This is currently under development, so the things that are written here are outdated. Look in the discussion for more up-to-date info.
Iji is an action-packed strategic platform shooter with a detailed story, large levels with multiple paths, powerful bosses and lots of secrets. There are alternate gameplay events, dialogues and scenes depending on what you do, a wealth of extras and bonus features, and seven stats to upgrade through a leveling system. Iji herself has superhuman strength and abilities, and can crack Nanotechnology, use her enemies' most devastating weapons against them, and be a pacifist or a killer - the story adapts to how you play.
Perhaps All Items is not the greatest name for this category, but 100% isn't accurate either, though it's about the closest thing to it you can do. The rule is that you need to collect all Ribbons, Posters and Supercharges. These are all optional, Ribbons and Posters don't give you any benifits but Supercharges give you 1 Skill point. I use Normal difficulty because on the game's hardest difficulty (Ultimortal), an All Items run is impossible because you cannot get most posters/supercharges since they require nanoweapons which you cannot get. On the Hard and Extreme difficulties, an All Items run would be far more time-consuming, due to required Nano farming and other factors, without a significant gain in difficulty under TAS conditions. This would result in a far less entertaining movie in comparison to one on Normal difficulty.
Right, looks like there's more things that could be considered part of a "100%" definition but those can't be accessed during a single playthrough?
This has, again, different strategies from any of the other runs in many places, and looks every bit as carefully planned and has a lot of action. Worth a 'yes' again from me.
Yup. Specifically, there are the two secret weapons (one in Sector 9, one in Sector X) the Ultimortal difficulty (unlocked by beating Extreme, and if I remember correctly this also unlocks Normal and Hard mode's postgame unlockables) and Sector Z, which houses the final weapon - the Null Driver. You can see the teleporter to Sector Z in this movie, in Sector 1. It's right beside the Supercharge, but you can't use it until you unlock all the posters. To actually get to the Null Driver, you need to get all the ribbons, to clear all ten Sudden Death Sectors in single sector play, wherein everything has 1 HP and 100 armor, and you need to have the game recognize that you know all four hidden skills. (Teching; which is done by hitting the use key right when you get damaged, Retribution; the attack this movie uses on Annihilator Iosa after getting knocked down, which can only be used once per sector, and isn't useful against Tor, Air braking, and the Nanofield Reboot; which this movie uses to reset their stats.)
I wouldn't mind seeing a movie playing through reallyjoel's dad difficulty, either. You need Ultimortal unlocked (beat Extreme) and it's literally impossible, according to the website. You get two minutes to kill every Tasen in Sector 1, then end the level - however, the forcefield that kills you at the end, which is supposed to go away once you have 100% kills, doesn't. I'd like to see if that's true or not, but I'm not that good at the game.
About the reallyjoel's difficulty, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCGjinbDSL0
I never bothered submitting it because I think it isn't worthy. And yes there is absolutely no way of getting past the barrier.
According to Speedrun.com rules, "all items" means all posters, ribbons, and supercharges.
However, according to the game's author, "all items" means all basic weapons, jump and armor upgrades, and the trapmine (in addition to all posters, ribbons, and supercharges).
To avoid arbitrary categories, is there a compelling reason why this run skips e.g. the Banana Gun and the Trapmine, other than "it would take a bit longer" or "that's how Speedrun.com does it"?
That's not "according to the game's author" since the author does not define speedrun categories for the game anywhere on that page. The speedrun community does, which is reflected at Speedrun.com. The nomenclature is also addressed in the submission text. If you have a problem with an "all items" run technically not picking up all items, have it called "all ribbons, posters, and Supercharges".
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The game author doesn't have to define the "all items" goal as long as he defines what items are officially, which can then be inherited by a speedrunner or ignored. I'd say official definitions have value.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
That's semantics. "All items" is the Iji community shorthand for the set of items the run author had in mind: all ribbons, posters, and Supercharges. There is no "official" designation in the sense of the game showing a percentage of items collected, but these three types of items are special in the sense that 1) none of them are required for anything; 2) there is only one of each per sector; 3) the game tracks your progress with two of them (the posters and the ribbons). The goal of this run is getting all ribbons, posters, and Supercharges; how you choose to call it is not very important, but the community calls it "all items" because that's convenient. They've chosen not to include all the other items in "all items" because some of them are mutually exclusive (so technically it would be "most items" at best) and the others require idiotic amounts of backtracking and idle actions (like wasting ammo to pick up more ammo, or wasting armor/life to pick up more armor/life). It benefits no-one, hence no-one runs it.
In any case, the game's author has also speedrun it (and had the fastest any% time on version 1.5) and joined discussions on other sites. You can ask him what he thinks of this definition of "all items" and of the runs currently on the Workbench.
As was pointed out here and as I say in my notes, All items isn't the best name, it's just the one that speedruners use. Feel free to suggest a better name other than "All posters, supercharges, ribbons" because that is too long. The reason I only chose these is because they are tracked by the game (in the ingame and main menu).
Getting the other guns/items would require multiple runs through the game and I think that that would be vary boring as they would not differ much at all.
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I can only see Poster viewer in the main menu and nothing else related to those item types in either main or in-game menu. How are they tracked exactly?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
In the records section in the main menu. The sudden death sector part would require first a completion on expert and then sector by sector play. The hidden skills do not need to be found in order to be used and would, like guns discussed previously, require at least one additional playthrough. For these reasons I did not include the other two things the game tracks in this TAS as it would make it easily 1.5+h long and would require going through the game 3 times.
Well there are other collectables such as the banana gun and null driver but I think it is a much more fitting name. Have renamed it, thanks for the suggestion.
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Let's go through what the author lists as "items", since it's the only connection to this goal.
Ribbons, Supercharges, and Posters are present in each sector this movie plays through, one of which per sector. Their overall counts are known, they can all be collected in one playthrough. To all Ribbons Iji reacts with a certain monologue as I've been told, and Posters are directly available in the in-game menu, and you're informed when you have them all collected. Those are the only items Daniel describes in the game guide in details.
Armor upgrades are available in several sectors, and you can't collect them all, only 3 of them, which makes the rest disappear. If you collect them, how much time would that add?
Jump upgrades I think you do collect, but I don't remember if you collect both or just one, or whether getting both makes the jump higher than just one. Do you get both? If not, how much time would that add?
Trapmine can very well be collected once and for all, how much time would it require?
What about Nano, Health, Armor, and Nano overload? Is their count per sector limited? Do they respawn? How many of them are there per sector? How much extra time would they require?
What about Weapons and Ammunition in that regard too?
Also overall, which of all these items persist across reboot, as in, recorded in the game save file? Which of them reappear after reboot?
This is all important to know because there's no explanation anywhere why exactly the 3 item types are picked and no other item type is required. If we want to define full completion for now and future, this info should be documented and discussed. Having a community definition already in place does play a role, but there's just a single run of "all items" at speedrun.com, so there's no way we could blindly rely on that as their community definition.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Okay, let's see, unless I misremember stuff completely - haven't actually played the game myself in a while, but did beat it back in the day. Also fun fact: I've met Daniel Remar, the developer of the game, a number of times. He's a nice dude.
Minor correction: You can only collect 2, since the max level is 3 and you start at 1. Goes for both armour and jump. Two of each are indeed collected in the run, both stats are maxed out at 3 at the end. This is something I agree probably should actually be included in the definition of "all items", since they're permanent upgrades.
These would be really weird to include for a couple of reasons. Nano's just experience points. Health, armour, and ammunition can't be picked up if you're fully stocked. Weapons you can only collect at certain levels of Tasen and Komato, and when you reboot your nanofield to respec your stat points, you drop all weapons you can't use. But you can pick up ammo for weapons you can't use. So you'd have to make sure you could get hurt and spend ammo to actually collect some of them. And that's before getting into the whole part where there's three weapons that can't be collected in this playthrough, so.
Nano overload... is just a temporary buff and it's randomized which one you get when you pick up the thing. As far as I know, they're not really tracked, but I don't think they come back once collected.
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Well, I was going to write a long post detailing each type of item, but then it struck me that it's the author's job to explain why this is a valid branch. As far as I can tell, he uses this branch only because Speedrun.com has it; and that site doesn't explain why, either.
This is not entirely correct. Posters are tracked in-game and in the main menu. Ribbons are not shown in-game or in the menu, but they are stored in the save file, as one particular secret requires ten ribbons. Supercharges are not tracked anywhere nor are they saved; a supercharge is simply equivalent to a level-up.
And while it is true that a single run cannot collect ALL weapons (the banana gunscrambler requires killing a bonus boss, the massacre requires zero kills), it strikes me as reasonable to collect as many weapons as possible. Neither the banana gun nor the trapmine requires multiple runs.
The whole point of this category is to come as close to a 100% run as can be done in one playthrough. To get a true 100% would require easily 5 playthroughs (one like this TAS, one on extreme, one on ultimortal, each sudden death sector and one to get to sector Y and Z) and that wouldn’t make for an entertaining TAS as it would be 3+ hours of going through the same 10 sectors. For this reason it is important that the community decides on what the rules should be. Feedback is much appreciated.
I agree that the existing rules (all ribbons, posters and supercharges) don’t include everything and I have learned that I should stop following the rules on speedrun.com when making these TASes. I am willing to redo the TAS but first we need to define the rules clearly. Here is my proposed ruleset
• All posters, ribbons, supercharges
• Trapmine
• Banana gun
• All armor and jump upgrades
There is also Yukabacera’s scrambler, which scrambles the dialog to where it doesn’t make sense. You get it by defeating Yukabacera (a miniboss) in sector 6. It permanently unlocks it in the main menu. Should this also be required? I see no reason to exclude this.
Would you also have to get all cracked nanowepons? They have to be made with a combination of tasen and komato nanoweapons at a cracking station. Would you have to end the game with all of them or just have all of them at the same time at some point in the run? If not would you need to have all regular nanoweapons at the end of the game? Personally I think this is going too far, perhaps the rule where you at least need to have all of the nanoweapons, including the cracked ones at some point (not necessarily all at once).
I wouldn’t consider nano overloads items, more like powerups. They don’t play any important roles and don’t change the gameplay in a meaningful way. Again up to the community.
I wouldn’t consider these items collectables and as KennyMan666 said
Also you couldn’t collect all of the Nano pickups as the game doesn’t let you collect them once you have reached the level cap for the sector. It would make for a lot of unneccessary backtracking and going through huge parts of the stage for no reason. Additionally you could not collect all even if you tried because there is sometimes a split path and you can only go down one, like in sector 3.
The jump upgrades are required to beat the game, but the armor upgrades aren’t. It is advatageous to collect them (at least the one in sector 3) because you take way less armor damage. Each time you take damage from your armor depleting it wastes 1 frame unless you are in the air. These should be required to be collected but they don't add on much time if any.
None of the items respawn while in the sector. All of them respawn if you restart the sector or start a new run. Classifying items this way doesn’t make sense.
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Thanks for participating guys! Here's our set of defining principles for any full completion category:
We don't require beating the game several times; even if there are games strictly defining 100% as such, I don't remember a single game where the community agreed that it should be a part of the full completion definition.
Not being able to collect something twice at all, even after reboot, would be a clear aspect, but if it's not feasible, we may agree to require items that don't respawn in a sector.
The amount of sectors is known and limited, so if you play each sector once, the amount of such items should also be known and limited. Though it could be a bit hard to objectively tell what this amount is. Especially given the fact some things are really hard to accidentally spawn, or randomly guess how to get. Daniel describes how to get them, but how can we know that there's nothing more, like maybe he forgot something? Or maybe something can be spawned by abusing a bug? We don't allow using bugs to increase your completion points, as the linked rule tells after the part I quoted.
So let's define it like that: items that don't respawn per sector, don't require several playthroughs, and whose amount is known for sure. How many of those can we count now? If some category of items has items that don't fit, we better exclude the whole category. For example, if we define weapons as items, and can't collect all weapons, we can't name the goal "all items".
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
I don't undestand this rule. Everything in a sector can only be collected once unless you restart the sector or select a different file. This applies to all things including ammo, health, nano, etc.
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Okay, please read the whole post. If that aspect sound bad regardless, what about items that don't respawn during one playthrough?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Joined: 4/17/2010
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What about the rest of the post? We still have items that don't require several playthroughs and whose amount is known for sure to address.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Well what do you mean 'whose amount we know for sure'? We could know the exact amount of nano, armor and health pickups but as discussed earlier, this would make for a very tedious run and would make it not fun to watch. Tell me exactly which things you mean by 'whose amount we know for sure'.