This is my 2nd Tas of Bust-a-Move 4 Story Mode vs Computer. This time its with Gigant.

My first submission of this game was with Cleon, who i thought was one of the top tier characters to make a tas with. I had initially ranked Gigant as 6th best choice for tasing purposes because of his easy to counter bubbles. While this is true for human speedrunners, in the hands of tas and lots of rng manipulation, he became the best choice.

Compared to Cleon, his damage is nearly twice as much, meaning i need less setups for towers and combos to get a lot of damage in. But it also means that i need to be careful with starter grid and shooter bubble choices.

The starter grids are chosen the same way, but this time i kept a firm eye on the shooter bubbles. The shooter bubbles must not have one of the following:

When i made the Cleon tas, i thought that there would only be ~10 starter grids. This is true if you use the first 1-~7 frames of selection time on the Universe Map. The ~10 starter grids are consistent, but if you delay the x input in the Meeting Screen for long enough, the same starter grids will reappear but with the shooter bubbles being different. This means that if you had bad starter grids like for example a big orange cluster and your first bubble was orange, you can delay the x input in the meeting scene and try to find the same grid again, but with the shooter bubble not being an orange bubble at first. This gives the enemy less time to counter you and because you are tas and shoot fast, you get to the orange cluster faster.

Now when you delay more than lets say 10+ frames on the Map you will get new grids, though im not entirely sure if some of the grids of the first 1-7 frames will reappear. I also did not look into wasting more time on the Map to get even more grids, because its just so exhausting to have to come up with tower patterns and combos. It can easily get very difficult to keep track of good grids from the first frames and the ones that come after 10+ frames delay, they all need to be tested.

With that being said, delaying frames on the Universe Map was only used twice (Develon and Gigant), because their initial grids were horrible and i wanted to get a much better time than the Cleon Tas.

Lets get into some more RNG that happens in the battle. I think i forgot to mention that whenever you take damage then the CPU will also get different bubble damage as a result. Most of the time you want to avoid taking damage because you cant make any towers or combos during the damage animation. For the later battles however it can be good. Delaying the inputs before taking damage can give you new bubble damage that can fit well with your grid (see G and Madame Luna) and allow you to deal the final blow. Right before the CPU loses, we need to not deal too much damage to them because the battle only ends when the bubbles finish traveling on their screen. All of the later CPU's follow that tower pattern and i ideally want to only get 1 more bubble onto their tower so they lose, but i think i made a mistake by picking gigant here because he cannot deal 1 bubble damage, only 2.

Madame Luna and Dreg are the biggest problem in the tas. For there to be a very good Dreg, we need a Madame Luna where we deal a lot of damage early on, so we have time to shoot and waste bubbles at the end to get favorable Dreg grids. The more bubbles you can shoot, the more grids are available for Dreg. I noticed that if you pause the game right before Madame Luna loses, you can get an additional grid for Dreg.

RNG that determines the starter grids:

1. Selecting your character

2. Skipping the intro

3. Universe Map input

4. Meeting scene input

If the 10+ frame delay rule applies to the first 2 points, then im counting roughly 640 possible grids for a single CPU, not counting the variants with the different shooter bubbles (could be 1280 then). These 640 grids are still within reason for an optimal CPU. It still means that you could try close to 10k grids before Dreg. While i am always pursuing for the most optimal tases, it would take me way too long. Even if you had the most optimal tas up until Dreg, he could give you a double digit time because guess what? You never know what grid you are getting until the end.

4 seconds faster (or 3 seconds faster when you compare it to my new attempt with Cleon) than Cleon, the timesave comes from the small tower on the left. Not much to say really, a little bit of time is lost to Bob shooting in the middle which takes time to travel. The last hit with the yellow bubble is necessary.

The orange bubble she misses in the middle saved a lot of time.

Well, a lot of timeloss to be honest. It's faster than the Cleon run but not even 12s. I think 1 more frame and this would be 13s. I spent a week trying to optimize Marino but with most of the grids i wasnt able to finish him off. The major timeloss comes from him turning way too much instead of staying in one spot, but this was the best rng i could manipulate for.

I usually dont go for such a long chain reaction at the start, but Kurol turns his shooter for long enough that he can take damage from it.

Now this is a very optimal grid. You can shoot through bubbles with a frame precise shooter angle. Figuring out when to damage Tam Tam was a little tricky.

I let Cleon intentionally damage me, but she stays in the middle for that. Good.

I actually had a grid for G that was 10 frames faster but Brambs grids were just too bad, so i had to stick with this battle outcome.

It always seems so simple to defeat the CPU's, but figuring out when to delay shots and deal damage takes lots of trial and error.

The fastest fight. Develons grid is full with orange and green bubbles and he only gets red,blue,yellow in his queue. So close to perfection.

Gigant was a very hard battle. Delaying one of the shots before taking damage lets me get a better combo angle and the enemy Gigant also gets an unfavourable bubble damage pattern.

Without taking damage like this, Madame Luna would have been 1s slower.

Only 4 grids available for Dreg and it was almost a disaster. The grid i chose could have been 1 second faster if his last bubble wasnt a yellow one. The first combo is frame perfect, meaning that i cant delay it at all to get a different damage outcome for Dreg. If i had delayed the shot by 1 frame, Dreg would have made a combo. I had to bait him to the right with manipulated yellow bubbles, otherwise i could not have gotten my damage in.

Im glad i made another Tas of this game, it was fun testing out different grids and the outcomes. Do not compare the Gigant Tas to the Cleon Tas, they are different characters with different damage output and bubbles.

If this Tas gets accepted then i would like to have this userfile for the encode because of the score: https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/638941314895391852

This will also be the last bust a move 4 tas i submit to avoid spam.

CoolHandMike: Claiming for judging.

CoolHandMike: Extremely fast rounds for this game. The nearest speedrun time for expert is over 17 minutes which over twice the length of the tas, and considering that a huge portion of the movie is just cutscenes and loading screens that makes the time improvement even more noticeable.

Accepting to goal "Player vs Computer Story, Expert, Gigant".

Great job!

inconsistent: Processing. r3gamerz is handling the encodes for this one.

CoolHandMike: Replacing file with one with cycle count.