I think that for that one it would still be fast to avoid mutants and humans. They can only gain one stat point per battle, so to attain any reasonable amount of power at all you're talking about at least 50 battles. I think that for a non-glitch run, some combination of robots and monsters would be quickest. I'd say four monsters, but you can only get two monsters of the highest level, and since you'd need to go through dungeons anyways, two robots and two monsters would probably be quickest.
One of the GameFAQs posters mentioned that they did a no-save speedrun and it was just over five hours. With the ability to skip encounters there's no way it would be anywhere near this long.
BTW, an alternative group for the glitch run would be one robot, two monsters and a mutant. This could cut down on the time spent in Nasty Dungeon, but to get a second high-level monster you'd need to fight TianLung (death immune). I don't know whether that would be a worthwhile tradeoff or not.
I figured we should have a topic for it since we've been discussing it MORE than Final Fantasy Legend on the Final Fantasy Legend topic. As for the status of this game, I might try it but I haven't done a TAS before. If anyone else would like to do this, then I can assist because I've been thinking about it for a while.
I've been talking to a few very helpful GameFAQs posters (namely Hasukawa Kazuyaa and Saint Cyan) about the use of the "dragon warp glitch" to speed through this game. The jist of it is that when you reach the dragon race circuit after Venus' world, if you're able to cast teleport, you can leave the race circuit and have a dragon to cruise around on indefinitely. You still have encounters, however you move at (potentially crazy) dragon speed and you can walk through walls.
To access this glitch without a gameshark, you need to have a Mutant in your team. Monsters can learn teleport, but never before the dragon race. Mutants can only learn this ability from Dunatis and Venus before the dragon race. So a Mutant is stuck in your team if you want optimal time.
Humans and Mutants will not make great team members because they require many battles and a lot of equipment to become powerful. Monsters are weak, but require the least work. After a great deal of consideration and discussion, I think that the optimal team for a TAS of this game is Robot/Robot/Baby-D/Mutant F. The Robots can use any chest items to be very powerful without ever battling. The Monster is low-maintenance, and will face a minimum of 2 battles before Ashura's Tower. In Ashura's Tower, they will be able to become a Medusa to petrify Venus (Venus is very difficult; this is probably the easiest way to do this by far). The role of the mutant is to learn Teleport from Dunatis or Venus, and minor contributions in forced battles early on.
The only dungeon that would be accessed after Venus' world is the Nasty Dungeon. There you can find goodies including: Hyper, Laser, Parasuit, Samurai Bow, Ogre Axe, Catclaw, Gungnir, Sun Sword, Dragon Sword, Glass Sword, Flare, Muramas, Defend Sword Wizard Wand, Karate, Jyudo, Arthur Armor, Dragon Armor, Dragon Helmet, and Ninja Glove. These will be used to outfit the robots. The Wizard Wand may be used to attempt to make the Mutant useful. Some of those may be converted into cash.
After that, we'd head straight to the center of the worlds and face the group of Fenrirs (using Hyper) to attain the most powerful level of monster. Hopefully we'd end up with a Kusanagi. Then run to the end, possibly with a fifth party member like Dad (nobody seems to know if that works or not). Damage against the final boss will be from the two very powerful robots and one fairly powerful monster. If it is easily possible to gain a Seven Sword... well, then the story sort of writes itself. :P
Luck manipulation:
-Battles can't be avoided by saving and using a soft reset on the square before a battle begins. Small waits, input and menu access do not help. This will still be done very, very frequently.
-Battle outcome is determined by the last actions performed in battle. One round is determined by the previous. The first round of a battle is determined by the last round of the previous battle. This is terribly awkward, since it essentially means that each battle is affected by ALL battles beforehand. Small waits, input and menu access do not help. Picking different actions for characters in a round of battle does not help, unless the action is executed.
-Old GB units allow for an easy exploit using a hard reset to gain stat boosts repeatedly. Since we won't be concerned with stat boosts (they're too slow), this is of no interest to us. I don't know whether it would be emulated correctly anyways, since it works on a GB, but not a GBC or GBA.
Previous battle outcome determining luck is totally awful. For those who haven't thought deeply about what this means, you can't avoid every fight between Babywyrm and Rhino... but if you could and the Rhino fight goes poorly, you have to try doing something else in the Babywyrm battle and then do the entire first world again.
Hopefully that type of thing wouldn't happen. I may still fight battles that can be resolved in few actions, particularly if it is possible to win a prize (ie. Asigarus in the first world).
The current best time that I've heard of is Saint Cyan, who didn't measure it very precisely. He says he was just over two hours. I believe his time was done with a "door" item hacked in, with Robot/Robot/Monster/Monster. Still, I envision that luck manipulation and the ability to avoid all encounters would lower this substantially.
TheAxeMan was interested in Final Fantasy Legend, and not the sequel. I already felt kind of bad for derailing his thread and now it just keeps going. :P
Digging deeper:
That FFL2 trashcan bug is relatively well-known. There's an in-depth guide at GameFAQs about it. Don't worry, you didn't drop your gameboy too many times.
I've been playing FF6 LLG lately, so I've gained a great deal of familiarity with it. That and a small amount of recent activity here prompted me to read this entire thread pretty thoroughly. Some reactions:
SprintGod wrote:
In no particular order, after using Retort:
# On Cyan's next turn, Equip Imp Halberd via the Item menu. Skip his turn with X / Y.
# Imp Cyan.
# Kill and Revive Cyan.
As long all the above is done before Cyan counters something, the glitch should be in effect with the Imp Halberd equipped.
In most boss fights, desperation attacks, vanish doom, joker doom, or rods/shields are obviously going to be the way to fight. However, if there were a time-efficient way to get Cyan in the WoR this would be a neat way to use a fun trick while ending input very early against Kefka... it would look funny, too.
In any case, all the time spent getting Cyan probably isn't worth it. Too bad. Maybe Gogo could sub for him? That's not completely unreasonable with a Moogle Charm.
Corundum wrote:
Jyzero wrote:
Gau with Merit Award + Illumina + Stray Cat could be very powerful, if unpredictible. (Is Merti Award+ Gengi Glove + Illumina + Illumina possible ?)
Someone (Setzer or Gau) should have the Fixed Dice. I know you'll have the Illuminas already from the Sketch glitch, but the Fixed Dice are right on the way in Kefka's Tower. Plus, at the low levels you'll be at, I'm fairly certain the Illumina can't hit 9,999 damage. The Fixed Dice *can*, though a fair amount of luck manipulation might be needed. (Rolling 6-6-6, any character will do 9,999 damage at as low as 4th level!)
Merit Awards take a few colloseum battles to earn. I've been playing FF6 on Final Fantasy Anthology, where they removed Gau's ability to equip the Merit Award. Luckily, there's an alternative (that I haven't tested in FF3 1.0 US). If there are no other equippable items for a character available, and you place a weapon in the very last item slot, then select "Optimal", you'll be equipped with the weapon in the last position. This is a good way to give Gau a Tempest, Thiefknife or Illumina without access to a Merit Award.
EDIT: This works for Dice and Fixed Dice as well, though I'm not sure how Catscratch works with those.
Unfortunately it's slow to use; when you're moving an item (at least in FFAnthology) the fast scroll with L & R is disabled. It could still be handy, perhaps, because Gau is very powerful and very quick to obtain.
The trick where Gau uses Stray Cat's Catscratch while equipped with a Tempest won't be useful against the three tiers, though. At least of couple of those components absorb wind.
It seems to me that lately there's a tendency for first-time TASers to take on very complicated projects (ie. Atma, hero of the day).
I'd like to make one too eventually, but I highly doubt I'd want to start with FF3! The expectation is huge! It would be very brave and ambitious of you to take a swing at it, Wandering Road.
Does anyone else find games like this kind of trippy? Instead of a ninja or a robot (or, to a lesser extent, a pizza mascot), the thing that every bad guy in the world is trying to kill is a small bird with sneakers and what seems to be some type of energy gun.
Anyways, it was okay for a while, but after the first boss I got bored and watched the rest in fast forward. Strangely, I was able to follow the gameplay perfectly in that state. That should be taken as a bad sign.
I'm voting no on this.
Hm, I liked this. It reminds me of a lot of my favorites... Castlevania, Mega Man, and even Zelda II in a way.
Everything in this movie looked pretty sharp except for the lag... well, and the crazy graphical glitches towards the end. Not much you can do about that, huh? I vote yes.
(Man, whenever I watch old submissions it looks like I'm spamming the workbench. Sorry about that.)
I really liked watching this, your use of Batcat looks like it really saves a lot of time. This held my interest the whole way through, and I can't pick out any mistakes. Using that crazy boss glitch doesn't hurt the entertainment value. I'm voting yes.
So, if this movie were published, would you use the good ROM dump with a corrected header, or the bad dump? I know ultimately it doesn't matter, I'm just curious.
I felt the same way, it kept my interest and was fun to watch. I'm not positive that it's the fastest completion simply because of the way grenades are rationed... but it looks very good to me as someone who hasn't spent hours analyzing the gameplay. :P
This was pretty good, but I think it may save a few seconds if both characters do 50% damage to the bosses. If anyone ever works on an improvement, I also think it would be worth getting Billy's second gun if it saves any time. Missed shots do look sloppy, but I don't think that should matter if "fastest time" is the run's primary goal. (Unnecessary missed shots are something else altogether... note the unusual but purposeful shots at nothing in Megafrost's new Metroid Fusion run.)
Although the SNES run would probably be preferable, it doesn't exist yet, so I think I'll vote yes on this.
Yes, this was more fun to watch than Revenge of Shinobi (not because of Neofix's or trazz's playing, but because of the nature of the two games). That last boss sure interupted a lot of momentum. Everything was so quick up until him!
Well, it's a lot less simple than the original Shinobi, and it looked pretty well played. Nice use of fast and high jumps in the vertical sections. Boss fights were really cool. It's a bit slow though, so after a while I switched to watching it with a frame skipped. I'll vote yes.
I found this pretty entertaining too, but the slow down was annoying. I guess IdeaMagnate was right that it was the most fun part of the movie. I like how this game is so incredibly Contra-y, right down to the guy's three frames of running animation.
So, how awful is TASing this game on hard mode? Has anyone tried? How much longer would it be?
(No vote yet.)
Hm, I just watched, and it was pretty entertaining. A bit awkward that rules would have to be bent... I'd really like to see all of the games done in a row on that [a1] rom. I don't know if this game should trump Frenom's dedication to Phantasy Star IV, of course.
With all of the crazy Rockman improvements lately, it's weird to see so few items used, heh. I'm not even sure whether this submission is serious or not anymore because of these posts from last year:
Frenom wrote:
Kholdstare wrote:
It's a lot faster using Bubble Lead on the fire monster. Couldn't you replace Gemini Laser with Bubble Lead?
Yeah I could. But sience this movie is breaking one of the first ruels on this site and cannot be allowed I leave it as it is. If they decide to accept it I'll might reconsider my decision. But thanks for your advice =)
So there's at least one obvious improvement and the movie breaks a site rule. I think I'm voting no on this one.
Hm. This is good. I wonder why I never watched it before. It's not quite hard-game-made-to-look-easy, because you can still tell how hard this game is. The play is good... improvement might be possible if slowdown could be reduced a little.
I'll vote yes on this. Hm, there are lots of votes and few posts. Moreso than usual.
I agree with AnotherGamer that the first trip to AQU was very impressive.
I read the submission text after watching, and I'm glad you decided to be consistent rather than start using the new trick, it makes it much harder for me to spot your mistakes. Heheh...
Yes vote.
This was more entertaining than the published movie, and doing a 2P run of this game is a great idea, and it led to some neat time-saving tricks. Still, the text and movement are both imperfect.
To answer "Did you enjoy watching this movie?", I say yes. It sure could use an improvement, though.
Yes, this game is radically different from Seiken Densetsu/Final Fantasy Adventure. If you wanted to emphasize that, the player could select to play as the girl. I seem to recall that this game allows nice, quick play... but it would still be a pretty long show.
He's a bit slow, but he's got style. I always really liked this game because all of the different arts allowed great variety of gameplay -- not that you'd really see that in a TAS. It also has some great text.
This one is on adelikat's list of Famtasia runs to improve. I'd like to see that.
