi's Camera again. His weapon is a dummied out item called the Light. In his first inventory slot is the Hammer that Emi just lost (it's not the same one but it's much funnier to imagine it is), and in his second inventory slot is a glitched item with no known use.
Emi's at level -258, and I already took this bit one past the comedy limit of three so I'll refrain from doing it again. She lost her Key, with it getting replaced by a can of Gas. She is now holding the Amulet in her first inventory slot.
You might be thinking these levels seem preposterous, and you'd be correct to: Outside of maybe Asuka, they don't accurately reflect the character's real level. Behind the scenes, even though the game is showing levels in the hundreds, thousands, and negatives, the characters' stats are all in line with normally attainable levels. This means their damage output and prayer point totals are within normal game bounds. Notably, Kazuo and Akiko are actually significantly underleveled by this metric. This is actually kind of a problem, one that won't be relevant until much later in the run. Stay tuned for that explanation.
Everyone except Emi has disappeared from the map. Kazuo and Akiko are gone, Taguchi is a scattered pile of glitchy pixels in the starting area, and even Asuka has just straight up vanished. You won't be seeing her for a while, in fact. Akiko, Taguchi, and I believe Asuka are all technically still around: Akiko returns immediately upon a screen transition, Taguchi returns to normal when we next control him, and the same thing should be true for Asuka if we were to switch to her. Kazuo, on the other hand, has become a ghost. He hasn't died in the game's terms, which is lovely because it means this is still a best ending run, but he's no longer on the map. Even if we switch to him, he can't be controlled.
Oh, by the way, we can't switch characters anymore, because the glitch disabled that. We also cannot get into random encounters anymore, nor can we be abducted by spirits (though that doesn't matter). Our most recent battle actions were Akiko using her Medkit, and Kazuo praying. If you're wondering what I mean by that, it will come into play shortly.
Since we can't switch characters, we can't move glitch, which means our currently available options are extremely limited...
But they're not none.
Pre-emptive Attack Glitch and Door Glitch
Akiko reappears when we move south, which is great for us as we need her on the map for the end of the run, but what's greater for us is that we can get into field encounters with Bats. Random encounters may be disabled right now, but Bats are not random encounters. In fact, they're the key to saving this run. In fact, they're literally keys in the context of this run. You're right, I did just make another bad key joke about something unexpected being used to open a door!
The first thing you'll probably notice about this battle is that I don't get to do anything in it. As soon as the battle begins, our current set of battle actions plays out automatically, ending the fight without even needing to select attacks. This is why Akiko used her Medkit and Kazuo prayed in that last battle, those actions essentially become pre-emptive attacks in every subsequent battle until we save and reset. This is useful for timesaves in battles, sure, but the real purpose here is that we're in a state where we're arbitrarily writing values to certain addresses. In this case, the EXP values of whatever enemies we face are going to be written to addresses controlling doors.
When a door or something similar to a door is opened, a specific value is written to the RAM address controlling it, causing the game to see it as open as long as that value is matched or exceeded. This means that if you, say, have the ability to arbitrarily write values to unintended addresses, you can open doors without needing keys. Good thing we have that ability right now!
If writing EXP values to the wrong place sounds familiar, then thank you for paying attention to this submission text. This is the same principle as the EXP glitch I mentioned earlier, the one that was rendered completely obsolete by whatever just happened against the Zombie. I won't pretend that I know exactly how this works, but I presume it has to do with the game improperly keeping track of where to write EXP values when battles aren't ended by direct character actions. In this case, we specifically want Kazuo to end the battle, as otherwise the game will write the Bats' 4 EXP to an address we don't want. This is why Akiko used the Medkit against the Zombie: It doesn't deal damage, and she would kill the Bats if she attacked any other way.
In this first fight with the Bats, their XP value of 4 gets written to a door we won't be seeing in the run, but it is still necessary to do this. We do enter the room where it is, but it's neither open, nor do we need to go through it in the first place. I'll point it out when we get there. The second fight with the Bats is the important one, as that 4 gets written to a much more important door, and better yet, a door that only needs a value of 4 to open.
You may notice something about that second fight, and it's that Asuka decides to fly in from the aether and slap the bats with Akiko's Medkit. This, right here, is why I save-reset precisely when I did earlier. For whatever reason, save-resetting there as opposed to any other time causes her to do less damage. Most of the time, she kills the Bats and permanently ruins the door glitch, as it specifically has to be Kazuo finishing the fight for it to work the way we want. This was the only way I was able to find a lower damage hit for her to keep the run alive. I don't think this is actually the defining factor, but for this run specifically it was the only thing that got it working.
Fixing What's Broken, Encounter Stalling, and Step Counter Overflow
After that second fight, we have successfully glitched open the door we needed, so now it's time to fix what's broken before we move on with the rest of the game. We go back north, exchange the Amulet for the Twin Keys, then disband from Akiko and Ghost Kazuo and fully detour for what looks like no reason. Emi grabs another board, who is my personal hero for what it allowed me to do with this route, and uses it to cross a gap to the west, leading to a side room. Emi picks up the Rope in the room and returns to Akiko.
I mentioned earlier that random encounters are disabled right now, and what I mean by that is that the game is unable to call them entirely. Normally, the game will call a random encounter whenever the step counter is negative. This is almost always going to be -1, but everything down to -128 is treated the same way by the game. Because of the item glitch, though, random encounters can't be called right now, even with a negative step counter, and the step counter is still being ticked down with every step, pushing it further and further into the negatives. We can actually overflow the step counter like this if we reach -128, our next step will bring it to a normally unattainable 127 and it will continue counting down as normal from there.
It is actually possible to "disable" random encounters without glitches. If you bring up a menu (A, B, and Start all work, with Start being the fastest) on the right frame after movement, the menu will appear instead of the battle starting, allowing you to take another move afterward. This has to be done for every negative step count, and it's both very annoying on an audiovisual level and also very, very slow over extended periods of time. It is always faster to take a battle over stalling it and overflowing the step counter. Despite this, encounter stalling does actually still have a huge use in the run, though, and I'll talk about it when we get there.
The step counter is at -60 when we make it back to Akiko and use the Rope on her. Using the Rope on Akiko here will eventually re-enable character switching. Note that there's one space between Emi and Akiko when the rope is used: This is actually necessary, as if they were right next to each other, the Rope would fire through Akiko and extend to its full length, only "rescuing" her while it's retracting, and it takes a good two seconds or so for that to play out in full.
Using the Rope here is technically a regression from RTA and the previous 11:XX Sweet Home submissions, but finding this was actually what made this new route possible. Now, let's move on after I say my latest catchphrase: I'll talk more about it when we get there.
We finally see and go through the door we glitched open earlier. It was just sitting offscreen to the right this whole time. This door leads to the penultimate area of the game, the Inner Sanctuary.
Inner Sanctuary and Rope Cancel Yapping
Random encounters are still disabled, which is great right now because this is an endgame area and two of the three encounters here would outright crash the game by having too much health. Character switching is still disabled, though, which means we're forced to take a trap encounter. Traps are essentially one-time QTEs, you have a limited amount of time to react to them with one of four actions. Three of the actions are boring and slow and don't always work, and the fourth is praying. Praying always works and actually clears you out of the encounter much quicker.
We want to get to the room in the middle, and both paths have (currently) unskippable trap files on them. We take what looks like the longer path to the room, but it ends up being slightly more efficient as we need to backtrack this way anyway to reach and solve the statue puzzle. These statues are meant to be the final puzzle of the game normally, unless you count the final boss as a puzzle. You need to find and place three Blue Candles on them, light the candles, and then pray at a value of 82 or higher to open them. These actually count as a door, and in theory could be glitched open in the same way as the door that leads to this area. This would skip needing the Blue Candles.
However, there are two issues with this. Issue one is that the Blue Candles are very along the path. Two are in this area and the third is right next to the required Photo and thus takes no time to get. The second issue is that the value required to open the path is 128, and also I don't know if it's possible to write to that address at all but even if it was that's very high!!! Given you still need to run around to get the other two final boss items anyway, there isn't much of a reason to try and glitch the statues open.
Emi dances around for a bit before entering the room in the middle. This is done to overflow the step counter back to positive. We're going to re-enable random encounters here in the rat room, and the rat room is a safe area, so we need the counter to be positive or else we'll immediately trigger a battle upon leaving. Pausing upon entering the rat room prevents the rats from blocking our path. Even if you've never heard of this game before, you can most likely tell just from looking at it that the rat room is the most annoying room in the game for speedrunning.
We bounce the Rope off of the Blue Candle before picking it up. This action, combined with using the Rope on Akiko earlier in the run, finally fixes random encounters and character switching. We're able move glitch again, but we can also lose time to unnecessary encounters as a tradeoff. The weird Rope usage is something I've taken to calling the Rope cancel, as it cancels out the glitched character switching that would otherwise be a run killer. Any "incomplete" use of the Rope will cancel those effects. I mentioned earlier that the Rope also needed to be used on Akiko, and that this was a regression from RTA and prior glitched runs: The old route only needs this part of the Rope cancel. Because of that, they're able to grab and use a much more convenient Rope that's directly on the path instead of having to detour for an earlier one like we did here.
For whatever reason, the extra steps I took before the item glitch made it so Rope cancelling just didn't work in that way. Originally, I had wanted to keep the same Inner Sanctuary path as RTA: Run straight in with disabled encounters, take the trap tile on the right, grab and place the first Blue Candle, move to the room with the second Blue Candle and Rope cancel using the Rope that's very directly on the path, but that Rope just wouldn't cancel, no matter what I tried before or after.
Checking to see if it worked was really inefficient as a result. Sweet Home isn't quite sync friendly: Everything will mostly line up, but you'll have to do a lot of 1 or 2 frame adjustments, both adding and removing, to get things to line up. Since everything gets disabled on the item glitch, that means my changes had to happen before the fight with the Zombie, which meant having to resync the barrage of level ups and all of the movement leading up to the second Blue Candle, 10+ minutes of work to test the equivalent of one (1) rerecord.
Thankfully, while exploring every possible option I could to fix things, I eventually found that detour Rope, which cut out needing to fix the movement by allowing me to test things out immediately. Still, nothing worked. On a whim, I decided to fire it at Akiko. I had no reason to think it would work: Using the Rope normally on the pegs in the second Blue Candle room hadn't worked in my earlier testing, so I had pretty much written off doing that, but miraculously, "saving" Akiko actually saved the route.
...Teaching moment: Always exhaust every option you have in a TAS, even if you're completely convinced it won't work. There's a universe in which I had continued to assume this wasn't worth trying, and that universe contains a very disappointed Samsara and a run that's a full two minutes slower.
Okay, yapping over.
After placing the first Blue Candle, Emi heads west and finds some glitched map graphics. This doesn't affect the actual map layout, thankfully. Even more thankfully (if you're thankful for glitched map graphics), this is far from the worst it gets in the run. Now that we can switch characters again, we can move glitch past a chandelier trap. This looks a bit awkward, but Taguchi's position makes it hard for fully efficient move glitching here since he can't go any further left.
Brief Aside: Just Kidding, More Yapping
This is going to be a lot of waffling on about less than a second of awkward looking movement, so feel free to skip this.
Efficient move glitching usually involves moving with Taguchi as little as possible. Emi can move from an "unsafe" tile (OoB, trigger tile, etc) to a safe tile if she moves immediately after being switched to, which allows you to save squares of movement as Taguchi. Most of the time, this works!
However, trap tiles are different, in that if you move glitch onto one, it will still trigger when you move off of it. This means you have to fully move glitch over them to avoid them. Taguchi, in this specific instance, can't move another tile to the left from where he's standing. It would take three extra moves for him to get Emi fully over the trap trigger, and those moves would still require Emi to take extra steps to be in an advantageous position.
Glitching into the little statue thing, however, means I don't have to take the extra steps with Taguchi, because it's not considered a trap trigger. For some completely unfathomable reason, I can only do this on the bottom one. The top one can't be moved into. It is, after two years of working with this game, the ONLY time I have ever seen the move glitch not work. It's an extremely minor time loss, but given the circumstances it's a lot more frustrating than it should be.
2nd Blue Candle and Taguchi Warp
Yapping over. We move on to the ice room.
This room has the much quicker Rope I mentioned earlier, literally being directly along the path you take to the second Blue Candle. On the east side of this room is also the door I mentioned earlier that gets glitched to in the first fight with the Bats. This is an Emi's Key door, it opens with a value of 8. It's used in the RTA route to get the Twin Keys, but... We have those already, so that door is useless to us. Even if we had to go that way for some reason, going through this room and through that door is much slower, as there's a faster way in using the Twin Keys.
...Quick aside that isn't relevant to the TAS, I believe the Bowgun to the east of the Rope would be slightly faster for the RTA route. It fires quicker than the Rope and also goes longer, and with good timing you can actually move up around the post next to the Blue Candle, slide down on the ice to the space directly southwest of the second pole, and Bowgun all the way across to the eastmost pole. Normally, you get dialogue boxes when sliding down the ice, but as long as you keep moving on the ice you'll only get the one at the end. Slightly faster than the RTA method of doubling back and Roping over the wall, but a bit harder to pull off.
After collecting the second Blue Candle, we switch to Taguchi and he promptly tries to leave the mansion.
Remember last Spring when I explained the caterpillar system?
Despite the move glitch being a constant reminder of this, it's easy to forget that Emi is in Taguchi's party, and behaves as normally in that regard as the game's current state allows. In the same way that going back downstairs after the Zombie fight brought Akiko back into the game, going across a screen transition with Taguchi will bring Emi along with him no matter where she is. This means that, for the first and only time in this run, Emi is now following Taguchi as intended.
...Sort of.
When I said Emi was in a state of superposition, I really wasn't lying. Followers in the caterpillar system are supposed to be incorporeal. Emi is currently a follower in the caterpillar system, so she SHOULD be incorporeal at the moment, which would allow Taguchi to move through her. However, characters outside of your current party are solid to allow you to interact with them. Emi is currently the leader of her own party, so she is in fact solid right now, despite following Taguchi. This means Taguchi has to make that little loop in the entrance area in order to be able to leave, as his incorporeal follower is solidly blocking him.
I love this game.
Once we're back in the first floor area, we switch back to Emi and start heading to our next destination. On the way, we get into the last random encounter of the run. The next fight we get into will be the final boss. This random encounter can be easily avoided, but doing so loses about 15 seconds in the long run.
I'll explain why when we get to the final boss, if only to prevent yet another yap section so soon after the last ones. For now, just remember that Emi levels up twice here.
The Mansion Reroute: Lady Mamiya Skip, Courtyard, and Dungeon
For those familiar with the game, you might be wondering why we're here right now. We still need to collect the Photo and the Coffin, and we just warped away from the normal path to get to them. That question should be answered for you in roughly one door animation. For those unfamiliar with the game, however, let me explain what's going on and why this is strange.
On the east side of the Inner Sanctuary is a Twin Keys locked door that leads to Lady Mamiya's quarters, with Lady Mamiya being the primary antagonist of the game. You encounter her in this room, and she does some spooky stuff and sends you all the way back to the Dining Hall, which is the room where we fought the Bats earlier on in the run. This encounter puts out the fireplace in that room, and through that fireplace is the Dungeon. Going through the Dungeon allows easy access to the last two required items: The Coffin is at the end of the Dungeon proper. Taking a slightly different path in there, though, leads to the Courtyard, which is where the Photo is, along with the third and final Blue Candle. The Amulet is also on the north side of the courtyard if we didn't glitch it earlier.
This is the intended way to get to the Dungeon, and it's the way used in the RTA route. While we already have the Twin Keys and could go to Lady Mamiya's quarters immediately upon entering the Inner Sanctuary, there's a lot of move glitching and unavoidable dialogue in there, and then the scene itself takes a bit of time while also putting you in kind of an inconvenient spot to loop around for the items. So, we don't want to take that encounter.
We're heading to the northwestern part of this first floor area, where there's a very convenient Twin Keys door that leads directly to the Courtyard. All we have to do is move glitch down off of the platform and we're right next to not just two of the remaining three items we need, but also the path to the third.
Emi opens the Twin Keys door to the Photo and third Blue Candle first, grabbing them both and leaving behind the Twin Keys and the Hammer that got shuffled to her. Item management is pretty tight here, we're bringing back four items with four inventory slots. If we didn't glitch in the Amulet earlier, we straight up wouldn't have enough room to carry everything back. We'd have had to double back to the statues after getting the second Blue Candle just to free up an inventory spot.
Emi then dives into the Dungeon, move glitching past the first locked gate. We're running out of steps here, with another encounter imminent, so to save as much as we can we move glitch as far upward as we can at the second gate, putting Emi right next to the Pitchfork. The Pitchfork is the best weapon in the game, so Emi picks it up and will wield it effectively in like a minute and a half from now.
We step into the river of presumably blood at the same time our step counter hits negative, and somehow this disables random encounters again, but only while we're moving. This means that the next time we enter a square that automatically moves us, we will enter a battle... Unless we encounter stall it.
Encounter stalling on the tile just before a conveyor tile will reset this brand new version of disabling encounters. The Dungeon is full of said conveyors, not that you're able to see most of them because of how horribly glitched the map graphics are here, but thankfully we only need to stall once each time. As a fun bonus, the "Stop!" textboxes get mixed into the glitched map graphics, meaning I can make dumb jokes about the fact that even the game itself wants us to stop.
Emi runs in circles for a bit before moving into the next room to overflow the step counter once again. The alternative is that we would need to reset to fix the pre-emptive attacks (fighting any enemy here with them still active would crash the game) before fighting an unnecessary random encounter afterward. Emi grabs the Coffin and leaves through a hole in the wall that shouldn't be there. Normally there's a mirror there, and the Hammer in this room breaks it open, but apparently that mirror just gets door glitched open at some point.
Convenient as that is for us right now, this is actually why glitching the Amulet is so important. We could easily shuffle around five items: Akiko is right outside this room, all we'd have to do is drop off an item with her, then pop back in here for the Coffin. The problem is that door glitching only affects one side of a door. If you look closely after Emi leaves the room, you'll see she's coming directly out of a wall. If we had smashed the mirror normally, that wall would be the path back, but that doesn't happen due to the door glitch.
Just to make a note of it: I did try and smash the already smashed mirror again to see if it would update the flag on the other side, and it didn't work.
Endgame
We're back at the second floor, right next to Akiko. This is why the reroute works out so well, it's so efficient that it quite literally leads us back to where we need to be. After shuffling around our items again, we pick up the Tonic on the table for healing. Levelups don't heal characters, so everyone's still at their starting HP values, and Lady Mamiya does more damage than that. Did I mention this game has permadeath, and that characters dying affects the ending? Yeah, we don't want any of that. The heal here is very necessary for everyone to survive.
Emi places the last two Blue Candles on the statues. Ghost Kazuo, somehow, lights the candles despite not being anywhere to be seen, and then with a powerful blast of prayer, the statues reveal the way to the final area of the game, where Lady Mamiya awaits. After a save-reset to finally clear the pre-emptive attacks we've been sitting on since the item glitch, Emi disbands and steps "alone" through the new hole in the wall. The final area is a safe area, though, so no fear of random encounters. We do, however, fear the triggered encounters here, so we move glitch past all of them, landing directly in front of Lady Mamiya. The many extra steps we have from the counter overflow allows Taguchi to walk far into the unsafe part of the first floor in order to let that happen.
FINAL WARNING FOR FLASHING LIGHTS
They happen constantly over this last part of the run. If you're sensitive to them, I would highly recommend not even watching the rest of the run ._. Compared to the rest of the run, this is just a normal puzzle fight, the only weirdness being the duplicate Emi, which you've already seen.
How the Lady Mamiya Fight Works
Lady Mamiya is a puzzle fight, and as such has an incredibly specific set of steps in a specific order to get through it efficiently. I'll explain the process here as if it was a normal playthrough. It doesn't actually change that much for this run, but there's a lot I need to explain about that, so I'd rather lay out the fight first and go on to explain why it's special here.
In her first phase, damaging her is pointless. What you need to do is wait for her to say a specific line of dialogue at the end of her turn:
ころしてやる！ ("I'll kill you all!")
みんあ ....しんでしまえ！ ("Everyone... Die!")
This is the signal that she's vulnerable to the first two required items: The Amulet and the Photo, which must be used in that order. After two horrible screen flashes, and there will be plenty more unfortunately, we are able to pray. Any prayer here will immediately send her into her second and final phase.
In this phase, she now requires damage before she becomes vulnerable to the remaining items. These must be normal attacks: Prayers cannot be used right now. She starts with 500 HP, and after running that down to 0 there will be another horrible screen flash that signals she's become vulnerable to the next item, which is the Diary. Once the Diary is used (with another screen flash), the party gets one free round of prayers. At this point, you need to do a total of 1024 damage to her: This does take all of the previous damage in the fight into account. She will flash at each interval of 512, and after the second flash, she becomes vulnerable to the Coffin. After using the Coffin (with another screen flash!), the party can pray again. At this point, she needs to be hit with an 80 point prayer or higher, and after YET ANOTHER SCREEN FLASH, the fight ends and the game is won.
Something I really like about the design of this fight is that even though a specific prayer value is needed to finish her off, it's actually less than the value needed to open the final area. Thus, there's no possible way you can softlock this battle.
Now that you understand how the fight works in general...
How the Lady Mamiya Fight Works In This Run Specifically
Also known as, why that lone Evil Doll from a bit earlier is one of the true heroes of this run.
This fight cannot be run from, so the run option can be used as a turn skip, saving a little bit of time over any other action. This is done by everyone on the first round, as we need to wait for her to scream about killing us all anyway. That dialogue can be manipulated, leading to the only time in the run where manipulating an enemy's action is actually relevant. As a quick aside, yes, I believe that is officially the longest time it took for one of my many Chekhov's Yaps to come to fruition. We finally got there.
Akiko and Emi use the Amulet and Photo respectively on the second round of phase one, while Kazuo continues to skip his turn. Emi, being in the battle twice, actually uses the Photo twice as a result. The first time doesn't do anything because it has to be used after the Amulet, but then Akiko uses the Amulet, so second Emi's second use of the Photo goes off as planned. Everyone except for Emi "attacks" on round three to save a couple frames on choosing battle actions, and Emi prays to send the fight to phase two.
Since damage now matters, it's time to talk about why we took that random encounter with the Evil Doll earlier.
Akiko and Kazuo are almost completely useless in this fight, outside of carrying and using three of the four battle items. Their internal levels are so low (I believe they end up at 15 and 10, respectively, both of which are under the otherwise minimum required level of 16) that they can't do more than a single point of damage on most of their attacks. Even with the Silver Sword, Kazuo barely reaches double digits on a prayer, which are a lot more powerful than normal attacks.
Emi, on the other hand, got much luckier with her "real" levelups and ended up at the equivalent of level 18 after the Zombie fight. She, especially when aided by the Pitchfork, consistently hits triple digit damage at that level. Now, given we need to do a little over 1500 damage over the course of the fight, triple digit damage is great, but Emi at level 18 can only hit very low triple digits. Her damage variance is 40-60 points or so, and the max damage she does with a normal attack at level 18 is 140. Even though she gets two attacks per turn, this isn't good enough for an efficient fight.
At that max value, she still needs two full rounds of attacks to hit the first 500 damage threshold, doing 280 per round. Since she attacks at the beginning and end of each round, she needs to hit that 500 damage on her first attack of the second round. This allows Kazuo to use the Diary as soon as possible. Since she can't do that at level 18, though, Kazuo has to wait another round. This, in turn, delays the prayer round, which is the highest damage round of the fight, as the Diary has to resolve first.
On top of that, even in the prayer round, level 18 Emi maxes out at 248 damage. We need to hit the full 1524 required damage over this round and Emi's first attack on the next round, or else Akiko's Coffin use will also get delayed. Needless to say, Emi doesn't hit that damage. Akiko and Kazuo, being so low level, can only barely add maybe 40 more points of damage, which is nowhere near enough save that extra round, meaning that the second phase is dragged out to seven full rounds instead of an optimal five. This is what would happen, and is in fact what DID happen, when all encounters in the run were skipped, originally turning a 20+ second improvement into a mere 7 second improvement.
However, the item glitch gave everyone a significant amount of EXP. Emi in particular is sitting at over 12k, which is enough for her to hit level 20 under normal circumstances. At level 20, her maximum damage output on normal attacks is a whopping 214, and she gets a full 100 more damage on her prayers as well. This allows her to fully solo the damage portion of the second phase, as she can easily hit every damage threshold at optimal moments, leading to the optimal five round fight.
That's why the Evil Doll encounter was so important. Since she has the EXP for level 20, and since she's internally considered to be level 18, the game will try and catch her up on every encounter. By simply taking a brief moment to instantly kill the weakest enemy in the game, Emi levels up twice in a single battle due to the party dupe, internally putting her at level 20 stats. Her stat menu level of -258 raises by two as well, to -260. Good luck figuring that one out.
We can finally explain the optimized fight.
Emi is manipulated to do exactly 500 damage on her first three attacks. I unfortunately rolled a real bad spot in the damage variance pattern: Her variance here is something like 151 to 214 damage, and optimally timed attacks from her were at the very beginning of that variance. Thankfully, even at the minimum required damage, the rest of the fight goes exactly to plan. Kazuo can use the Diary on round two, giving us the prayer round on round three.
Emi hits a max damage prayer of 347, hitting the 1000 damage threshold. Her followup 347 doesn't quite make it to the 1500 we need, but we're only 153 away from that at the moment, and she is guaranteed to attack first in the next round. At most, we need to wait a frame or two if we somehow roll the bare minimum of Emi's damage variance, but no matter what we're hitting it next round.
Anyway, you're right, we rolled the bare minimum of Emi's damage variance! Akiko is still able to use the Coffin. From here, all we have to do is have Emi hit the 80+ point pray on the next round. Once again, everyone else "attacks" to save a couple frames since they won't go through anyway, and the run finally ends once that prayer is processed.
Kazuo, having been a ghost for several minutes, decides to finally show back up in corporeal form for the ending. Asuka, being too used to not having any screentime since shortly before the item glitch happened, decides to just stay offscreen until the party of five leave the mansion together.
The game finally cuts to black after media's most telegraphed jumpscare.
An Overview of my Old Research
Because this submission text is currently only my third or fourth longest ever and I'd like to at least put it in a solid 2nd.
I took a good number of notes a couple years ago while testing and theorycrafting. The main reason none of them ever saw the light of day is because I wanted the final run to be a huge, mindblowing surprise, even over what it had become from kill_me's RTA efforts, but they also never surfaced because a lot of them just felt like false leads that I could never really prove or disprove.
Early Process
I'd figured out early on that the item glitch sort of worked the same way as the door glitch, in that arbitrary values were being written to characters' inventory addresses, so one of the first things I did was run through as many different permutations of the item glitch as I could to see exactly what values could be written. Here's the list I had, minus a couple entries I had apparently never confirmed:
| Added HEX Value | Character (Item Slot) |
|---|
| 01 | Akiko (2), Emi (2) |
| 02 | Taguchi (1) |
| 03 | Taguchi (1) |
| 0A | Taguchi (2) |
| 0C | Taguchi (2) |
| 10 | Taguchi (1), Akiko (2) |
| 11 | Emi (1) |
| 12 | Emi (1) |
| 13 | Asuka (1), Taguchi (2) |
| 15 | Kazuo (2) |
| 1C | Taguchi (1) |
| 1F | Asuka (2) |
| 20 | Asuka (2), Taguchi (1) |
| 33 | Kazuo (1), Taguchi (2) |
The main thing to take away here is that Taguchi and Asuka have pretty noticeably wide ranges for what they could have written. Notably, Taguchi is also able to get the Diary from an empty item slot, meaning Kazuo could potentially be used for something else if the need arose for it.
If a website could be a co-author, I'd happily add the Sweet Home shrine on RPGClassics, as it was instrumental to my research both back then and now. Back then, I was using
this save state hacking page to track items. Quick heads-up: This whole site is based on the old Gaijin Translations patch, which has some inaccuracies that aren't reflected in this text or anything I've written about the game on the forums past my original submission. That didn't make it any less useful to me, though! The lack of HTTPS up until recently did, though. C'mon, RPGClassics. Even TASVideos wasn't that late to the game.
Originally, my process involved cross-referencing that hacking list with the values I had found being written to character inventories by working backwards from items I wanted. For example, I'd look at something like the Coffin, and subtract all of the values I had from it to see the items I would need to have. Then, I'd check
the map on the Shrine to see if it was possible to grab any of these items.
Still using the Coffin as an example, I had a value of +20 (HEX) being written to both Asuka's second slot and Taguchi's first slot, which when working backwards from the Coffin's 2B becomes the Wood's 0B, which I wouldn't have really needed the map to check because there's literally a second board right next to the one we pick up for the board glitch, but if it was something that I immediately couldn't place, the map was a huge help in locating it for me.
Through this method, I had found potential ways of getting every required item into my inventory. I did not have them confirmed at the time, and I still don't as I believe most of them are impossible due to knowledge I didn't have at the time, but I had found seemingly valid combinations for all four of the battle items and at least one Blue Candle. What's worse is that I had also found a potential setup that could get me all five of those things at once. It required a
pretty substantial detour for a couple out of the way items, but the time save from it would have been legendary.
What Could've Been
So, anyway, here's a full table of what I found in that initial research:
| Original Item | Added HEX | Final Item | Character (Item Slot) |
|---|
| Hammer | 0A | Twin Keys | Taguchi (2) |
| Match | 10 | Twin Keys | Taguchi (1), Akiko (2) |
| Wood | 10 | Gold Key | Taguchi (1), Akiko (2) |
| Pills | 11 | Twin Keys | Emi (1) |
| Match | 11 | Gold Key | Emi (1) |
| Hammer | 11 | Amulet | Emi (1) |
| Wire | 12 | Twin Keys | Emi (1) |
| Pills | 12 | Gold Key | Emi (1) |
| Broom | 13 | Twin Keys | Asuka (1), Taguchi (2) |
| Wire | 13 | Gold Key | Asuka (1), Taguchi (2) |
| Polaroid | 15 | Gold Key | Kazuo (2) |
| Rope | 15 | Iron Key | Kazuo (2) |
| Polaroid | 1C | Iron Key | Taguchi (1) |
| Log | 1C | Blue Candle | Taguchi (1) |
| Pick | 1F | Diary | Asuka (2) |
| Wood | 20 | Coffin | Asuka (2), Taguchi (1) |
| Rope | 20 | Photo | Asuka (2), Taguchi (1) |
| (empty) | 33 | Diary | Kazuo (1), Taguchi (2) |
One of the first ones I had confirmed and found a consistent setup for was writing +11 into Emi's first item slot, which was great because it was both the most convenient option due to being Emi, but it also had a real good set of items attached to it: The Pills could become the Twin Keys, the Match could become the Gold Key, and the one that actually made it into this run, the Hammer could become the Amulet.
The Gold Key was an interesting find at the time: It opens the door we glitched open to the Inner Sanctuary, which could skip the Bat encounters if they don't glitch open other doors, but it also opens the other door to Lady Mamiya's chamber, which would allow opening the fireplace without needing to get the Twin Keys first or having to move through that textbox-filled hallway. It has no use in the current route since we need the extra encounters anyway for the levels and we don't need to encounter Lady Mamiya at all, but it could still be an interesting get for RTA if it can be done consistently.
The Iron Key isn't as useful, but I kept it in my notes just in case. It unlocks the gates in the Dungeon that normally get move glitched through, which might've helped on a route that couldn't do that. It also unlocks a different door on the first floor that also leads to the Courtyard, however it's slower than the Twin Keys door (extra hallway w/ a room hazard trigger) and you still need the Twin Keys anyway to get the Photo and Blue Candle. That being said, it could still be an option for a setup that gets those items.
One thing that's notably missing from the list is the other item glitch used in this run, which is the Polaroid turning into the Twin Keys. This pops up later in my notes, in a proposed route that had also included the Coffin example I mentioned earlier, using a board in Taguchi's first item slot, which didn't end up working out for a reason that pretty much invalidates most of what I just laid out here. As it turns out, not all of these values are being added.
In quite a few cases, those values are fully overwriting what was there before, making them useless for me as they'd only ever lead to one result, nothing of which being anything I needed. This, notably, was happening with Taguchi and Asuka, which is why that Coffin addition didn't end up working out. No matter what Taguchi has in his first slot, it will be completely overwritten with the Hammer as long as we're also getting the Twin Keys, as both things rely on the same precise result (Kazuo's prayer value in the Zombie fight). Same thing with Asuka getting the Pail: Even if she had something in that slot, she would still end up with the Pail.
Branch 112
I do need to keep talking about that proposed route, though, because... Well, that's technically what ended up in this run.
Kazuo gets the Diary, Akiko turns the Polaroid into the Twin Keys, Taguchi turns the Wood into the Coffin, and Emi turns the Hammer into the Amulet. At the time, I hadn't stumbled across the mansion reroute, so my thinking with these items was going to be as such: After the item glitch, start with the usual rat room Blue Candle and ice room Blue Candle, use the Twin Keys for the Lady Mamiya encounter in her quarters to open the fireplace, go to the Courtyard through the Dungeon since the rest of the Dungeon isn't necessary anymore, grab the Photo and third Blue Candle, backtrack out, beat the game from there.
Decent route, though fairly backtrack-heavy, but it would still save a significant amount of time. Given how easy the setup was, I had even gone as far as to test it at the time. It only needed those three easily accessible items in the starting area, after all. That's how I ended up with branch 112 on my original TASPROJ. It has the Twin Keys on Akiko, the Amulet on Emi... But it doesn't have the Coffin or the Diary. The Diary was a huge blow since it had normally been guaranteed up until that point, and the detour to get it might not have even been possible as it requires the northern door in that second floor room to be unlocked with Emi's Key, which gets deleted through this iteration of the glitch. The Coffin did sting a bit as well at the time, though I had always seen it as less significant to glitch in than the other items since it's so close to where we need to be after the collection anyway.
Still, me having the foresight to save this branch anyway is what led to this run's existence. Looking back through all of my old branches and all of my old route ideas, this one seemed to be the most plausible, and I decided to chase it. And it worked.
The rest of my notes don't really say much else, it's just a lot of speculation and half-finished forum posts that I never felt comfortable putting up. Some of them say I've "confirmed" that every item is obtainable individually, and I don't quite know what I meant by that at the time. I don't have any branch saved where I have the Photo, Coffin, or a Blue Candle, so I must have just meant I had the values and needed items lining up, but "confirmed" implies I went through and tested everything, and the existence of branch 112 backs up that I had done that, so did I just not save those branches or did I not actually test those things? The world may never know. Or care. Mostly never care.
Potential Improvements
This is a terrifying section to write.
The board glitch and everything it allows in turn have already broken this game wide open, and yet I still feel like the full potential of it has yet to be realized... which is why it's hard to give specific improvements at all. I don't know what they are, only that they can likely be discovered.
The best thing for this route would be to glitch in a Blue Candle. This would remove the need to go to the ice room, meaning we could Rope cancel off of the rat room candle and warp straight back to the entrance. However, the only way I had theorized to get a Blue Candle was to use a Log on Taguchi's first item slot. The Log itself is easily available, it's in the same sideroom that we take the Rope from to "rescue" Akiko, but Taguchi's items are almost always overwritten instead of being added to, so a different method for obtaining a Blue Candle would need to be found from items that are close enough to not lose time to obtain. I don't see this being possible with current knowledge.
An actual route change would need one of a couple additional known glitches that lead to the same result. Here, you'd get the Photo, a Blue Candle, and the Amulet, then glitch open the fireplace. It's possible to trigger the Lady Mamiya encounter early. I believe this was discovered by kill_me prior to the item glitch, but there's also
stevenqbeatz' recent discovery where the fireplace was just opened directly, though this seems to also disable the possibility of the door glitch to the Inner Sanctuary. Either way, opening the fireplace with those items means all you'd need to do is loop through the Dungeon once for the Coffin after getting the other two Blue Candles, and you'd be at endgame. The dream route is, of course, glitching in the Coffin as well, reducing the run to just running into the Inner Sanctuary, picking up a couple candles, and proceeding to beat the game from there. Again, though, I don't think any of this is possible with current knowledge, but I can't exactly say I think it's fully impossible either.
Final Thoughts
I referred to this as my "white whale" at the very beginning of this submission text, not just because I've been chasing this run of this game for two years, but also because I'd been dreaming of finally coming up with my own proper route for something.
I think that's why I was so caught up on chasing this game. The discoveries I had made on my own were substantial enough that the entire run could have been redone with each one, so I had to test everything and see what was viable and what wasn't, and the more I tested, the more things got muddied. More testing meant more discoveries, more discoveries meant more ideas, more things that could work together.
At any point, I could have taken the RTA route and optimized it. In fact,
that's what I had originally been working on. That was uploaded April 28th, 2023, which was less than a month after I had cancelled my 18:10. I kept telling myself I should just finish up that run, but I couldn't. It wasn't optimal. It wasn't good enough. It needed something new in it, something huge to set it apart, something that I knew was possible with all of the research I had done.
Sitting here now, writing this, not just with the sub-10 time I had been dreaming of for so long, but somehow managing to have achieved sub-9 as well... It may have taken years, but with a lot of help and a lot of inspiration, I finally caught that white whale. The white whale of a worthy run of this game, and the white whale of a TAS route I can truly call my own.
I'm finally free.
Thank you for watching.
Suggested Screenshot
Frame 24144:
Darkman425: Every time Samsara kept measuring the Home, it seemed to keep getting smaller. Imaging I knew a better way to continue the House of Leaves joke that involved replacing the input file with one linked above this message that saves 3944 frames. Also resuming judging, of course.
