Commentary by Fx, Plexa (WR holder), and Blueser (#2)
Why Japanese:
Aside from the generally faster textboxes, JPN has multiple advantages over English:
Cutscene length being shorter, this affects the RNG in several places. This works out in our favour.
RNG will pause when menus are opened on the English version. This is a problem when you have to wait for RNG to advance anyway, because you're stuck doing nothing. In JPN, the RNG will not pause on open menus, which allows us to fill the waiting time with menuing instead.
Out of Bounds movement is different (sometimes better, sometimes worse). This saves time overall in JPN.
Venus1 (one of the late-game dungeons) lacks a particular glitch that's present in the English version, but performing the glitch on English to skip an encounter wouldn't save time over playing through the dungeon the normal way in JPN.
For general concepts I'll refer to the previous submission I made a few years ago. Most of the basic logic still applies. That out of the way, I'll summarize the major differences and how we save so much time:
First of all, we run on a more accurate emulator with mGBA as opposed to VBA-rr. This doesn't exactly save time, but it's a nice improvement nonetheless.
General execution was vastly improved compared to previous, largely thanks to TAStudio making it much easier to optimize things like textbox clearing or menuing.
Overall strategy:
We took a hard look at what is -truly- required to complete the game, taking an extremely greedy approach to initial theorycrafting and routing. This caused us to decide on completely skipping:
all Djinn of the Jupiter element. They all cost too much time to justify collecting them for how small their boost for bossfights is, respectively.
Gust timecost: 1min
Breeze timecost: 1min20s
Zephyr timecost: 2min30sec
Smog timecost: 15sec (While Smog would technically be a viable option, when all other djinn of the same element are skipped, he becomes useless on his own, and so even the 15 second investment can't be justified. The total time lost from skipping all of these combined is in the range of 30 seconds to a minute (hard to accurately estimate, but it's such a massive gap to the time saved that it's obvious we should be skipping them)).
Broad Sword. This comes with skipping Gust, as we no longer enter Bilibin at all, and so it would take far too long to go there just to buy the Broad Sword. We get the Elven Rapier instead, which is both stronger, faster, and lets us manipulate the GRN for free upon collection.
Elven Shirt. This item boosts Agility of the wearer by a factor of 1.5, but this bonus is relatively useless to us. The time investment for the item comes up to around 27 seconds, of which we lose roughly 10 seconds overall due to lacking the Agility boost. Saving time overall.
Assassin Blade. Used by the previous TAS to one-hit-KO lategame encounters. However, this strategy was found to be slower than manipulating for encounters that allow us to run away after a failed attempt instead. Even though we're so underleveled that we will always fail to run on the 1st turn, we can effectively manipulate to always run on the second turn instead, saving time over collecting the Blade.
Other things we considered but decided against:
Skipping Scorch in favour of collecting Smog to have the same total number of djinn (this matters for Colosso setup), since the investment for Scorch is 45 seconds, but Scorch quickly pays off and in fact starts to save a lot of time over all other options (such as Ember or Squall).
Collecting Ground before Altmiller Cave. With improved RNG manips, we can instead save time by delaying the collecting of Ground until after we complete the dungeon.
Major route differences:
The general structure remains the same. We visit the same areas in the same order. However, since the time the previous TAS was made, a new major glitch was discovered that allows us to skip the Manticore bossfight in Lamakan Desert. This saves a reasonable amount of time.
RNG manip:
We ramped up the extent to which we manipulate both the GRN (General-) and BRN (Battle Random Number) systems. We now manipulate 1 in several thousands, multiple times in a row, throughout the run. There are sections of gameplay where the chances of getting the result we want is 1 in millions, Certain boss battles are 1 in several millions by themselves, etc.
By taking the manipulations to this extreme, while also looking much further ahead in the run (up to 1 hour of looking ahead during the lategame) we manage to save a lot of time on things like random encounters (by skipping many of them where the previous TAS did not), or boss battles.
Along with these encounter manips, we can also manip who takes damage (and when) more effectively than before, which we can use to properly spread our damage intake and heal it up later on when we need to drain Isaac's Psynergy to perform Retreat glitches faster.
Resets:
We've cut out almost all Hard Reset points. We only Hard Reset when absolutely required for an Out of Bounds glitch that needs clean RAM. When we don't have to clear the RAM, we only Soft Reset instead to maintain our BRN and continue the RNG manip.
Puzzles&General Movement:
We've improved the movement throughout the world from before, with more accurate movement comes fewer total encounters (in some cases going through entire zones or dungeons without any encounter whatsoever). Puzzles also fall under these optimizations, where we tried to take a fresh approach to each puzzle and see if we couldn't find a better way than what everyone had been doing for years. This led to discovering some minor improvements here as well.
That's about it for now. If you have specific questions feel free to ask.
Joined: 1/27/2019
Posts: 11
Location: The Netherlands
File that includes the post-credits cutscene:
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/download/69611605441251371Link to video
Commentary on the TAS by me, and two of the main speedrunners of the game.
At 1:11:53, this movie makes a mistake that we have already fixed in the submission. We've saved around 2.7 seconds due to this. Other suggested alterations were either not timesaves for TAS, or impractical as they would cause large portions of the game to change with them, which simply isn't worth the effort as it would take weeks to fix and save a couple frames at best.
On the topic of timesave:
Is there time to be saved? Short answer: yes.
Long answer: it's complicated. The way lag frames present in this game is something we do not fully understand, but they impact many parts of the run and it's not unthinkable that more optimal placement of the lag frames would produce a faster movie.
Other than that, there are some theoretical timesaves we could get but couldn't make work in this movie. This amounts to a couple seconds to save.
Even further optimization of RNG manip, most likely through writing a script or bot that will brute-force the optimal path forward, could yield more timesave, in the range of 10-30 seconds (unless something major is found).
Seems fine so far, but a bit on the boring side like most jRPG speedruns. The OoB skips are nice though.
How much would an "All Djinn" or "Perfect Password" (All Djinn plus the three triggers for the link events, plus all psynergy items needed for 100% completion of sequel) differ?
Joined: 1/27/2019
Posts: 11
Location: The Netherlands
deuxhero wrote:
Seems fine so far, but a bit on the boring side like most jRPG speedruns.
I know the TASvideos community isn't that big on JRPG, which is fine. We basically went into this expecting it's going to be Vault no matter how good the run is. For anyone else considering watching, I'd recommend you skip ahead to 44:00 to not sit through the intro. There's nothing to see there other than minor optimizations and cutscene mashing.
deuxhero wrote:
How much would an "All Djinn" or "Perfect Password" (All Djinn plus the three triggers for the link events) differ?
Route-wise it'd be unrecognizable. First of all we'd need to collect Jupiter Djinn, but some dungeons we skip entirely would have to be played through at least partially. There would be a couple unique-looking glitches that have a basis in the ones already used. Assassin Blade would be picked up again because it'll oneshot every djinni and every bonus boss.
All Bronze Transferrables (what you call perfect password) wouldn't only do the event triggers, but also requires you collect all psynergy items (Orb of Force, Lifting Gem, Halt Gem, Cloak Ball would be the extras). This means you have to play through certain dungeons in full.
From a viewer perspective, it wouldn't add much to the run. Isaac goes on a big fetch-quest for 1 extra hour, then obliterates S&M+FD because 28 djinn KEKW
Most interesting part would be Deadbeard. I say interesting but it's really going to be some 4-turn boss battle at best where his actions are manipulated to be some trash like Impact or Atk. Late-game encounter manip strats wouldn't be necessary anymore as we'd be much higher level and therefor can just run from everything on the first turn like we do up to Suhalla Gate in the Any% run.
Joined: 4/18/2006
Posts: 179
Location: East Petersburg, PA
Did you look into fixing the extra log push? You push the left log down at 1:11:54 instead of just pushing the right log to the right, going under the left log, pushing the left log up, and then pushing the bottom log down. Meaning, the left log only needs to go up, instead of down and then up.
"I think we can put our differences behind us... for science, you monster."
Joined: 1/27/2019
Posts: 11
Location: The Netherlands
DemonStrate wrote:
Did you look into fixing the extra log push? You push the left log down at 1:11:54 instead of just pushing the right log to the right, going under the left log, pushing the left log up, and then pushing the bottom log down. Meaning, the left log only needs to go up, instead of down and then up.
Fx wrote:
At 1:11:53, this movie makes a mistake that we have already fixed in the submission. We've saved around 2.7 seconds due to this. Other suggested alterations were either not timesaves for TAS, or impractical as they would cause large portions of the game to change with them, which simply isn't worth the effort as it would take weeks to fix and save a couple frames at best.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
Hey, hi, it's me, the Queen of Feedback Asking. I know this is a long RPG run, but I would love it if y'all provided some more entertainment feedback. The thread votes look very positive, but with only 4 votes (and hardly any feedback in posts), I'd like to see a few more people chiming in. Now pardon me while I copy-paste this to the other long RPG run I have claimed, making minor adjustments to the text so it fits.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family.
Now infrequently posting on BlueskywarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
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.
