2 seconds of time save! Sorry, I hope I don’t start another frame war like last time haha.
In case you have no clue what’s going on or if you just need a quick refresher, here’s the short version:
During battle, the weak board Emi is standing on breaks and that breaks the game. You are not supposed to be in a battle state and an I-need-to-be-rescued state simultaneously. Emi is now stuck in the floor but can join back with Kazuo and Akiko. Taguchi rescues and teams with Emi even though she is already in a team. Yes, Emi is now in two teams at once! When Taguchi moves, Emi moves. This is helpful for bypassing obstacles and grabbing hard to reach items since he controls her remotely. Taguchi is also used for extra storage space. There are some crazy side effects from doing this glitch too. Emi now runs at twice the speed. Copies of party members will appear in battle. Getting into battle with a zombie can cause item glitches to happen. Having specific items (or nothing) in your inventory prior to battle will cause other items to be glitched into it. Emi having the mallet in her inventory will turn it into the amulet, but only if you move Asuka on specific tiles. Doing an exact value of 126 damage to the zombie using Kazuo’s prayer will cause the polaroid to magically turn into the twin keys. Getting into two fights with bats will open some important doors. Emi runs as fast as she can to collect the rest of the necessary items needed to defeat Lady Mamiya while avoiding as many random encounters as possible. Got all that? Good lol!
Optimizations and differences:
Since the publication of the TAS almost a year ago now, I had improved the
RTA WR time quite a bit. Recently, I’ve been making some theory TASes to see if there are any other optimizations I could implement in the RTA run to get it down to sub 13min. When doing some comparisons and timing things out,
I realized something I was doing was actually faster than what the TAS was doing . In the current TAS, Emi splits up from the team to go grab the mallet and rejoins afterwards. It’s faster if Emi brings Akiko and Kazuo with her. In an RTA run, this is much more risky as Akiko and Kazuo may go off-grid and softlock the game if she moves too fast while turning. That’s pretty much the main time save here. Unfortunately due to RNG differences, some frames were lost in the “rats & cats” room as I wasn’t able to manip the best pattern. However, I still got a pretty good pattern after messing with it for a bit. The Lady Mamiya fight went much better this time around though. Emi was doing more damage so no waiting frames were needed to manip the amount. Other than that, everything else is almost identical. No changes to the route at all.
I was contemplating even submitting this as it’s not a huge difference or anything too special, but to me a PB is a PB! Squeezing an extra 2 seconds from a game that is already super optimized feels like an accomplishment. Unless a new route or glitch is discovered, I really think this is it! (for now....)
Thanks again kill_me, AmaizumiUni, and especially Samsara for all their hard work, dedication and optimizations :)
Challenger: Sweet House? This is more like Sweet GlitchfestHouse! Nice to see an improvement for an already very broken game that you can learn a lot in the way thanks to the great explanation (Written by Samsara) included in the aforementioned previous run ;)
Accepting two seconds of improvement to the current publication.
