Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest
(SNES) in 1:28:31
This is a 20 minute, 49 second improvement to the current FFMQ TAS by DonamerDragon, which was originally published 20 years ago, on November 1, 2006. His run is very impressive considering its age, and much of the time-save comes from implementing a single major glitch that was discovered years later: The Inventory Underflow Glitch.
FFMQ, as a very stripped-down and basic jRPG for beginners, only has a handful of shops, and each of them only sells one item each: Cure Potions, Seeds, or Bombs. It asks if you want 1 of the item, and you can change that number all the way up to the max of 99, subtracting what you currently hold of course. But for some silly reason, the game also lets you go the other direction, and purchase 0 of it instead. With Cures or Seeds, if you did not have that item in your inventory already, the game will give it to you anyway, but with a quantity of 0. If you use that 0, the game will still let you use the item, and subtract 1 from that 0, underflowing to 255 and corrupting the next item's ID.
While glitched items themselves don't have much practical use, messing up the usable inventory does allow some access to alter the Key Items, giving us the ability to skip the entire Fire Crystal chapter of the game, as well as an honestly pointless fetch quest right at the start of the final chapter.
Otherwise, I found a number of battle strategy improvements and a couple of dungeon movement improvements. Again, DonamerDragon did a fantastic job on the previous TAS given the knowledge and the tools of the time. I'll detail what I came up with below, in case something appears unintuitive to a viewer.
Chapter-by-Chapter Descriptions
- The main character's name, according to the manual, is Benjamin, but you're forced to insert whatever name you like. I do not believe it affects RNG in any way, and character count does not affect how long it takes to display text, so all names are effectively the same. "TAS" is chosen.
- In my testing, it seems that Benjamin cannot RNG-outspeed the Behemoth. The game was designed for the player to be slower than most monsters without some level grinding, so Benjamin will struggle to go first or second for most of the run with RNG manipulation. This is a source of heavy time loss if not managed.
- Anyone making direct comparisons between this run and the previous publication might notice that I am constantly losing a frame or two during every screen transition. Simple explanation: Emulator differences--modern Bizhawk is just doomed to lose frames over the old Snes9x. I can't even tell you how many hundreds (or thousands?) of frames are lost from this. oh well!
- Pick up Kaeli, pick up Cure spell for Benjamin.
- One thing an RNG machine could possibly dig for as an improvement is Preemptive Strikes. The two encounters in the forest here will always have three enemies each, so locking them out of attacking for a turn could save a couple seconds at least per battle. This stays somewhat true for much of the run, but how much it matters fluctuates. If a game disassembly is ever done and the exact formulae are found, it would be nice to know what is needed to manipulate Preemptives, or if it really is just not possible most of the time.
- Using version 1.0 of the ROM allows us to defeat this mini-boss in one move. Now we have an axe--it's the only one we'll hold for the entire run. Kaeli is swapped out for Tristam. (And, yes, even if you cheat and give yourself the exorbatant amount of gil he is asking for for the Elixer, the game will still act like you don't have enough to cover. But thou must!)
- In order to properly set up the Inventory Underflow glitch, we have to pick up items in a certain order. Seeds first, which are picked up as we explore the Bone Dungeon. Cure Potions need to be second, and we pick some up on the way back out.
- This Boss Battle against Flamerus Rex could possibly be done faster if I let Benjamin flatline and take him out of the battle, since he does less damage per round than Tristam. The boss inflicting poison on Tristam every turn would be a fast way to do minimal damage, letting Tristam go ham with ninja star crits. Just an idea to test for whoever decides to beat this run in the future.
- Sand Coin obtained, Tristam leaves us, and we have to talk to Kaeli again before we can continue. That happens a lot in this game for some reason.
80 frames lost in Chapter 1.
- Heading through the Focus Tower for the first time, we head into the wintry north and pick up Phoebe as a partner. For this chapter, her autopilot does a solid job of quickly destroying enemy parties with magic, but we have to be very precise with the amount of Thunder she uses. We have enough mana-restoring Seeds for 20 casts, but there are 22 battles that want Thunder while Phoebe is in our party. Finding the perfect two battles to go without and the perfect times to use those Seeds was a big struggle but I'm extremely happy with the route I ended up with. This did require manipulating a couple of "Surprised the Enemy" moments to make work. A lot of time was saved in this chapter as a result.
- The mini-boss at the end of the Wintry Cave, Squidite...Again, I'm curious if this fight could be done faster with an incapacitated Benjamin. Why spend time swinging his axe for 202 damage when Phoebe does 646 each round? Stripping Ben to 1HP is a terrible idea, but I wonder if setting him to Defend every round would end up faster...Bah! It took me a month to make the test run and another month to make this submitted run, I'm not...im not againing.
362 frames saved in Wintry Cave
- The second half of setup for the Inventory Underflow glitch begins on the way out of the Wintry Cave. We have to pick up Heal Potions and Refreshers in either order so that our typical inventory is full before later manipulations. I grab Heal now and Refresher in the Ice Pyramid, though the reverse order could possibly work better--we have to re-empty the fourth slot at the start of the final chapter, and Refreshers cannot be used outside of battle, while Heal Potions can. I have enough opportunity to have party members waste turns on Refreshers though that it ends up not a problem.
- Keeping party member HP high for the main Boss is important, so I manipulate the Snow Crab mini-boss to just inflict Confusion every turn, although the skull-curse animation is a little slow. Not having to Cure later makes up for the time losses, I calculated.
261 frames saved in Falls Basin.
- There are two kinds of boss fights in this game: Fights where the enemy just throws bombs every round, and fights where the enemy tries to get cute with status inflictions. The latter are easy to manipulate, but the big Boss of the Ice Pyramid, the Ice Golem, is an example of a damage race. He likes to inflict Sleep on the first couple of turns, sure, but after that, the party just wants to outdamage him in order to not have to stop and Cure up and waste time. There is one battle down the line where this isn't perfect, but it's all we can do.
162 frames saved in the Ice Pyramid.
- Ice Coin in hand, Phoebe leaves the party, and we're forced to walk out of the Pyramid on our own. This puts us in a rare "Benjamin alone" party, but he's able to take out the two mandatory encounters without a scratch. I pick up the Noble Armor in this room, too, which increases his defense slightly and also gives him permanent immunity to Poison. More useful than it sounds, though only for a couple of fights later on.
785 frames saved in Chapter 2.
- Before heading back into the Focus Tower, we make a pitstop at a Battlefield to destroy 10 enemy battles with Benjamin still partnerless. This would be a silly waste of time for a TAS, usually, but this Battlefield grants Ben the Exit spell when defeated, which is a *massive* timesaver for all future dungeons (and cities!), as well as being an occasionally-useful instant-enemy-kill spell. (We do not gain XP or Gil from enemies defeated this way, but we don't get enough XP from each battle for it to matter, and Gil never matters, really.)
- We head into Fireburg and initiate the Inventory Underflow glitch. By now, we've used up our Seeds, so we purchase 0 of them and put them into our first slot. Then we use a Seed, which corrupts the Cure Potions into Sky Coins. Then, we purchase exactly 19 Cure Potions from another merchant. She looks at our inventory, sees that we don't have any Cure Potions, and decides that it should be safe to give us the potions, but since all four slots are already full of other items, this stack of Cure Potions bleeds into the Key Items section and corrupts it. This takes away the two Coins we already have (but don't need anymore) and gives us the two Coins we still need. This lets us immediately go back into the Focus Tower and open the door into the next chapter!
68,032 frames saved in Chapter 3.
- The run gets really tricky and relatively slow here. Time is lost in almost every battle, usually because the heroes can't both outspeed the enemies anymore: Benjamin is under-statted compared to the previous run. He's also under-spelled--DonamerDragon's Benjamin had the very powerful White spell to help win battles, but that option is no longer available since that spell is picked up in one of the dungeons we completely skipped over. This forced me to consider whether picking up a different spell (or the highest level Axe) was worth doing. Aero seemed like a natural get--only one battle in the Focus Tower is required to get it--but Aero's battle animation is the second slowest in the game, at 2.5 seconds per cast. Discovering this led me to realize that Kaeli also shouldn't be throwing out Aeros for most of this chapter, too, despite it being kinda her go-to attack for most of the battles here. It's so slow! I ended up deciding that letting Benjamin stay bare was the fastest route until the Flare spell is available for pickup in Pazuzu's Tower later.
- Our party is still empty as we walk onto the Rope Bridge, but Reuben (who??) leaves the party (???) to go fight a single mummy and lose (?????) and we have to go clean that mess up. Tristam comes by and joins us, but really only long enough for him to tell us we really should go get Kaeli again instead. Back to Aquaria we go (not Foresta for some reason.)
- Also, Tristam gives us the Dragon Claw as he leaves, which is a very powerful weapon. An enemy struck by it may become simultaneously afflicted with Blind, Poison, Paralysis, Sleep, and Petrification. For some reason, though, if an enemy is immune to Petrify, the game wipes *all* of its status effects away, so this is not always as useful as it sounds. But wherever an enemy is weak to Petrify, though, a quick clawing is by far the fastest way to defeat it.
- Climbing the tree is such a slog. And then when we save the day, the tree calls us 'GOON KID!!' what a vulgar thing to accuse us of.
1,281 frames lost in the Giant Tree.
- We now arrive in Windia finally. First off, we enter a house in the back which contains a transport square in its basement. This leads to Fireburg, specifically the barricaded house where we are given throwable Mega Grenades--necessary for the final dungeon, might as well get it now. This is possible because the Inventory Underflow glitch put the Mobius Crest into our Key Items. We could have immediately transported here at that time, but if you cheat here that way, when you try to leave town, the overworld does not allow you to walk southward until the Giant Tree has moved. If only you could sneak over to Mount Gale right away you could skip that entire dungeon, but no can do (as far as I know.)
- The bossfight of Mount Gale is one I'm proud of. Kaeli uses the Heal spell on the Dullahan--normally this cures statuses, but if used on an enemy it will *cause* a random status instead. This particular boss is actually vulnerable to Paralysis, but trying to set it with Benjamin's Claw causes no effect since the boss is strong against Petrify. So Kaeli's Heal spell does the trick instead, and promptly chops him down for a huge time gain.
- Benjamin Claws himself here to set Petrify, btw. He's weak enough that it's just faster to wipe him out of the battle. Fun fact, after the battle, he has to have Heal used on him or else he can't cast Exit--the Dragon Claw inflicted him with Silence successfully, and it actually works! The game has enemy attacks that can inflict Silence, but they're not programmed correctly and the game never sets the status. Attempts to Silence an enemy similarly never work. But somehow, Benjamin clawing a party member can actually set the Silence status, and it functions properly and even has an in-battle ,(...) icon! The time loss to undoing the Silence is minimal since we would be going into the menu to cast Exit anyway.
1,787 frames lost in Mount Gale section.
- With the boss defeated and the winds dying down, the scientist Otto can create a Rainbow Bridge over to Pazuzu's Tower, where the 4th crystal is being drained. We could, at this point, use the Inventory Underflow glitch to put the Thunder Rock in our Key Items, which lets Otto create a second Rainbow Bridge beyond Pazuzu's Tower over to the backside of Spencer's Place. While this would give us immediate access to final chapter locations, there would be no way to actually get on to Mac's Ship--the trigger to do that is flagged from a conversation we have with Kaeli once she leaves our party, and the only way to get her in that state is to complete Pazuzu's Tower. Sure would be nice to skip this other slog of a dungeon, but no way has been found yet.
- The central gimmick of Pazuzu's Tower is that the boss is on an elevator, and will always run away from you when approached--unless you flip switches that lock down their floor so the elevator can't go past. Once Floor 2 is locked, if Pazuzu is on Floor 4 when you approach him, he cannot run away to F1 or F2 anymore. While you can interact with Pazuzu on either F1 or F3 on your way up the tower, if you have not by the rooftop (Floor 7,) he will force you to approach him and then run away. He will never appear on Floor 7 at any other time, so at this point, F6 is the highest he can go, and the first floor where you can access a switch. So the quickest route is to manipulate him to appear on F6, hit the switch, and force him to stand and fight. However, he is programmed to *never* go to Floor 6 if you meet him first on the rooftop, so it's best to first meet him on Floor 3. (Floor 1 requires a battle and is otherwise out of the way.)
- The Pazuzu battle itself was a serious pain to optimize for this route. He has a gimmick where, starting on the fifth turn and every other turn thereafter, he does a four-second animation where he turns on or off his Psychshield--a status where he reflects any damaging spell cast on him, often obliterating your party if you goof up your timing. So this fight is all about beating him down as quickly as possible--including Benjamin. It costs about 2000-2500 frames to pump up his damage output in all four ways I could come up with: 1. Aero in the Focus Tower (animation takes too long, damage on non-Pazuzu battles too low), 2. Giant Axe in the Living Forest (single target damage, won't damage as much as Kaeli will), 3. Meteor in the Giant Tree (only spell slower than Aero, counts as Earth magic which Pazuzu has resistance to), and 4. Flare in Pazuzu's Tower. I went with number four, since it is the strongest spell in the game, and later in Doom Castle the Cerberus enemies are weak to fire (wait, why? they're hell dogs whatever) and will die even in a three-way damage split. Unfortunately, Benjamin's level is low enough that the max number of Wizard spell charges he has is not enough to carry him all the way, so a Seed and a Cure spell are required--but it's enough to damage Pazuzu fast enough to cut out a Psychshield animation, altogether saving me 1640 frames over DonamerDragon's run in this battle alone.
2,740 frames lost in Pazuzu's Tower.
5,808 frames total lost in Chapter 4.
- With Pazuzu defeated, Reuben reappears and takes over the partner spot. Since Kaeli is now looking after Otto's hurt daughter, we can glitch the Thunder Rock into our Key Items and skip a whole trip to Fireburg and back. Go to Spencer's Place, fill the canyon? thing?, and head to Mac's Ship.
- Mac's Ship is a silly dungeon. It's a big three-floor maze full of monsters with no way to reach the end point. Oh wait, there's a pole you can climb near the start that hides the true path, so the whole dungeon is ignored if you've ever played the game before, har har har. Kinda clever, I like that the programmers gracefully let us skip this dungeon, but I don't think I've ever...done the other floors before? And I owned this game in the 90s. They stuck the dungeon's only important treasure box in the endpoint room, too, so it's not like you get any real reward for exploring anywhere but the short intended path.
8,886 frames saved in Mac's Ship section.
- Back in town, Phoebe comes back to take Reuben's place, and she has mega-powered up. We're ready to hit the final dungeon for real now, but we have to talk the now-rescued Captain Mac before the game will let us go. We sail to a secret backdoor into the Focus Tower, which was in fact the location of Doom Castle this whole time! Each new floor of this location is themed after one of the first four chapters, with a boss re-fight each time.
- The first re-fight, Skullrus Rex, can be insta-killed in THREE different ways. They did not give him any status protections, so Petrify kills him, and Life saps all 10,000 HP away as well. He's also vulnerable to Exit. Pick your poison!
240 frames saved in Basement 2.
- Regular encounters are very interesting in this dungeon, since the enemy selection is a bizarre mix from almost every dungeon in the game. Fastest battle strategies are completely different here from anywhere else, especially with the magic now at my disposal. The boss of the second re-fight, Stone Golem, can be Exit-ed, so that's another easy win in the books.
399 frames saved in Floor 4.
- The third chapter's floor doesn't have much to discuss, but the boss re-fight ended up very tricky. Twinhead Wyvern does not have the same weaknesses the first two did, and all of his status moves also inflict damage, making this actually the last difficult fight of the game. He's also strong against fire, cutting Benjamin's damage output in half. I was forced to use Cure and a Seed to survive with this loadout, meaning I actually lost time to DD here. Nothin' more I could do.
272 frames lost in Floor 5.
- The Pazuzu's Tower floor has an interesting maze layout, with the corridors and multiple levels situation. The bossfight was thankfully very simple--while Zuh has the same Psychshield situation as Pazuzu, he also has 'Psychshield' available as a regular attack, which isn't really programmed to do anything, so it just does a single damage of HP to one or both party members. Thanks to Flare, I'm JUST able to wipe him out fast enough to save a Psychshield animation, saving a ton of time again.
1,745 frames saved in Floor 6.
- That leaves the final battle. The "Cure Glitch" on the Dark King is probably the most well-known thing about this game: Benjamin casts Cure on the boss, it heals so much that it rolls over, causing him five-figure damage amounts while is HP is high (if his HP is low enough, it just heals him to full instead.) At level 21, Ben casting Cure twice while Phoebe defends, casts Cure once, and then casts White is the fastest way to defeat the final boss and beat this lovely game.
496 frames saved in Floor 7.
- I would LOVE to find more improvement here--Phoebe's Cure causes the Dark King to taunt the party and transform, which costs 11 long seconds. Using regular attacks or magic to lower his life total to *exactly* the amount Ben's Cure does could one-shot the boss and skip this conversation, but A) as is, I'd have to do 12,000 damage in maybe four turns to save time, and B) if Dark King's HP is even *one* point lower than the amount Ben's Cure would damage him by, he'll just be full-healed instead. Now, counterintuitively, Benjamin's Cure does more damage the LOWER his Magic stat is, so this strategy *might* pan out if Ben hits this battle at a lower level and equips something other than the Claw, but that would require using a lot more Exits in battles throughout the game (since enemies defeated that way do not provide EXP) and I can't shake the feeling that that isn't worth the hassle. Individual enemies provide WAY too little EXP for the amount each level costs. But I wanted to put this idea out there in the aether anyway, in case it spurs genius in someone else.
11,494 frames saved in Chapter 5.
Further Ramblings
The game does not properly set resistances for the partner members. Each one has protections against one or more elements and status changes, but the *only* way to set them is to save your game and reload it. When a new partner joins, you have to save and reload again to change from the old partner's resistances to the new ones.
This can be used strategically--save and reset once Kaeli joins and all of your partners will have protection from Water, Petrify, and Mute forever. Do it with Tristam instead, and they will all be protected from Fire and Instant Death instead. The problem for TAS is that the save and reload process takes ~11 seconds, so this is not likely to be a time save. (Protection from Instant Death, though? Maybe this could save some time against certain fights after all? You wouldn't have to Cure against Pazuzu...it would be really fast if this cancels the Doom Dance animation too...)
Not a super-well-known glitch, but this one does actually have use. Once you obtain the throwable Mega Grenades, just run yourself out of Bombs and then try to throw one again. For some reason, this causes Benjamin to re-do whatever his last scripted action was. If his sprite was told to shrug, for example, he'll shrug every time you press the A button. There are only two places I could find where this causes useful behavior: Trying to enter the locked door in Fireburg without the key (which you usually have to unlock to get the Mega Grenades in the first place) and the elevators in the Mine dungeon. Do either of those two animations, and after that, pressing the A button will move Benjamin's sprite, even through walls! This can be used to completely skip the Jinn mini-boss in the Mine.
The Inventory Underflow route completely skips the Mine, though, and so there is no known benefit for this Bombless glitch that I could find. See, any map change cancels the glitch, so you cannot bring the glitch-through-walls movement into other useful places. Maybe there's something still undiscovered here.
The original version of the game has a single bit flipped the wrong way--normally in FF games, undead enemies die to Life spells. In FFMQ Version 1.0, though, non-undead enemies die instead. This TAS uses this fact to insta-kill the Minotaur and a couple stronger enemies in Chapter 4. The 1.1 version of the game corrected this alignment, so that rom can be used to have Life kill, for example, Mummies in Tristam 2. Not likely to be the faster path.
https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/639128256689889737
Here is a link to a RAM Watch file I compiled while working on it. It includes five locations for battle order--00 and 01 are the party, 02 is the Boss if any. Otherwise 02 - 04 means left-to-right. There's also a RAM location for status effects, one per enemy. 01 - Silence, 02 - Blind, 04 - Poison, 08 - Confusion, 16 - Sleep, 32 - Paralyze, 64 - Petrify, 128 - Fatal.
Any Other Improvements?
Honestly, there might still be another minute of improvements just from better RNG manipulation. It's incredibly tricky to get really good RNG--if you can't find something, you have to go back to the previous manipulation attempt and search again, and maybe even AGAIN, until you find what you want. Someone with good scripting and botting experience could set a machine loose on the game for a while and find RNG paths that I couldn't. Things outside of battle don't change or affect RNG, so just copying my non-battle sections into a script should be trivial. That's more than I can handle right now, though, so maybe someone someday in the future.
Samsara:
Claiming for judging. Apologies, have to drop this.
Challenger: I'll give a shot to this game. Judging :)
Challenger: Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is such a quite different RPG compared to the other titles even at the time of the release. The objective of the game is providing an easy challenge, finding crystals, weapons, spells and crystals while forcing the enemies to be "more direct" to find rather than having the usual random encounters.
If the previous run has great optimizations even for 2006 standards, the new run did a huge new step thanks to the new discoveries over the years: finding a useful glitch which not only affects the Inventory items but also allows to skip one of the Chapters, gaining a huge amount of time while at the same time adjusting the game because fighting strong enemies become such a difficult task this time.
The RNG in this game is something that requires bold knowledge in order to handle it properly, and the TAS improves the project even further!
Challenger: I watched both runs side-by-side and I can confirm that everything is working very well, except for one point: there's one instance in the Focus Tower where the player can leave the location using the Exit spell that's actually present in the published run but it is missing in the new run completely by accident. It costs around 10 seconds, but given the fact how RNG is incredibly tricky (according to the author of this project), attempting to adjust the game will affect RNG such a way that would require a long time to fix, and the fact that does happen around 2/5 of the run.
So in order to avoid turning the project into a real hurdle, better leave it since the actual objective of the game has such a quite big improvement after all.
