A few months ago I was working on Legend of Dragoon to see if it would have looked any good as a TAS. The main reason for this was the combat was a little more involved than most other turn-based RPGs. I own the game, but I've never beaten it, so I figured I play around with this.
So, I have here a short-ish movie of about 53000 frames. I fight four battles (two unavoidable, and two random). I'll post comments about things that people may want answers to with frame locations of it.
Download the movie here (you'll need the NTSC version of the game):
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?4yzmmzm3gmn
If anyone wants to encode it, be my guest. I tried once already and I got a bunch out of sync audio.
I may try encoding it again, maybe. I've tried encoding it several times, and I just can't get it to work.
0-~1500: Just the opening FMV and the title screen. Nothing exciting.
1547-11000: A lengthy,
unskippable FMV. You can fast forward through this without desyncing (I've never had it desync when skipping this).
13314: I repeatedly tap X instead of holding it. For some reason I didn't think I needed to hold it to skip the text. My mistake.
~13900: I mash buttons hoping something can skip this. Can't.
~20200: Still tapping X. >.>
~23900: Finally started holding X instead. This is much faster.
24535: First frame I gain control of Dart.
~24600: I jump the fence pretty close to the first possible frame.
~24900: More dialogue
~26700: First battle. You may notice that frame advance moves forward 3 (!) frames for each advance while in battle.
26810: I hit X more-or-less dead-on.
28510: More dialogue...
~30200: I got the Burn Out for the "boss" fight.
34700: I tried several different ways of manipulating this fight. It turns out that the frame you do something on doesn't matter. The enemies react to what you do on your turn. So, instead of doing the Burn Out first, I slash instead. This keeps him from using his strongest attack on me on his turn. I then use the Burn Out, which I will more than likely use a turbo button on from now on (the horrible 3 frames per advancement is keeping me from getting the best I can on that tapping.).
39570: I understand I can get Star Dust here, but since I don't know what it's used for, and since this was just a short run-through, I didn't bother getting it.
44900: I skip the salesman here. I wanted to find out if I could avoid random battles or not (hint: I can't).
46297: The pause here actually manages to delay the random encounter.
46600: I tried for about a half an hour to avoid this encounter, but no matter what I did, it happened in the exact same amount of steps. No dodging encounters in this game, it seems.
47100: I'm not entirely sure why I didn't flee here.
*shrug*
51828: I couldn't avoid this encounter either. I couldn't even delay it to get out of the area.
52653: I delay for enough frames to Flee. The RNG seems to still effect that, at least. I haven't tested for criticals, yet, but I assume it would be possible.
So, there you have it. What I've learned so far of how the game would go if it were to be a TAS. It seems that since random encounters aren't completely avoidable that there may need to be some light grinding in order to survive later on.
Personally, I don't know if I'll be the one who does the whole game (I really doubt I will), but if this gets anyone else interested in running it then I did well enough. I may keep tinkering with the game off-and-on, but I don't have the patience to optimize something like this. If I were to do a run of it it would most likely be pretty sloppy (pretty much, more of what you see in that movie).
