This is a meme. But it beats the published movie by 16 frames, so why not?
Objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 1.12.0
- Core: mGBA
- Abuses programming errors
- Triggers the end credits
Yu-Gi-Oh! 7 Trials to Glory is a GBA game centred around a card game, but we won't be seeing any of that. Instead we use a glitch in the card shop to put the game in a post-completion state, then demonstrate this by playing the credits.
The main impetus for this TAS was seeing a speedrunner called Mergy do some runs to practise for an ESA donation incentive, and him finding a new
way to ever so slightly speed up the run.
The glitch
The shop glitch is basically the fact that with some quick menuing you can buy packs of cards you weren't supposed to. In a normal playthrough this can be used to buy multiple packs of cards you don't have the money for. The important consequence of this to the TAS is that you can buy more copies of a pack than the shop actually has. Then when you go to buy the packs, the game freaks out and starts writing garbage over various patches of memory.
The effects depend on what packs you buy. For example, by buying packs one way the universe is replaced with a hell where every card pack has Tea's picture on it and the chibi Solomon is replaced with a chibi Strings. You also seem to need to buy too many copies of a pack - too many copies of a deck alone seem to be handled perfectly fine. In the TAS, the game is set to a post-completion state, the language is set to Jap (but I already make that change for frames), the text is set to slow, endgame areas are unlocked, and other odd effects irrelevant to the run.
At the end, to trigger the credits I enter the Konami Code. This only works once the game has been completed, so it's the quickest way to show off game 'completion'.
The actual run
I select Japanese at the start, and press B to skip the intro.
The game starts with the player walking right into the card shop, as if it wants to be beat quickly. I buy 3 of Volume 3 with R instead of pressing up 3 times (the timesave in the 'main' part of the run, due to Mergy),then immediately press down and select Volume 4 with A. Then by pressing B it defaults to giving me 3, the selection for the previous pack. This is the shop glitch proper. I then buy 3 of the Gemini Elf pack, despite there only being 1 copy in the shop.
Then I go to confirm my order, and the game freaks out due to buying too many Gemini Elf packs. Once the game has put itself back into a state resembling playable, I get through Solomon's text (which now scrolls slower due to the glitch). Here I do one more optimisation over the last TAS: entering the Konami Code early so the final A is what clears away Solomon's final textbox. This doesn't make any visible change, but it means the final input is earlier so it gets that frame count down.
The Konami Code triggers the credits once we leave Solomon's card shop (which looks like our room), and it is revealed that in half a minute of gameplay we have managed to get through 48.5% of the game's content!
Acknowledgements
The shop glitch has been known for a long time, for example from
this 9 years old GameFAQs post. Agglom from speedrun.com noted that you could use the Konami Code to trigger the credits after using the glitch.
- Mergy, for giving this game a go which led to me doing this, and finding out about using R to buy packs faster
- AkagitsuneYuki, for making the previous TAS and giving me a standard to beat
- Striferider, for wanting to do this too and so pushing me to beat him
Mergy also noticed you could reduce the RTA time by waiting until the music in the intro screen stops. It makes the game start 19 frames earlier, and then I can save another 2 frames a bit later, but by the time the music stops the TAS is already over. Using that, the best RTA time I could get was 22.75s, beating the current WR by 0.92s. As it stands, the RTA time of this TAS is 23.11s.
