(Link to video)
Ultima Exodus has a straight forward plot; Exodus is bad, kill him. What sets this game apart is the open world you are given to explore, rather than a railroaded script.

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: FCEUX 2.1.6-interim svn0
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Manipulates luck
  • Takes damage to save time

Comments

Ultima Exodus is a game I played for hours as a kid. The basic plot is straight forward; Exodus is bad, kill him. What sets this game apart is the open world you are given to explore, rather than a railroaded script. Character customization is immense and a 20 person bench can be made to pull your 4 member party from.

Stage by stage comments

  • 0:17 Here I make a save file, start to make a premade party and immediately reset. This sets a flag that I've already seen the opening cutscene, which is longer than sitting through the intro again.
  • 0:34 I make a party of 1 cleric and 3 wizards. Magic is needed for moving around the dungeon and to make quick work of the few battles I fight. I'm using a premade party rather than custom because the only stat that matters for this run is the wis/int/max mp, which is maxed on the premade characters. The character select RNG is frame based.
  • 0:36 I named the party VOU1 "we". It made a little bit of sense and didn't waste any frames to input.
  • 0:44 I'm surprised that mob didn't attack me. Usually if any of your characters are within the 8 surrounding squares of a mob after it moves a battle will start.
  • 0:48 Starting with a dungeon crawl. Ascend/descend change floors. The destination on the new floor is based on the frame the spell was cast. No RNG, it just cycles through the 256 cells of the dungeon map, dropping the party at the first empty tile. Sometimes it is faster to walk a bit, rather than wait to be placed at the absolute closest point. By alternating descends and ladders, the bottom 8th floor can be reached in 4 spells. This is good since my characters only have enough mp to cast the spells once each.
  • 1:00 Dropped in next to the mark of fire. This will let me walk unharmed over lava. The whole party takes 50 damage and that won't fully heal by the end of the run.
  • 1:05 I do some walking around to regen mp and pick up some treasure chests that are lying around. Some of the chests are trapped. I either cast OPEN, take the damage or advance the RNG. In the dungeon the chest RNG is advanced by steps, spinning in place works. This run doesn't need much gold, so I don't bother min-maxing drops here since spinning is relatively slow (~12 frames).
  • 1:40 One chest was left unopened so that I could make it back for this descend cycle. Technically, only the wizard that will have 50mp needs the mark of force, but I'm boxed by an ascend cycle later anyway. Giving it to everyone now saves me the time of death notifications later. There is a spin in there that prevents a random battle.
  • 2:02 Before going to the castle to level up I need 400xp. Undead give 4xp each and come at max 8 in a battle, so 13 battles. I need 2500gold and I have ~1400 now. Number of enemies and gold drops can be controlled by spamming B. Type of enemy is based on the frame the fight starts.
  • 2:11 Ghouls and skeletons are both hit by the clerics undead spell, which one shots about half of the enemies at a time. I haven't figured out anything to advance the RNG that controls the number hit. The spell can miss if it is started at the wrong time. When your chars right foot is down and 2 frames before, it will work. There are also situations where the spell will be cast but it hits noone. In those cases I don't bother casting it and wait for the next turn.
  • 3:50 13 fights of 8 each would be four more kills than needed. There are 2 fights with only 7 mobs and the last only has 6.
  • 5:57 Walking on lava is faster than through the forest.
  • 6:02 Pray is needed to get cards and use them later.
  • 6:11 Advancing the RNG will affect mob placement when exiting a city/cave.
  • 9:41 Level UP. Now more challenging enemies will appear; most importantly, the pirate!
  • 10:24 Sailing into the whirlpool takes me to the second overworld, Ambrosia.
  • 11:08 The boat looks glitchy, but I have to fight it.
  • 11:25 Speed of the ship is affected by wind, so some directions are faster than others.
  • 11:38 Shrine of intelligence. Time to pay for power. At 50 int the wizard will have poison, which can hit everything on the screen and works great for killing particular low hp, invisible mobs at the end of the game. Int starts at 25 and costs 100gold per point, so that is why I collected 2500gold. I need to collect a card by praying at each of the shrines as well.
  • 15:12 Manipulating the RNG here, to affect placement of mobs...
  • 16:40 HERE. Also a glitch, I walk on the water and my boat appears underneath me. Need to dodge the whirlpool. It isn't aggressive, but it can get in the way. Which frame you move can affect which way it goes.
  • 16:53 Really nice RNG here. Don't even see the man-o-war on the way in.
  • 17:35 My movement here is chosen to keep the whirlpool in a blocking position, so the man-o-war can't charge me.
  • 17:47 Back in Sosaria. With 30 int I got the spell trans. This teleports the party somewhere on the world map. It is on a 256 frame cycle. 26 of the cycles end up in the upper NW corner, which is a nice entry point to the moongate system.
  • 17:53 Moongates allow transport to places that are difficult or impossible to reach otherwise.
  • 17:56 I need to pick up the connecting flight.
  • 18:00 Cave of Moon, home of the most secret secret. I hang out here a bit because I'm waiting for an ascend cycle, I was hoping to RNG a certain mob placement in this time frame, but it didn't pan out.
  • 18:05 The cave has a ladder that runs from top to bottom, but its in the opposite corner of the floor. I descend then ascend to get to it. It is a single tile on lower levels, so I can't descend directly to it.
  • 18:16 The time lord doesn't just give information, he freezes the mobs in Exodus Castle for you. No bow tie. :(
  • 18:28 I'm ducking in and out of the cave because otherwise there isn't enough time before the next moongate to pimp my ride.
  • 18:40 Normally I'd need to pray for a horn, dungeon dive for a mark of snake and pilot a ship to this island. It was nice that someone left one parked in the moat.
  • 19:00 I RNG to get the first dragon to start on the left. It is the only one that moves/attacks. I briefly open the status menu to bring the party together. Otherwise the dragon will attack the last member.
  • 19:27 Someone said they could dodge all these mobs, but I find that highly unlikely without the time lord's help.
  • 19:29 Lining up the RNG to 8 shot the floor.
  • 19:53 RNG, and regening mana.
  • 20:50 It seems like it should be over at this point and all the effects are just for show. But I actually got trapped inside on my first two runs out. Where the volcanoes pop up is affected by when you move and which direction. But it is hard to tell which of those moves caused the particular volcanoes that are blocking the path.
  • 21:23 End of input

Other comments

kamikaze9699 has some non-TAS speedruns on youtube. He takes 2.5 hours starting with a new party, and an hour starting from a glitched maxed stat party. (The glitch is effectively a new game+, as it starts a game with a previously used party)
My run completes in under 22 minutes from a fresh party. FCEUX always saving party data made this tricky starting out. I was always having to delete that data. (is there an option for that?) I ended up making a blank save and setting it read-only.
The RNG manipulation could be improved if I understood it better, but I'm not at a point I can follow what is going on in the assembly.

turska: Judging.

turska: Good audience response, solid run. Accepting for publication.

natt: processing

Joined: 3/14/2012
Posts: 13
Location: San Diego, CA
Rayas wrote:
chrstn wrote:
Now if someone would just break Quest of the Avatar to smithereens. :s
Game of my childhood. I've tried to corrupt saves on the SMS version (which is in my opinion the definitive version of the game, hell it was issued 5 years after the Dos version), but no luck so far.
Mine, too. First RPG I ever played. There was some discussion of the run already, but it appears to have been abandoned: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1471 </offtopic>
Joined: 6/24/2007
Posts: 119
yes vote, but if this is published shouldn't the rejected Might and Magic II run be published too? They have the same style of play
Synahel
She/Her
Former player
Joined: 1/19/2011
Posts: 260
Location: France
I'm puzzled how two different games should "compete". Shall we reject Mario 2j runs because Mario 1 runs are faster?
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
It's more he's saying "Previously we rejected game X; now we're considering publishing game Y that has similar gameplay, so perhaps we should reconsider X's rejection?" They aren't competing.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Player (65)
Joined: 4/21/2011
Posts: 232
Twisted Eye wrote:
However, you did miss something else: whenever you power-on the game or press reset, if you hold down the B button, the game skips almost immediately to the game select screen
OH!!! suraimu mentioned that in the other thread. I thought they were talking about the cutscene with Lord British, which is skipped after you've seen it once on a save. B on frame 11 after a start/reset jumps to save select. ;;
Player (65)
Joined: 4/21/2011
Posts: 232
http://www.mediafire.com/?ldeqx3ugbrbxdag The time stamps include 2 seconds for encoder_logo.
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 14905
Location: 127.0.0.1
This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [2061] NES Ultima: Exodus by nanogyth in 21:22.80
mklip2001
He/Him
Editor
Joined: 6/23/2009
Posts: 2224
Location: Georgia, USA
Now that I've seen the encode with the subtitle commentary, I have to say it made a world of difference for me. You had a lot of interesting things to mention about the game for someone who didn't know it. Given that, I'm much happier about the run than before. In any case, congrats on the publication!
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
Joined: 2/26/2011
Posts: 98
mklip2001, you said just what I wanted to say. This run is awesome because it's Ultima III, it's technically outstanding, and it completes a long and difficult RPG in less than a couple dozen minutes. And more. Unfortunately, it requires patience to watch it when it doesn't have the subtitles. Fortunately, the subtitles are very well-written and cleverly help this run hold the viewer's attention. I never will forget the experience of playing this game the legitimate way. Watching this run+subtitles is so good. It's almost enough to make me consider playing it again.
Post subject: Re: subtitles
Editor, Emulator Coder, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
nanogyth wrote:
http://www.mediafire.com/?ldeqx3ugbrbxdag The time stamps include 2 seconds for encoder_logo.
Thanks. Those are quite nice. I hope in the future more authors will consider this sort of thing, because it can be really helpful for watching runs.
Former player
Joined: 7/6/2004
Posts: 155
Ah, I didn't realize the Time Lord did anything. Still, without talking to the Time Lord, it is possible to walk by the enemies in Castle Exodus (though, with heavy use of status to regroup away from them and careful timing). So, I was wondering if talking to the Time Lord was actually necessary. It seems that it should be faster without talking to him.
Joined: 6/18/2012
Posts: 2
What's up guys, I just registered today and I just mentioned that it was a great run and a great glitch i might add. However, you mentioned about the horses and that it was cosmetic?. Actually, what it was suppose to do is slow down the movement of monsters (and I believe the residents in towns, I think) by one half. I am not sure if it will work on guards if you get into a fight. I own the game myself and I played MANY weeks on it. :(( Happy gaming guys!
Joined: 4/25/2004
Posts: 498
This was the first RPG I ever played, and it took many years before I was able to finally see the ending legit, lol. So good to see it get the ass-kicking it deserves from TASVideos. :p And yeah, your horses slow down everybody else, rather than speed you up. Strange that they implemented it that way, but whatever; the net effect is the same, and it gives you more reaction time than if it were done the other way around, so I'm not complaining. :p
Player (65)
Joined: 4/21/2011
Posts: 232
zid- was nice enough to make some corrections to the transcript. https://dl.dropbox.com/u/86767934/ultima3-tas-nanogyth_corrected.srt