O hey! A puzz...and it's solved! The puzzles go by too quick to really see them, and not all puzzles are actually interesting to see solved fast. I can't say the movie was entertaining to me.
Sniq's submission notes to the 13% run state: "Varia - Required for surviving MB's rainbow beam attack, which would otherwise require me to acquire double the amount of tanks to survive it, which would defeat the purpose of this low% category. Also required for surviving heated areas since Grav is not acquired."
You can get grav without varia, but for low% it doesn't make sense. I think varia halves the MB rainbow attack, and that attack is the reason for all the amount of health upgrades.
Would it be faster, with the fire ring, to equip Cloud with the Dragon Armlet to half lightning in the Schizo fight? If the fight goes the same, you can skip using a hi-potion on him.
Amazing that the few steps required to get the Fire Armlet have such an impact on the step route tho.
idea for timesave: can you save some money before digging, and then use that to buy a weapon in Mideel to save you from having to spend 13k on soldiers in the fort condor minigame?
I can answer a few of those.
The battle hopping is switching to the next character. In the final boss fight, skipping everyone's turn leads to a stamina refill as well.
The -3 (+x in general) matters in the damage elements do, the bonus (or malus) is 12.5% * x. It does not matter for status magic though, so strengthen can be -3 no problem.
Viper Manor I'm quite sure you have to find the code, which is random.
In Marbule there are two shops next to each other. One sells normal elements, the other sells traps. I can't remember where the trap is used tho.
I can't say about the final boss strat.
I think that the more powerful the major skip glitch, the more problematic it is to draw the line. I'm imagining something like Final Fantasy III, where with memory corruption the game can be beaten under 6 minutes. The same trick can be used to glitch jobs to one shot every fight in the game, which in its own way skips a major part of the game. It can do some other things as well to skip great portions of the game.
Another thought is that sometimes a fun and useful minor glitch turns out to be of the same sort of a later discovered major skip glitch. Or it may be that the same sort of minor glitch is much more major in another game (I think some Zelda OoT glitches are sort-of-but-not-fully fixed in MM?) I don't see the use of banning the whole type of glitch in such a situation, other than keeping the ruleset clear and concise.
Because of such situations, I'd define "forgoes major skip glitch" as in principle forgoing all instances of the glitch that enables the major skip for that specific game.
I thought it was interesting so I timed some things from the movies. I counted time in battle from the point of control to final hit, rounded to 5s.
This TAS spends 14:20 on the Karsh and Dario quests to get the Mastermune.
It spends 13:00 after that in battle with enemies that the mastermune does not do double damage to (the exceptions are some weaklings in the swamp, FATE and Final Boss).
Assuming that battle time is doubled without the Mastermune, it would be a timegain to not get it.
I looked at the 2012 TAS to time some of their fights. It mostly takes a bit more than double the time of this TAS for most checked fights (Lynx, most bosses in the Dragon Tower), but less than double for some (namely the Dragon God, where it spends 380 seconds against 220 in this TAS). The 2012 TAS is also a bit slower on fights where the mastermune has no type advantage, it spends 90s (against 60) on FATE and 120s (against 100) on Final Boss.
It seems to me it's worth looking into further, as skipping the Mastermune could be very close or faster than getting it.
It looks really good, and I'd like to know more details as well, but the movie is the main thing of course.
How much time does getting the mastermune save? It's rather a hefty time investment, so I'm curious if someone knows or has an educated guess.
I don't think I'd prepare for every eventuality in advance, since I think 'too many branches' is not a problem that will pop up a lot.
Just going through all in-game options in some games would result in 20-30 branches (different combinations of characters, simultaneous player count, difficulty, warp usage, etc.). And the borderline of "different enough" may be tricky to define, for example if there is disagreement on which branches make sense to exist on their own.
Will people make 20-30 TASes of the same game though; for how many games is that really a danger? "Different enough" is indeed tricky to define, but maybe a poll question in the vein of "should this movie be published" can help with some intersubjectivity.
I think something along the lines of 'Is the difference the new branch has with the old ones interesting enough?'
The difference could lie in goal choice, in routing, in entertainment, in anything really. If the difference is judged non-interesting, I'd publish the more optimised and then the more entertaining one.
I don't think I'd prepare for every eventuality in advance, since I think 'too many branches' is not a problem that will pop up a lot.
I don't really get the bolded part, it is not obvious to me why that is what follows out of what came before, or why this specific way of rewriting the equation makes sense. Is that an easy thing to explain?
I liked the youtube movie a lot specifically because it builds up how hard All Star Mode on Very Hard is, which greatly enhances the 'Superhuman' aspect of what comes.
The visual gameplay in the movie can hardly be called entertaining, as it's walking up and down stairs (with annoying music to boot), with an extremely sudden end. The one virtue of that end is that comes quickly, I suppose. This is completely ignoring the technical side of things, of course.
For me, the goal choice quite hampers the entertainment of the movie. I know the ABC from Mario 64, and there it has a tension because so much can be done without pressing A, and so many stars don't require it at all. You wonder, can it really be done without any after all? In this movie, the first level starts just like normal, with jumping for the mushroom and jumping to get over the pipes. In total it uses 8 jumps, which is maybe 2 less than I think I would need in a normal playthough. The goal choice, and what the minimum ends up with, is just completely unimpressive. I feel that even more when a long setup is needed to save a jump - but then to clear the gap there is still a jump needed. I really liked the moment where Mario jumps (without the A press) on the top of the screen from a koopa on the bottom in 1-2. But that feeling falls apart the moment Mario has to jump to get to the leftmost pipe.
The glitches that do not appear in any other categories, and the puzzling and the work that went into this TAS, I feel they are deserving of a TAS that makes more sense, if you get what I mean.
When a fourth person equips the Book of Fire
The x position on the world map of save data No. 1 will be
referenced as the weapon LV. It's about 100.
This is why you only see four digits of damage on the screen.
In reality, the damage is over 10,000.
Having to fight the final boss to get a party member resurrected is an interesting game mechanic.
The boss dies to an underflowed attack stat or something? How does that work?
The area of the circle is pi*r^2. The flat ends of the shaded circle-halves, if connected to each other, form a square. Half the diagonal of this square is r. The radius of the circle-halves is therefore r/sqrt(2). The shaded area then is pi*(r/sqrt(2))^2, or pi*½*r^2. Dividing the circle area by shaded area, we get that the shaded area is half that of the whole circle.
Would it be possible to judge the Vagrant Story case as a hard-mode rom-hack of sorts? That's basically the point of the idea as I understand it, and it might fit in some existing category seen that way, or at least the normal rules about difficulty choice would apply to it.
From those options, I feel thatleaving it "as is" is fine, because I saw everything I was promised and came to see. I'd be fine with a save & quit to mark the tas as finished, but throwing away all lives, which has nothing to do with the goal itself, detracts from the core gameplay and the stated and reached goal.
I don't think the potch and level up glitch save any time, because there is no need for potch after getting your HQ, and the level up glitch takes place in the last dungeon. I think the manner in which the hero gets to level 64 in one battle uses the same principle though, just way earlier.