Wizards and Warriors 2 is an action platformer developed by Rare. The basic idea of the game is to collect a magic scroll to defeat each level's boss.

While not particularly noteworthy in itself, this game has the distinction of being the longest non-obsoleted NES game, despite several started and cancelled attempts to create a new run.

The current run accumulates the already heavily optimized and partially completed runs by Aglar and Randil (themselves from nearly 5 years ago) and completes the game with a few additional improvements.

Game objectives

Comments

Scubed's original run of this game already contained the significant glitches used in this run. They are the infinite magic glitch, whereby if you get 255 magic, your magic will constantly refill when drained due to sloppy programming, and a glitch in the second boss which lets you skip getting the magic ordinarily needed to beat him. Aside from this, the improvements are platforming optimization and luck manipulation to get infinite magic as quickly as possible. I would say also that a lot of this improvement is also attributable to improved tools available in the form of FCEUX compared to 10 years ago.

Luck manipulation on this game is perhaps as easy and convenient as possible. It's usually just holding the up button until you get what you want. It doesn't always work (as in the geysers), but for harvesting magic is certainly not as hard as it could be.

A final note is that this run drops the 'takes no damage' tag of the original movie, as there was consensus (even by the original author Scubed) that it was unnecessary.

Stage by stage comments

Stage 1: This stage was heavily optimized by Aglar and Randil. The current run uses it directly and manipulates the boss to get the required level of magic. About half of the overall improvement in the run comes from this level.

Stage 2: A little more manipulation to get the infinite magic glitch activated here and a slightly better boss fight.

Stage 3: From here on it is almost pure platforming. I do manipulate the geysers in the first part of the stage to save a few frames, although they are not always useful, especially since they always shoot you to the left. I also improved the boss fight slightly.

Stage 4: Pure platforming and an easy boss fight here.

Stage 5: The boss fight here was pretty tricky. The basic idea is that if you are shooting magic in the same direction as each boss is moving it will stay in contact with them longer and damage them significantly more. Only 1 boss is 'activated' at a time however (actively maneuvering around you and attacking) so making opportunities for this to happen takes patience.

Author's Comments

When I read through the game thread and looked over the WIPs, I was quite surprised at how much was done despite there being no final product, and the improvement over the existing run being so great. About 95% of this run is directly attributable to Aglar and Randil, so I can hardly take any of the credit. Indeed it seems that it just needed one final push to get to completion. I can't help but wonder how many other projects out there exist in this state, as personally all of my movies to date have relied heavily on existing work that has basically been lying around waiting to be finished.

I am not sure what other possible improvements might be. Maybe the last boss can be done quicker, but it's not clear to me what a perfect fight would look like, so I don't know how far away from that the current run is.

I would like to thank rchokler for looking over my WIPs and pointing out improvements. Also thanks to Samsara and rchokler for dramatically improving the last boss fight.

feos: Fixed platform, judging...

feos: Updated the movie.

feos: Accepting to Moons as a notable improvement.

fsvgm777: Fixed game name to match that of the previous publication, publishing.