...Wooooooow. Final Fantasy 4 Advance is BROKEN.
There appears to be some sort of glitch where a character can act multiple times off of a single ATB gauge charge. I've had it occur to me several times already in regular play, so it looks like it'd be a glitch that would be easily abuseable.
...Of course, with a glitch like that, it also brings into question whether FF4 Advance would even be an acceptable TAS candidate, but who knows..
Don't exaggerate. It happens one time in my TAS and I don't know the real reason. Trying to reproduce seems not easy. There's probably something related to when another character got the bar full while another is just doing an action.
Or maybe it's something else.
Even if there's that bug, YES it is acceptable. Since it's easier to obtain critical hits on Snes version, that bug may compensate.
P.S. And next time, try posting in FF4 GBA thread for that game ;P
Since it's not really the same game, you can continue FF2 US. Try to get critical hits on Myst Dragon boss and next enemies.
I think I noticed that glitch during Tellah's 'You Spoony Bard!' moment, in the SNES game he only acted, like, 3 times in that whole sequence. But in the GBA remake, he acted TEN before he even said anything. That might be the glitch, or that might just be how they changed that sequence..
Anyway, personally, my vote is to do the run on the SNES version, but that's just me.
I'm back to work on the run, now that I've finally had my fill of FF4 Advance. I'm currently in Fabul after making surprisingly short work of MomBomb. I thought that not having Cecil's Darkness would make things pretty painful in this battle, but I definitely found out otherwise. I'll probably put out another progress report once Cecil becomes a Paladin.
After trying in three boss battles to manipulate critical hits consistantly without also causing enemies to get in a whole bunch of free hits due to the rapid battle speed (manipulating beyond a couple dozen frames or so gives enemies free turns, that's how fast FF4 battles are at full speed), I've given up trying. Right now I'm only doing a bit of damage manipulation in these battles to make them go faster.
And yeah, besides that, I'm fairly aware of most of the mistakes in the run.. trying to publish a run of an RPG of this length in one shot isn't going to happen.
I think I noticed that glitch during Tellah's 'You Spoony Bard!' moment, in the SNES game he only acted, like, 3 times in that whole sequence. But in the GBA remake, he acted TEN before he even said anything. That might be the glitch, or that might just be how they changed that sequence..
Anyway, personally, my vote is to do the run on the SNES version, but that's just me.
It looks like the battle will only "advance" if Tellah actually does hit Edward. If he misses, nothing happens. Tellah has crappy accuracy, so it's going to take a while for him to whack Edward a few times.
The same thing happened in the Edward/Anna battle. In the FF2 version, the battle was over in a few rounds because Edward had better accuracy. I missed like 10 or so times with Edward in the FFIV version because he had crappier accuracy (at least only in early levels, in the late game his accuracy skyrockets). During the time when I missed, Anna didn't say anything. However, when Edward FINALLY hit the danged enemy, Anna started to talk, and "advanced" the battle.
I haven't been keeping up with this thread or any of this site for that matter, but I do want to say that I improved the FF2 run over at SDA by a little over 20 minutes, from 4:15 to 3:55. It is currently available at Persona's page, and should be on SDA itself once all the administrative stuff is taken care of. Maybe you can find some things to use, but at least it should be a better reference than Peter Tiernan's old run. As an aside, it's a bit amusing now to note that I originally started this thread with getting to Zeromus in 3:58 on ZSNES, and now I get there at 3:40 on a real SNES.
I know a lot about this game, Tilus, so I think I could help you. I really think you shouldn't be fighting any regular enemy fights so far. If you remember way back earlier in this thread, I tested and not fighting any non-required fights before Paladin was better, even for a console run, and the difference would be even greater for a TAS. Most of the chests you can pick up are not worth the time either. To reduce random battles, I would try power cycling for a TAS, since it's so quick for FF2. I don't think you need to be getting any overworld battles, for one.
Non-obvious key strategies that I would do different in a TAS compared to my console run are:
1) Get Excalibur and dupe it while running with Strike First!
2) Level up using Attacker/Defender (probably using FuSoYa's Quake) instead of D Machin's.
Other things like getting critical hits you can figure out by yourself.
Kyrsimys, the battle messages only count for fighting messages and not plot messages in battle, like the Mist Dragon and Golbez and Edge's parents and such. It's a little arbitrary, but messages such as "Kain! Jump!" are indeed affected by battle message speed.
About FF4 GBA, it would have to be faster based on the battle action bug (it does exist, as discussed on SDA), which is more pronounced with battle speed 1. Your characters move way too fast, which hurts enemies and automated moves like Jump and Berserk.
nitsuja, I agree that this is a very real possibility, but it isn't obvious as in FF3, where the battle speed only affects the enemies. Tilus should definitely test this out.
Seeing as the little Pokemon distraction got taken care of by someone else, I'm going to return back to this run.
I spent yesterday watching the latest console speedrun video.. I've picked up some really good information from it, and have some additional ideas where it can be improved, and not just using TAS tactics, either. I can definitely see where someone might get 3:20 as a possible TAS time to shoot for.. the bosses leave room for lots of improvement. I like alot of the earlier bosses and the ones in the Lunar Subterrane, but alot of the ones in the middle leave much to be desired. 3:20 is definitely stretching it (I recall a cheat filled walkthrough .zmv which showed the fastest theoretical playthrough of the game lasting about 3 hours even), but getting sub 3:40 seems to be fairly doable.
As for some of the suggestions in the thread..
I dunno if setting the battle speed lower will really help any. I imagine the critical hit rate for the game is rather low, given their extreme infrequency in regular gameplay, so I'd have to slow the battle speed down fairly significantly to be able to manipulate criticals with any sort of frequency and not lose too much time doing so. I'm going to stay with battle speed 1, and if I can pick up a critical hit after 15-20 frames of playing around, I'll take it, otherwise I probably won't bother. I'll likely be using far more damage manipulation than critical hit manipulation.
Picking up the Excalibur and duping it to give Edge some Dart material.. I may dupe other items (such as the Flame sword) to give myself lots of cash to purchase items (maybe Elixirs) later on, but the Excalibur seems a tad out of the way to be worth it, having to go through much of the Summon Monster cave to get the Tail necessary to obtain it. It's a shame I can't dupe Spoon daggers, though..
Looking back, I'm not sure if I should just continue on with my testrun as it is now or restart and apply all the knowledge I've learned on the console speedrun onto a new testrun. The current testrun I have is sitting at the base of Mt. Ordeals, approximately 1-2 minutes faster than the SDA run despite the mistakes, and if you want me to post my progress before I stopped about a month ago, I can.
Josh the Funk DOC told me you had replied to this thread. =)
Could you elaborate on your improvement ideas? I did all the segments 20-30 times, so the boss fights in the middle are very optimized for a speedrun unless there's some strategies I didn't test. The luck could be better in parts, but that's TAS territory. Did you look at my comments? I list some improvement ideas at the end. Also, as an aside, I think the segment comments are really worth reading for the funny. ;)
You could always try setting battle speed lower while fighting some boss and actually test.
I still think duping Excalibur should be better because it is way faster. Getting the Tail is not bad. It's the part after that, and then the duping. You'd have to test, but I wouldn't be surprised either way.
I would recommend you restart. Mt Ordeal really isn't that far. To be honest, I'm pretty happy that I would only be 1-2 mins behind a TAS WIP with a speedrun. =p
Good to see you're working on this again! I wish you luck.
Oh, I just remembered something I found about this game, it's really quite minor but maybe it'll help save that 1 frame you need to get better luck somewhere. When you choose and target a command in battle, normally you press A for 1 frame to choose the command, then release it for 1 frame, then press A again for 1 frame to choose the target, which takes 3 frames overall, but you can do it 1 faster by instead pressing R+A for 1 frame, then press only A for 1 frame, that's it, so it only takes 2 frames to do the same thing. It doesn't work in any of the non-SNES remakes of this game as far as I can tell.
I still think duping Excalibur should be better because it is way faster. Getting the Tail is not bad. It's the part after that, and then the duping. You'd have to test, but I wouldn't be surprised either way.
I'm not so sure if this trick has been discussed or not, but it MAY come in handy, if the time to get the Avenger offsets the time to dupe Excaliburs, or whatever.
Also, it could be used to mass dupe any sword for money. Just throwing it out there :D
gamefaqs wrote:
To start the trick, you need the Avenger sword, which you can find in the Sylvan cave in the underground, I think.
First, equip Cecil with arrows in his GOOD hand, and the any kind of bow in his BAD. Get into a battle (preferably an easy one), and make sure that nobody does anything. If a character's turn comes before his, have them parry (press right and the parry option will come up). Once it gets to Cecil's turn, enter the item screen. Grab the arrows he has equiped and bring them down to an empty slot. Without leaving the window, select the Avenger sword and move it up to his BAD hand.
From there, press B to exit the items window and his commands will disappear because the Avenger sword causes the person with it equiped to be berserked. Don't have any other characters do ANYTHING! Just let Cecil beat up all the enemies.
After the battle, go to the Equip screen for Cecil. Move the Avenger sword to an empty slot, and then without leaving the screen move the sword you would like to duplicate 250 times into his GOOD hand (the one with the numbers). De-equip, and re-equip, and voila! You should have a sword with a circle and a number next to it in your inventory. If not, make sure you followed my directions EXACTLY.
I'm not so sure if this trick has been discussed or not, but it MAY come in handy, if the time to get the Avenger offsets the time to dupe Excaliburs, or whatever.
Also, it could be used to mass dupe any sword for money. Just throwing it out there :D
I looked into that for my speedrun, but I doubt there's any way the Avenger could be any use, and especially in a TAS where you can have perfect menu manipulation.
Avenger is way out of the way in the Sylvan cave, and worse, it's one of those chests in that room with the 6 chests that all have monster fights. Add that on to the time that Excalibur itself takes, and it'd be better to just get the Crystal sword in a speedrun. In a TAS, you can manipulate to get a first strike fairly easily, and then the actual duping would be done frame perfect. And by the time you get Avenger sword, you have no more need for money.
And as an aside, to what Tilus was saying about duping swords for money, there really isn't much that you want to buy that you can't already afford. The only place to buy Elixirs and Ether2s are at Hummingway's, and you don't need them by that point. Weapons are mostly useless, because the best weapons are usually found. I thought for a moment about being able to buy Ninja stars maybe, but then I realized you need Excalibur already for Kokkol to start selling them.
The only possibility I can think of is duping the Black sword to be able to make the Cure2 item run sooner in the game. However, I think you would be able to do this in a TAS (maybe even a speedrun, I'd have to make sure) anyway by buying minimal items. At any rate, getting a couple chests like the 2000 GP in the weapon/armor shop in Baron would be faster than duping.
Actually, in a TAS, I would only recommend going to a store for: Cure2 item run in Mysidia after Paladinhood, Bandannas in Baron, and Blizzard spear in Eblan.
Yeah, the improvements I'm thinking of are mostly boss strategy.
The bosses that I think lots of time can be saved on without luck manipulation are:
- Milon Z.: Did you try to see whether using Cure2/Fire2 with Palom and Porom was faster than casting Twin? I could've sworn one of them did in excess of 1100 damage to Milon Z..
- Baigan: You should be able to organize Tellah's magic and Palom/Porom's Twin magic so that he goes down in just 2 Comets and 2 doses of Ice-3.
- Kainazzo: His regular form is actually weak to Ice. You should be able to win with Lit-2 from Palom, then Ice-3 from Tellah, then another Lit-2 (or Ice-2, depending on Kainazzo's form) from Palom.
- Magus Sisters: Having Cid use his Earth hammer as an item in battle casts Quake, which does a good 300-400 damage to all enemies. Should make the pounding away once the middle sister's gone go by quicker.
- Golbez (Dwarf Castle): Having Kain Jump before Golbez says his little speech is possible - I've pulled it off myself. I guess trying to do so in real time at battle speed 1 is kinda stretching it though..
As for the dupe trick.. I've seen a number of variations on it, including a way to equip anything stealable as a weapon/shield.. I'll have to test the limits on some of these variations on it once I get back to running the game again.
Just to let you know, I scrutinize these and any other suggestions people make (i.e. with real testing), so I appreciate your comments.
Milon: Twin does so much more damage than anything else. You win on the same Twin anyway.
Baigan: Tellah needs to wait to get around Wall, and I can't split the Ice3 or else Baigan won't die. I win on the first Twin following Tellah's 2nd Ice3. If I just parry and wait for Tellah, I still win on the first Twin following Tellah's 2nd Ice3. So any time gain would be negligible (like not having to revive someone after the fight).
Kainazzo: Holy mother of God! I was sure that he is weak to Lit whenever he is out of his shell and weak to Ice in his shell. But I just tested and you're right. However, Palom basically NEVER survives Big Wave, so it doesn't help me one bit. I win with Lit2, then Lit3 and Lit3. Lit2 + Ice3 isn't enough, so I win on the same Tellah spell anyway. Very glad you told me this though, still. It would have looked smarter at least.
Magus Sisters: This is the one battle I said I could have used a better strategy in my comments: only using Ice3 with Tellah to make the later parts quicker with an extra Ice3. I tested and Quake seems to do about 75% of the damage on Cindy that attacking does, if you don't critical any. It turns out that I would kill Cindy on the 2nd Ice3 even with the Quake damage, so you are right; Quake seems to be strictly better. Because it still takes me the final Ice3 to win, this cost me ~10 seconds. Interestingly enough, the Quake strategy means that the better Ice3 strategy is irrelevant.
Now, to throw another curveball, with Bandannas and decent luck, I think you can kill Cindy with just one Ice3, which would be the fastest of all because then you could start Ice3'ing the others without having to wait for Wall to wear off. To do this though, you would most likely have to be attacking with Cid instead of Quaking. =p So, this is another case where I learn something very useful for normal play that probably wouldn't affect a speedrun.
This segment was weird in that I kept on "improving" it, but then when I looked at the time it was actually slower. And in almost all battles I think I have optimal strategy (i.e. 0 better ways), yet there are at least 3 better ways to have done this one (3rd one coming up). And I think this was the only segment where I knowingly left a faster strategy on the table: reflecting Ice3 off your own guy and hoping it hits Cindy. I didn't actually do this because there's a 1/9 chance of success, but with 1/3, I think it would be worth it.
Golbez: Nobody seems to believe me no matter how many times I say it. At low levels, it is impossible to get Kain in the air. Impossible. I have tried on ZSNES in slow motion and everything. I also tried while running, which actually helps in FF5. I tried about the first 10-15 record attempts trying to catch lightning in a bottle somehow. Unless you can luck manipulate Golbez somehow (which is not pertinent to speedrunning), it is impossible. Your stats are simply not good enough. Yes, I know you can get Kain in the air. That is for normal playing.
The classic use for the steal equip trick is to let Rydia or Rosa equip a Silver shield. Actually, apparently I already wrote something about this on the SDA thread back in December (I wrote a bunch heh), so I'll copy and paste:
I also considered a couple more tricks/glitches. The instant mass dupe trick involving the Avenger sword is tempting, but unfortunately getting the Avenger involves winning a chest fight in the Sylvan Cave. I think actually, a worthy possible trick is to give Rosa a Silver Shield, which would allow for less D Machin leveling. I didn't do this because:
1) most importantly, it's dangerous playing with low levels and I didn't want to save myself stuck
2) I didn't dupe anything and the run would be glitchless (I don't count Dark Crystal as a glitch)
3) I'm not sure it would save time by making an appreciable Rosa leveling difference, and there are other ways to speed up leveling like leveling Cecil less or Rosa less as is or getting lucky with Attacker/Defender maybe
In the end, it probably is worth it because it would allow Rosa to skimp at least one level I think.
Edit: It doesn't bother me personally, and I know your point, but I wanted to ask you to tone down your rhetoric a little =p "the bosses leave room for lots of improvement" "alot of the ones in the middle leave much to be desired" "lots of time can be saved on without luck manipulation" Even if everything you said were 100% true, most of those (not the Magus sisters one) would save 10-15 seconds per. So total almost 1 minute, out of 235. ;)
Well, when I wrote that, I honestly thought there was quite a bit more to improve than I listed there.. Sorry about that. But I guess some of what I wrote may still be applicable to a TAS (like with Kain's Jump), where things can be controlled much more precisely.
The speedrun was taken down, does anyone have the latest progress, or could you send me what was once on that page via e-mail? I'd greatly appreciate it.
Btw, I just bought FF4 for the GBA, and I must say I'm quite impressed at the conversion... although slightly apalled at the stupid combat bug. It keeps messing with my head.
Joined: 11/14/2005
Posts: 1057
Location: United States
I don't know if anyone is still working on this run, but I have found a usefull new way to manipulate luck in this game. Instead of slowing down the battle speed in the options menu like nitsuja suggested, it is probably better to simply press the start button and pause the game for a few frames right after you enter your attack command. I killed the first boss in a mere 35 seconds, he didn't even enter his mist phase because he was killed off so fast.here is a link to that battle. I am currently trying to find the memory address that would indicate when a critical hit will occur, because testing every single frame is really time consuming.
I haven't worked on it since I started over, but have considered that possibility for luck manipulation, and am glad to see that that particular method does work.
If you want to take over this game and do a speedrun on it yourself, feel free.. I won't stop you. However, I'll probably start getting some of my free time back soon, so if you don't want to do it after all, I'll pick it back up myself, and make sure it receives the justice it deserves.
If you're going to do this game, what platform are you going to do it on? SNES or GBA?
And personally, I find this FF game to be slightly less entertaining than, say Final Fantasy 3 or Chrono Trigger. Just personal opinion though. Almost fell asleep during that segmented 600 meg video set.
Joined: 11/14/2005
Posts: 1057
Location: United States
I think I will take up this game, and it will be done on the SNES version. And yes this game is very boring in comparison to those other rpg's you mentioned.
