Since recently I have peaked interest in speedrunning this game. Some new skips and small timesavers were found and the WR for RTA has been cut down to 6:40:20 by GreenMittenz. His sum of best splits add up to around a low 6:33 or high 6:32 I believe (I have no idea yet but I think TAS can sub 6 hours).
I intend to work on and complete a TAS of this game for NG+, although I don't know if I will ever submit here. I just want to get the word out that this is being worked on and if people would like to join and contribute that would be cool too. PM me if you are interested.
The two reasons I have for not submitting are such: The rules of this site require NG+ runs to have a recorded run of the set up file used starting from NG which would take around 40 hours of time to set up and record and then a ridiculous amount of time to upload. I don't really want to do that.
The other issue is that dolphin emulates running speed in this game incorrectly so your avatar in towns and dungeons runs faster than normal. From a naked eye it SEEMS as though running in towns without personal on Lloyd is roughly the same as console with personal on Lloyd but I can't be sure. This problem is also seen with third party controllers (I have a madcatz where I run a lot faster). If anyone could shed some light on this that would be cool. What I will do for the TAS probably is leave personal off of Lloyd and leave nothing in its place to make it more similar to console runs.
So unless I can correct running speed and people don't care about a 40 hour set up video then I probably won't submit but I still want to push this game to its limits. There's a lot of potential for time to be saved despite the game being decently long. (From the RTA start which is right after the grade screen up to leaving the school I have already saved roughly 21~22 seconds over the fastest RTA time (although about 1 extra second was saved due to the faster movement). This includes the skill set up menu for Lloyd, Colette, and Genis. You can see this in the video below in my google doc).
The major idea with "skips" in this game is overlapping cutscenes. If you enter a battle at the same time a cutscene starts and you run from the battle you can bypass line triggers that block your path. This lets you skip Ymir Forest in its entirety. You can also skip the second sheena battle in the wind temple with this trick (TAS can save roughly 10 seconds with it but is frame perfect so not realistic in RTA).
There are also a few places where when the game displays the town name when you first enter, you can run a few pixels and talk to someone nearby, cancel their text and keep running instead of waiting for the name of the town to disappear.
As this is a NG+ run, a HUGE amount of planning goes into this. Many small things such as cooking, affection, and the amount of skills in your menu saves good chunks of time. I am creating a google doc with detailed notes on the run (still a work in progress as routing is still being done) and I also detail a little bit about TASing as well as I post this on my stream where not everyone knows the ins and outs of TASing.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jS8Uwd7khCOWLPoUPt_MnqNUXQ6PFOYjV1nuBN5vxDU/
There is a small WIP in the google doc as well although it was mostly created by me for practice (Input buffering in menus sometimes doesn't like to cooperate). The set up file used in the WIP is not going to be the one used in the final TAS because small timesavers have been found and I am waiting for GreenMittenz to finish the set up file on his Wii and upload it for me as I do not have a means of doing so.
I can't wait to start TASing the battles, but I am still learning how RNG manipulation in this game works too. To manipulate starting stats, I had to wait around 2.3 seconds on the title screen before the words "newgame" and "continute" appear (literally the only way I was able to figure this out was through hours and hours of close watch of the memory values during the intro. Starting stats are not changed in the memory until the kratos narration starts but the RNG seed is set way earlier).
Thanks for reading. I wanted to get the word out about this and to see if anyone was interested, although submission to this site may not happen.
Cheers!
