Excellent work and really cool glitch. This TAS would benefit greatly from commentary in subtitle form as even if you read the submission text beforehand/during, it's difficult to follow everything going on, especially on a Japanese ROM.
TheAxeMan, I just wanted to say thank you personally as you have, by far, my favourite TASes on the site. Can't tell you how excited I was to see you'd made this submission, and it did not disappoint.
Your use of subtitles to include interesting stories as well as technical details is brilliant.
Much appreciated—truly!
In a battle, unit movement always goes from 1 to 5, with 2 and 3 being the most powerful units. I typically send the 4 or 5 to get killed by the enemy's 2 or 3, and save my 2 and 3 to kill the enemy's leader. In this particular video, it didn't matter. However, I agree that changing the assignments before the battle will greatly enhance speed, even if it costs a whole season.
I communicated what I was trying to say poorly. There is a mechanic in the game--I'm going to look it up--that lets you reassign your army units, and you can assign 4 and 5 out of the picture entirely, meaning you have fewer input spam to deal with.
Yes, checked it out and it's the assign command on the second page. Now what I can't remember is if that affects a "worldwide" change or if it only makes a change in the fief where you do it. But it's possible that getting rid of units 4 and 5 prior to the final battle in Fief 4, with all the other fiefs on direct, would save time in the long run because of both larger quantities of men in units 1-3, and also not having to move as many units each turn.
I really enjoyed this run and I'm glad someone has decided to tackle it. I have a *lot* of questions about it though.
For stats, is it necessary to spend the time getting them all to 109? Or could you get away with lower values for all but Char and save the frames?
You seem to slow yourself down by giving various amounts of rice/gold to peasants. For example, at some points I saw you give 1 rice to the peasants to get your Char point, but other times you'd give around 25%. You mentioned it was automated for 25%, but was there a reason for this? This also would be in places like when you'd have the option of sending say 80 gold to another fief but you'd do 75 for example--requiring four extra inputs.
Another thing was you didn't manipulate plagues either not to come or not to come to your fiefs. That plagues have come uses time but the extra message from them striking you takes even more. Were you unable to stop that for some reason?
I did notice you seemed to optimize the fight better compared to the first video, where often your own units would bump up against each other because they weren't ordered properly. I don't remember the mechanic very well, but would it be helpful, or a waste of time, to reorganize your armies so that you only have two units? You'd have far less menuing.
Could you overbid for fiefs to save frames? I.e. bid 40 even if 36 would be sufficient?
You often send men and rice and gold places that it seems may not be entirely necessary. Of course the only such one I can point to specifically is at the very end. There are 1,582 men in Fief 4 but you only have 744 gold so you can only send 744 men. Surely you didn't need to spend the time sending the other 838 men to Fief 4? You also have them take 403 rice when they use less than 200. Even just taking 400 instead of 403 would save three inputs.
I agree that subtitles would be fantastic especially for people who have not played the game before.
Thanks for your efforts!
I'm glad everyone likes the subtitles. There was some great feedback about the commentary on some of my earlier runs so I decided it is really a must on longer RPG runs.
I just wanted to add my voice to the chorus of approval of the subtitles--I've watched your Final Fantasy and Crystalis videos multiple times because of them! I loved those and this was a great work as well. Thanks very much.