Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is a strategy role-playing game for the Game Boy Advance. The gameplay is similar to Final Fantasy Tactics. The player controls up to six units in grid-like, turn-based battles. For the most part, players are free to decide the party's jobs and abilities.

Game objectives

  • Beat the final story boss, Li-Grim, in the fastest possible time. Only story missions are completed.
  • An "all missions" branch is also worth pursuing, but an RTA route is still in the works.
  • A "Famfrit" branch is another more accessible RTA category that aims to beat the first boss in about an hour, without grinding. Said boss is beaten in around 45 minutes in this movie.

Comments

  • Emulator used: BizHawk 2.1.0
  • No glitches/programming errors discovered so far.
  • Units are left to die when they serve no further purpose in the battle. This is only done rarely, however.
  • Frame-perfect inputs are used to get favourable RNG (and AI) in every single turn. This lets me avoid every single attack thrown at me (except for a particular Double Sword attack which was nearly impossible to manipulate), as well as get criticals (1.5 damage multiplier) whenever I need them. Later on, Beatdown (double damge, half accuracy) is used in favour of criticals. This is especially deadly with Estreledge, the fourth strongest weapon, which can be obtained less than halfway into the game. The Gadgeteer ability Chroma Gem inflicts Sleep on either all allies or all enemies and is normally too luck based to be used in normal play, but thanks to RNG manipulation, it can be easily used to prevent enemies from taking their turns. Finally, Rockseal is used to OHKO certain enemies that can't be OHKO'd with Beatdown, especially in the late game.

Stage by stage comments

-1: Snowball battle, 0: Lizards

For this section I mostly just followed FellVisage's run. Default name is used since name length doesn't matter; entire lines of dialogue are printed at once, unlike older games where dialogue is printed character by character, like Pokemon.
Misses are manipulated by pressing A on specific frames during the attack animation, are always faster than getting hit, and are relatively easy to manipulate. If I'm not wrong, as long as the hit rate is not 100%, a miss can always be manipulated.
The snowball battle only ends when Ritz gets her second turn. All I need to do is wait. Ideally, enemy movement should be minimised, and I think their default AI was pretty decent in this respect.
After some long scenes comes the battle against the "lizards". I hit one of them so that Montblanc (from now on referred to as Mont) can follow up with a kill. Notice the pause when hitting the second one. This was done to get a critical hit; critical hits are determined on the frame you press A to "Do it". This will be the bread and butter for the first third of the game or so.
Note that these two battles do count into your "battles fought" tally, which is important in getting shop upgrades later.
After the battle, I kick out the last 2 members since I don't need them, and remove all armor from the 4 that are left. (FellVisage found out that removing armor before changing jobs allows a very long dialogue box to be skipped) I sell most of it in order to buy weapons and accessories. Namely, Sweep Blade (which teaches the Fighter ability Beatdown), and cheap swords to unlock the Fighter job. I make the Bangaa a Warrior to prepare to unlock the Gladiator job.

1: Herb Picking

An easy battle. Marche leaves the goblin alive so that Mont can kill it and earn JP, important for a later battle which needs 10 JP. So if you notice me leaving an enemy alive for Mont to finish off, that's why. Sadly, there are some wasted turns because the last goblin is too far away.
Because this battle is done with <6 members in the party, a recruitment mission is triggered. Additionally, a low-level recruitment mission appears normally. I manipulate to recruit a White Monk and Fighter this way. I ensure both have near maximum Speed (as Speed is the single most important stat for the run) and equip them with the appropriate weapons. Notably, the White Monk has a strong ranged attack due to a weapon I manipulated to get from a quest reward; however, the animation for this attack wastes quite a bit of time.

2: Thesis Hunt

Another standard battle. Here we see how strong the newly recruited White Monk can be.
After the battle, I buy new weapons and proceed with the next one.

3: The Cheetahs

Ritz and Shara occupy 2 slots, so I have to leave the humans behind; the Bangaas are of greater importance in the long run. The Black Mage could not be prevented from using his spell. Mont uses Fire instead of Thunder (which has a faster animation) because Lightning is banned on this day. With some good AI from Ritz and Shara, this battle is no problem.
Notice the pause in the pub. This is me waiting frames to get a Khukuri, an important weapon for Mont. It teaches a cheap Thief ability which lets him unlock the Gadgeteer job quickly, but cannot be bought in stores. I deliberately get into the encounter (and flee it) to increase my battle count by 1. I give Montblanc a stronger rod to let him OHKO a certain monster later.

4: Desert Peril

This was a headache. The two monsters in the middle section are easily killed, but for best results, the antlion (the bug thing) HAS to be faster than Marche. Otherwise, Marche would just advance and have nothing to attack. This took a while to manipulate, since antlions have rather low Speed. Again, the Panther taking a while to come down along with the cramped terrain around the cactus leads to some wasted turns.
I walk around a bit to get a law that "recommends" Ice. With this, Mont can gain JP every time he uses Blizzard. This is necessary as the battle that needs 10 JP is coming soon.

5: Twisted Flow

The first boss of the game. Only Mont needs to be set up, so I choose to do it during the formation this time, instead of in the main menu. The Roulette spell KOs a random unit, and I redirect it to 3 of his allies; the boss is immune, of course. However, the animation is ridiculously long, so I'm uncertain if I could have let it go off only twice or once. Marche takes a hit because the Speed point (10% chance) is more important; wish it didn't have to be a crit though. A few rounds of ganging up later, Famfrit goes down.
The Fighter now has access to a ranged attack, and the White Monk becomes a Warrior to prepare for becoming a Gladiator. Again, I walk around to get Fire recommended, and flee the encounter to increase the battle count by 1.

6: Antilaws

Ezel, who is in need of rescuing, has a beastly spell that puts all enemies to sleep. Of course, this is manipulated to make all hits land, completely shutting them down. You'll see more of this strategy soon enough. The Defender is satisfyingly killed by fall damage, and the Ninja is prevented from retreating to the right corner of the map (he'd be unreachable if that were to happen). Mont uses Fire on himself to gain JP.
Since that was the 10th battle, the shop gets upgraded. I buy Shadow Blades and Dream Claws. The former teaches Beatdown, which does double damage at half accuracy - which essentially means double damage in this TAS. The latter teaches a spell that puts either all allies or all enemies to sleep - which essentially means it puts all enemies to sleep. :)

7: Diamond Rain

The 10 JP are used to summon Famfrit to not only OHKO the ice flan, but also heavily damage all the other enemies, which is really important since the Dragons have a lot of HP and defense. The rest involves some careful consideration of movement, but is generally standard. I let that one guy die because he's no longer needed, and his turn would just be wasted if he was alive.
Marche becomes a Fighter, and I get Estreledge from the map. Estreledge is an absurdly powerful weapon. I walk around to ban Charm for the next battle.

8: Hot Awakening

Very boring fight. Would've been insufferable if Charm wasn't banned; the enemies would keep using their Charm spell, which has a long animation and is quite hard to avoid. Routing was also tedious.
Mont finally gains access to the "sleep-all" spell.

9: Magic Wood

A rare instance of friendly fire - I get the Fighter to push Marche one space forward to get him in range for a Beatdown on turn 1. Sleep-all is not 100% accurate, which is why some units remain awake. In particular, I let the Summoner come forward so she can be killed the next turn. "Sleep-all, then finish off" will be the general strategy for the rest of the run.

10: Emerald Keep

Effortless 2HKO on the boss.
The first Bangaa finishes learning Beatdown and finally gets to wield the Estreledge, and I kick the first human to make room for an Assassin that I will recruit soon.

11: Pale Company

I let the guy in the back die since he's not needed (I only bring him for AP). Here you can see just how strong the Estreledge is; with it, I can take off almost half of the boss' HP. With some support from Marche and a convenient sleep-all, the boss goes down in 3 hits.
Now I recruit an Assassin, give her access to Rockseal (32 MP OHKO, usually only once per battle), and kick another member to make room for another Assassin later.

12: Jagd Hunt

Dodging both hits of Double Sword is very hard. Rockseal takes care of the turtle instantly - otherwise he'd need 2-3 hits to kill. Again, some friendly fire lets the Estreledge guy reach his target in 1 less turn.
I flee yet another encounter, and recruit the second Assassin.

13: The Bounty

Since enemy formation is random, getting a favourable formation is essential. This formation lets me kill 3 enemies on turn 1. The rest are finished off on turn 2.

14: Golden Clock

More Ritz and Shara goodness. Shara OHKOs the Time Mage and Ritz disables the Gadgeteer on turn 1. The latter is important as that's the only way to get around his annoying Damage > MP spell, which redirects damage to MP unless the unit has 0 MP. The Alchemist is immune to sleep, and is prevented from using magic to save time. The rest is easy.
I flee my last encounter to upgrade the shop again. The most important purchase is Dash Boots, which increase movement by 1. Marche becomes a Paladin to equip a rather strong weapon (it has an automatic 50% damage boost).

15: Scouring Time

3 kills on turn 1. Estreledge cleans up the rest. I kill off Babus easily, then crush the fruits one by one. Notably, 3 of them have higher defense than the others, so I leave those ones for last.
I get a Tiptaptwo from the map, which boosts Mont's speed greatly, letting him use sleep-all before most enemies take their turn.

16: The Big Find

3 kills on turn 1 again. I let the Assassin die since she has no more MP, and she'd just waste a bunch of turns since she's so fast. Estreledge cleans up the two above, and Marche kills the one on the hill.

17: Desert Patrol

This one is a bit annoying since they all start so far away. The Assassins have enough turns and MP to be able to use Rockseal twice now. I do wish I could've killed the last enemy before he woke up.

18: Quiet Sands

The first battle ends when Marche is KO'd, so I left that to the Estreledge guy. I kill off the guy in the second battle since he's only there for AP. Mont uses sleep-all, and Marche and Estreledge guy gang up on a retreating Mateus.

19: Materite Now

2 summons kills them all. This is probably the best battle to use the summons in, really.
I get a 2nd Estreledge after the battle.

20: Present Day

Rockseal and Estreledge make the first battle a breeze. The second one is done by simply standing there and getting Llednar to use only Fight, instead of his fancy time-wasting abilities.

21: Hidden Vein

One of the more difficult battles. I kill off the Assassins once they're done, redirect Roulette to the Blue Mage himself since he has Damage > MP, and use sleep on ONLY the White Monk, unfortunately - the Juggler is immune. If I hadn't done that, he would've revived the Blue Mage no matter what, and that would've been worse.

22: To Ambervale

Air Render sees its last use here, to finish off the weakened antlion. The Assassins do the heavy lifting, with 4 Rockseals in total.

23: Over the Hill

I put most of the enemies to sleep (Ritz and Shara are immune), then kill Ritz with fall damage. Lovely.
Saving is necessary to trigger the last battles.

24: Royal Valley

Llednar is killed in 2 hits, unfortunately, since the Estreledge guy doesn't have enough Attack to do it on his own. The next bosses are simply a repeat of the Famfrit fight - sleep, surround and let Estreledge guy do most of the whacking. There really is no other way around it.

Possible areas for improvement

  • study the RNG address, 34B0
  • perfect map placement and movement; the second Estreledge can probably be ignored
  • avoid getting armor from quest rewards (minor)
  • Kaiser Knuckles + Firewheel Rod + Atmos Blade in the early game; requires quite a bit of luck, so I only obtained the first two
  • get Montblanc to 10 JP without wasting turns
  • use Famfrit on Ultima instead (unsure)
  • do Golden Clock without Petrify being banned
  • flee the last clan encounter in a more suitable location (not a jagd)
  • find a better way to beat the final bosses, preferably in at most four turns
  • discover glitches (Voodoo anyone?)

Thanks to

  • AnthonyJones, for being the first one to even attempt a TAS of this game
  • FellVisage, for being the first one to attempt a serious TAS of this game, and for the Rockseal idea
  • ruadath, for telling me about the RNG address (though I had no idea what to make of it), and for helping me out with some BizHawk and encoding issues
  • Pokota, for the ffmpeg command I used for my temporary encode

Fog: Judging.
Fog: This was a great technical run, but not my usual cup of tea game wise. There were no glaringly obvious issues, and the audience reception was great.
Accepting for Moons!
Spikestuff: Hey, this is only one cart not 4 disks. What gives? Publishing.
Fog: Replacing movie file with spiked inputs trimming the extra inputs.
Fog: Replacing movie file with correct BIOS information.

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #5620: hejops's GBA Final Fantasy Tactics Advance in 2:50:37.76
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Temp encode can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvTbUXnGqpI Also, I neglected to remove all the empty frames after the last input, so the time of the last input is more like 2:49:51. I will upload an edited bk2 file if necessary. Sorry about that.
#6717 Interested in: GBA Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (any%) GBC Dragon Warrior III (Pachisi glitch - skipping Kandar 1 means Kandar 2 won't be triggered)
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i didn't know petrify worked like that, pretty cool!
TAS i'm interested: megaman series: mmbn1 all chips, mmx3 any% psx glitched fighting games with speed goals in general
Joined: 5/13/2009
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Hitting your own guy with a critical just to get him close enough to hit next turn was pretty inspired. Definitely entertained by this one! Yes vote :)
Zarmakuizz
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That was nice to watch! In the final fights, why do you use a Soldier and an Assassin, instead of your 2 soldiers with Estreledge?
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I simply used the units with the highest attack power since that's pretty much the only way to beat them. The second Warrior could have been stronger than the Assassin, but he was significantly underleveled at that point - I think he was 2 to 3 levels lower, which corresponds to a rough difference of 20 damage.
#6717 Interested in: GBA Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (any%) GBC Dragon Warrior III (Pachisi glitch - skipping Kandar 1 means Kandar 2 won't be triggered)
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Wasn't the Sleep on Hidden Vein (2h27 in the encode) a little bit overkill ? Other than that, it looks really well planned and done.
Joined: 2/28/2009
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I was able to watch this whole thing over the course of several days. I enjoyed it, but I questioned many small decisions that were made throughout the course of the TAS. Using the long-animation sleep move to hit only 1 or 2 enemies, having allied units wait when it seems like they could've done something useful, etc. I'm sure there were reasons for most of these that I couldn't perceive because of my shallow recollection of the mechanics, but I was surprised at how many decisions seemed strange on the surface. Of course, SRPGs have a ton of interweaving elements going on that all need to be juggled and considered to fully optimize for speed. I think this is good enough for publish, so yes vote from me.
Zarmakuizz
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The movie could totally be watched at 2x speed, if you know the game already. If you don't, you may still give it a try: I bet you're not here for the story, and most attacks are the same. The music stays nice to listen even in increased speed.
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lapogne36 wrote:
Wasn't the Sleep on Hidden Vein (2h27 in the encode) a little bit overkill ? Other than that, it looks really well planned and done.
Yes, I really wanted to avoid that one, but if I hadn't used Sleep, the White Monk would have revived the Blue Mage. And the Blue Mage is a pain in the ass to kill - the only reliable way to kill him is through his own Roulette.
Orange Claw Hammer wrote:
Using the long-animation sleep move to hit only 1 or 2 enemies, having allied units wait when it seems like they could've done something useful, etc
An entire turn with the Sleep animation takes about 16 seconds. An enemy turn lasts at least 12 seconds, sometimes up to 16 or 18. So as long as you get to deny at least two enemy turns, Sleep will usually be worth it. There's definitely room for improvement though, like for the tricky White Monk mentioned above. In almost all instances where I had units wait, I tried my best to make sure there was no better action that could be done. In this respect I consider this run a significant improvement over my first attempt (also on my YT) which had many more waited turns. Again, there's definitely still room for improvement. And yes, I simply cannot bear to watch/play this game at normal speed anymore...
#6717 Interested in: GBA Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (any%) GBC Dragon Warrior III (Pachisi glitch - skipping Kandar 1 means Kandar 2 won't be triggered)
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Right this needs to be pointed out for future reference on what not to do. The TAS uses 2 GBA bioses at once. The correct "World" bios and the "Debug" bios. In order for this to sync you must have both in the Firmware folder, and it automatically selecting the "World" bios. With "World" alone you desync at around 275k frames in. With "Debug" alone you desync at the very beginning at the game. With both however, you're able to get from Halfway and Absolutely Nowhere to a Complete TAS. From my guess the bios switches around 275k in to the Debug Bios and completes the rest of the game from there. Also one of the factors you wrote which was "Bios Skip: False" is actually set to true. This is a factor that doesn't matter since you're TASing on the mGBA core which ignores this field outright. Now we've had one TAS that actually just used the Debug cause it was the first time TASing GBAHawk but this one uses both and again as a first time to GBAHawk. Now we've had Arcade TASes predominately requiring backwards ass methods to sync compared to "just 2 GBA bioses are needed". So, do we have a problem on our hands with how either hardware changes or are we fine with crossing two different Bioses which the only known difference is the bootup sound being different? Something else to bring up the Header. The header file brings up this for the Bios being used: sha1:AA98A2AD32B86106340665D1222D7D973A1361C7 Now this is the Debug version, but remember Debug on its own can't even get out the gate, but we're being told it's this Bios even though it isn't it's both GBA bioses and that the World bios made us jump that gate.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account. These colours are pretty neato, and also these.
Alyosha
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^ That's bad. It shouldn't even be possible. Also it looks like there is a state error in mGBA. Start TAStudio, advance some frames, hit '<<', game won't load.
Fog
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When I judged this, I had both BIOSes available to me, and thus did not notice that this was an issue as it synced just fine. It is indeed a strange issue, and I'm not sure why or how it works.
Alyosha
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Ok, so far I tried on BizHawk 2.2.0 and no combination of BIOSes synced. But then I tried on 2.1.0 and it synced just fine with only the standard BIOS in the folder (no debug there at all.) I think part of the problem is that the submission says mGBA 0.6.0 was used, but that wasn't added (according to the release notes) until 2.1.1. The submssion says 2.1.0 was used and this version worked for me, so maybe problem solved? (I sure hope so because I have no clue how this could happen otherwise.)
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Since I helped resync the movie to the correct BIOS (it was originally made entirely on the debug BIOS), I can try and fix this over the weekend.
Spikestuff
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Alyosha wrote:
But then I tried on 2.1.0 and it synced just fine with only the standard BIOS in the folder.
The weird part is that I desynced with the world bios on 2.1.0 and just now it has synced all the way through. So this game is being a joke to me or something. >.>
ruadath wrote:
Since I helped resync the movie to the correct BIOS (it was originally made entirely on the debug BIOS), I can try and fix this over the weekend.
Don't worry.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account. These colours are pretty neato, and also these.
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [3524] GBA Final Fantasy Tactics Advance by hejops in 2:50:37.76
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TODO description i made one as a suggestion Description: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is spin-off of the Final Fantasy series,in which the player controls a clan of characters in grid-like battlefields,chooses their skills and abilities and employs them into missions.The story is comprised of a bunch of kids who travel to a video game world named Ivalice and Marche,the main player character, fights to go back to the real world. In this run, hejops blazes through wih luck manipulation, making almost every hit a one hit kill or some form of disablement to skip enemy turns.Sometimes, it almost feels like enemies are just waiting for the defeat!
TAS i'm interested: megaman series: mmbn1 all chips, mmx3 any% psx glitched fighting games with speed goals in general
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I didn't know my movie ended up getting published since I stopped getting those email notifications for some reason. Thanks to everyone who voted! And sorry for the BIOS troubles; I'll try to make sure they don't happen again if I ever make another attempt.
#6717 Interested in: GBA Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (any%) GBC Dragon Warrior III (Pachisi glitch - skipping Kandar 1 means Kandar 2 won't be triggered)
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I've added stage by stage comments.
#6717 Interested in: GBA Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (any%) GBC Dragon Warrior III (Pachisi glitch - skipping Kandar 1 means Kandar 2 won't be triggered)