Emulator: BizHawk 2.6.2
Core: Mupen64Plus
Major luck manipulation
Major skip glitches
Why this goal?
Both any% and 100% are categories that will never be published on TASvideos.
Any% consists of 35 minutes of sleep to go directly to Summer 1 of year 3, where the credits will play. Very trivial category.
100% takes over 100 hours to complete.
As a compromise, I chose the next best in-game goal to complete: marrying a girl. Even though this may not be the most entertaining category that this game can have, I wanted to start with something short.
Why the Japanese version?
Normally I'd pick English just because it's much more fun to know the lore. However, I did not find the lore to be that important with this run.
Not only does the Japanese text have fewer characters to display, the North American location team thought it was a good idea to put a space between each letter in the North American version of the game, making the text scroll at half speed compared to JP.
RNG manip:
The random elements that this game has are determined by a global timer.
For instances where random elements stay the same3 for the whole day, they are determined by the frame that you go to bed the previous day.
The requirements to getting a wife
- Get a girl to 220 affection (more on that later)
- Get 450 lumber to build a kitchen for your wife (it's an actual requirement)
- Purchase the blue feather to propose. The blue feather is only available once the first 2 requirements are met.
- Wait until the next Sunday for the wedding
What is affection?
Affection is a score from 0 to 255 which determines how much an NPC loves you.
For a reference, if you gift something to an NPC and have a daily conversation will them, you may get 5-10 points per day, as affection gains are only possible to be gotten once per day.
However, due to a flag that doesn't get set, Karen, the girl we're trying to marry, gets 1 affection point every time you show her the dog, and it can be repeated for as long as you want, saving about 40 minutes over an intended route.
A major time loss comes from the fact that on emulators, the vineyard has a permanent lag that makes the game run at half its normal framerate, as a result of that, I had to do a slightly slower route which did the Karen affection on the screen with the carpenter house would lose ~10 seconds on console, but saved nearly 2 minutes on BizHawk. I also had to stand in a weird spot during the affection spam and manipulate other NPCs to not spawn to reduce lag.
How is lumber obtained?
The fastest way to get 450 lumber is to win the dog race by trading 500 medals for 500 lumber, which always happens on Winter 19. The odds are determined when you sleep on Winter 18, and the dog movement is decided when you close the textbox before the race starts.
How is the money obtained?
Via the fastest way of the game: doing hot spring work (1000 gold) then mining (5000 gold).
The problem with mining is actually getting out of the mine. You either need to run out of stamina (which involves using the hoe 100 times), or wait until 5 PM.
doing the hot spring work warps us to 3PM, which gives us barely enough time to do all the mining we need before 5 PM, avoiding the need to till the ground another 94 times.
Each rare metal (cyan crystal) that I mine and ship gives 1000 gold. We keep the last rare metal in our hands to avoid having to pause to ship it.
The important schedules to know
The hot spring work always puts you at 3PM, and the mine is open until 5PM.
On Winter 20, the carpenter house open at 8 AM, but I need to wait until 10 AM so that Karen spawns right as I leave.
On Winter 26, Rick's shop opens at 10 AM.
note: The time of the day does not advance when you are in menus and when you're inside of a building.
With all of this in mind, here's the route
- Sleep all the way to Winter 12 to get money. Any day between Winter 12 and Winter 15 works.
- Get lumber from winning the dog race in Winter 19.
- Purchase the kitchen and show Karen your D** on Winter 20. This is the only day that we spend outside with the ability to build affection. We also go to the vineyard twice to clear 2 events. The first being a mandatory cutscene of Karen leaving the vineyard, and the second being about Karen twisting her ankle.
- Purchase the blue feather on Winter 26 (only available day), and propose.
- The wedding happens as soon as you wake up on Winter 29.
Samsara: This run seems to be running into the same problem as
#5825: ViGadeomes's SNES Harvest Moon "Marriage" in 29:31.77, in that it's a non-standard category (marriage doesn't trigger credits, unlike
GBC "Girl mode") that's lacking in positive audience response (68% at the time of judgement). All three responses in the thread, even the two Yes votes, mention that copious amounts of fast forwarding are needed for the beginning sleepfest to be watchable. The fact that only three responses were made is also telling in and of itself of a lack of reaction to the run. That's not to say this category will never be standard on the site, though: Given the nature of the Harvest Moon series, "marriage%" is probably the most major goal apart from getting the best evaluation possible when the game naturally ends (which would be 100% for us). Fastest marriage requires multiple criteria to be met, and needs proper routing, so I could potentially see it being an acceptable standard category for Harvest Moon games in the future. However, with the site in its current state of flux we're unlikely to discuss it anytime soon.
This will be kept in mind for future discussions, but unfortunately as it stands right now, it's a Moons category without enough positive audience reaction to make it there.
