Welcome to a nightmare of routing for an “all endings” run of a game which has been condensed down to just focus on the get an ending done in each story first.
Dark Tales: From The Lost Soul features 3 stories; Cat & Mouse, Ghost Writer and The Honeymoon all having an amount of alternative endings to their respective stories; 3 that cannot be done until the first clear, and one other hidden behind a single route.

Cat & Mouse (3 of 3 endings available)

Investigating the brutal murder that have taken the lives of thirteen people over two years we find ourselves at a closed down theme park called “Shadeland” whilst we’re there we run into the killer known as “Evil Eve” the killer who mocks the police. Are we chasing them, or are they chasing us?
  • Despite taking 116 frames to select the Gun. It saves time at the gate, a whopping 153 frames making the gun the better choice by 37 frames by the next event. However, if this was an “all endings” run, it’s smart to select the phone instead.
  • At our next decision we take a Right and then get jumped by Eve shortly after. If we went left we would wind up in the same spot only difference being we have to decide which mask we want.
  • We select the Blue Card cause faster, and first choice… that’s literally it.
  • As we Jumpman up the steps we do a QTE event, fun fact about this if you fail nothing happens. We then go into a quick little QTE section of dodging and shooting.
  • After entering the Labyrinth we’re treated to a table and a door, examining the table will prompt you which cards you should be entering, as this is a TAS that’s skipped and we just run right in.
At the end of this we a brought to Ending III of Cat & Mouse, we become another victim to “Evil Eve” and that closes the story showcased here. It’s the fastest ending as Ending I requires an extra run through the card doors but in reverse and a running segment full of QTEs.

Ghost Writer (4 of 4 endings available)

Passion to write to their hearts pass out, Ghost Writer follows the story of a novelist wishing to become big with a best seller and installs a new program which makes their computer possessed.
This one is filled to the brims of fake ends, and very, very, very, very long in terms of story that the quickest way out was to enjoy the nice sea breeze.
There's also one instance of changing something which is at the claw game, delaying by 2 frames gives a better layout.
It’s honestly straightforward just go in order have the passion of finish writing that book and then enjoy that sea breeze.

The Honeymoon (5 of 6 endings available)

We follow a recently married couple en-route to someplace that neither of us know cause neither of us understand Japanese (nor asked anyone to translate the story for us) and found themselves on the wrong side of the law despite paying at the deserted petrol station.
In an “all endings” route the very first thing that would change would be who we are, as a secret ending requires us to play out to one of the endings as the driver, but as this isn’t an “all endings” we select the passenger and skip a QTE event that you’re allowed to fail.
  • We reach a diner after some time that’s also deserted, and we stare at a payphone and do nothing about it. The jukebox starts playing but since the police car hates music they come and trash the diner.
  • After successfully dodging the police car at the diner we head straight and we start getting rammed in the back, to avoid damage on either side of the car you move out of line before the police drives forward to attack as this is basically a manipulation to force the police to attack you.
  • Driving straight once more we learn that this car can drive off road AND OH GOD BOULDERS. Dodging the boulders is all you do, and this is where the input also ends just before the last one that loads in so you can’t pre-emptively dodge it.
  • For those curious if we took a right at the Dropdead Point we can manipulate the police car there and be able to ram them off the cliff, but this is slower.
Since we killed the input back at the dodge and weave of the boulders on the ground, we’re unable to grab Ending III which is to light up the Police Car, instead we’re treated to Ending I were the couple fails to throw the Molotov cocktail and die with it in hand. Morbid.

Ending

We are then treated to seeing our storyteller Takeshi Hirohama who informs us that we’re not done as there’s many other endings to the stories we have completed once, and to go out and find them all.

What is “all endings” then?

After completing the game once, we’re basically in a post-game situation where we go through each story again with a Skip button in hand for events we’ve seen before as certain story requirements is used to reach a alternative ending, meaning that we must grab all 13 endings.
Takeshi Hirohama will congratulate the player onstage for finding all the endings in a story, and when you find all 13 he’ll once again congratulate you, walk off stage and fades to black to credits.
There’s a large difference between the routing of a straight completion to a full completion and this was done to showcase the shorter run as a full run would reach between 4 to 5 hours and has a lot more routing to get done and solved out before we’re even confident about submitting it.

Memory: Judging
Memory: dropping claim (resetting to new)
feos: Judging...
feos: Updating the movie file.
feos: Updating again with a movie sent over Discord. 2060 frames faster due to getting a different ending.
feos: Spikestuff confirmed on Discord that this version of the movie is final, so let's judge.
As explained in this post, this game is not trivial to TAS optimally, so it doesn't make sense to reject it because it formally matches a description of a banned genre. As well as the whole clause about visual novels and "Choose your own adventure" games. So we removed that clause from Standard rules. Triviality is enough to resolve those.
In another post I explained why this ending is acceptable. You can't avoid it even if you try to fully complete all stories, so it can't be considered improper. It's similar to what Ghosts'n'Goblins does: you beat the game once, it tells you to play further, then you get the final ending after beating it twice. In this movie's ending, the host tells you that there's more to accomplish, but he says about "tonight's entertainment" and "your enjoyment" in past tense. He doesn't say "no no, this is all fake, you failed". So this goal is valid for this game.
Accepting to Standard.
EZGames69: Processing…

TASVideoAgent
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Voting no because it doesn't stand out much from what an rta run would look like. 300k re-records for a visual novel game? Why?
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InfamousKnight wrote:
300k re-records for a visual novel game? Why?
300k frames you mean. Rerecord count is unknown.
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+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
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Oh sorry lol
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This looks like a cool horror game, but I literally have no idea of what's going on due to the language barrier. I can't even tell what "END VERSION III END POINT ZERO" is supposed to mean. As such, I have to vote No for entertainment, and it also makes me question whether this submission even qualifies for Standard, considering that from a viewer perspective it doesn't look like there's much player agency beyond story choices and QTEs.
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Tried watching this a few times, as a game it's somewhat entertaining, as a TAS I can rarely tell when the player is in control and when they aren't.
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An updated file with 00:17.68 seconds saved in Ghost Writer due to an error selecting the II door instead of the I as the claw game is significantly slower than the poke the book off.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
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If you make the movie 500 frames longer, the game will end 13486 frames sooner. http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/75270958242466603 LOL disregard that. Here's a 2060 frame movie improvement that makes the game end 13489 frames sooner. http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/75271122283147715
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.
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Something has to be checked with that, cause Ending VI was the first ending that was chased after which also killed the input extremely early. I'd say delay, but personally with how this TAS is I don't know if it's going to survive the Judgement or not still. Edit: Basically I'm asking for a Judgement to be made before working on a fix on the file. Just to rewrite to make sense. When the input was made Ending VI was the first one checked, and then it was compared against all the other soonest endings (aka only Ending I) so I have conflicting information with feos apparently.
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Why would it not survive it?
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.
Spikestuff
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Movie Must Be Complete is the big one I know it's violating/challenging in terms of rulesets, as well as its subcategory Games with additional level sets or games. And according to DMs there's other rules it's violating/challenging according to feos (without referring to which ones).
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The game must have clear achievable goals wrote:
If a game consists of presenting a story with user input having little to no effect on it, it is not acceptable. This includes games which are overwhelmingly made up of cutscenes with very little user interaction anywhere. This also includes visual novels and games of a Choose Your Own Adventure story book variety, where the user has no creative control beyond choosing between predefined choices. Examples include:
  • Super Adventure Rockman
  • The Arcade version of Dragon's Lair.
Indeed this game is overwhelmingly made of cutscenes. Once every few minutes (maybe more often) you get to press a button or two, and that affects what the next cutscene will be. You can't speed up the cutscenes. And you can only skip them if you're replaying the same route again after completing the level (story) once. There's a few places where you can move your controlled object in different directions and do a certain action within a given time interval, but those are still limited and rare. If we compare this gameplay to freely running around, picking up items, reading things, like for instance in Silent Hill, it does look like there's little to no room for creative control. However we also have the triviality clause there.
The gameplay needs to stand out from unassisted play, and must not be seen as trivial. Note that a game is considered trivial until proven otherwise. If getting perfect times everywhere is challenging, such a game is considered acceptable. If a game was considered trivial but a technique is found later that makes TASing it challenging, that game becomes acceptable.
  • Example of a trivial (mini-)game which does not stand out is Desert Bus
Completing "all endings" (which is a valid in-game goal and gives you the best ending) is absolutely not trivial, because there's a ton of routing options, a ton of endings, and you have to find the optimal path through all of them in one go, considering the skip option as well, and the fact that some endings tweak some routes. And I dare say that even the goal we have here is also not trivial. There's less routing to resolve, but there's still a lot of options that unlock other options, different endings, and it all needs to be tested. For example I literally found a route that Spike already tested before and it was slower for him, but for me it was faster than the current submission, and I got a different ending too. So here's the thing I've been thinking of for a good while. The current wording of the triviality clause, while it's still debatable if we want to keep it in the future at all, seems to cover a whole lot of things that exist as separate rules. For example, we removed the rule about educational games, because it was incredibly hard to figure out, and the goal of that rule was still to avoid triviality. Similarly, I feel we should get rid of the rule about "visual novels and games of a Choose Your Own Adventure story book variety", because we only want to reject those if it's trivial to speedrun them, and we already have a decent rule for that. Opinions?
Spikestuff wrote:
Movie Must Be Complete is the big one I know it's violating/challenging in terms of rulesets
Indeed this game does not show the credits after you've completed every story once. Here's the translation of what the host is saying when you do so:
How was your entertainment tonight? Did you enjoy it? Actually, there is more than one ending for each story. You, my guests, have only experienced a mere fraction. We look forward to seeing you again.
This has some similarities with #6933: DaSmileKat's NES Extra Mario Bros. "bad ending" in 05:24.35. The game is telling you you have more to do, however it's not outright telling you you've failed or it's a false ending. It's also related to [4469] NES Ghosts 'n Goblins by DreamYao in 08:04.45 and its "fake" ending after the first playtrhough. I personally feel this game has enough to offer for a single run-through, and "all endings" will in no way look similar to it. I'm leaning towards allowing this branch, but I don't have strong arguments for it.
Spikestuff wrote:
as well as its subcategory Games with additional level sets or games.
You can't select stories independently from the start, so this one doesn't apply.
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.
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I support the idea of dropping rules that are otherwise covered by the triviality clause, if you feel they are truly redundant
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feos wrote:
So here's the thing I've been thinking of for a good while. The current wording of the triviality clause, while it's still debatable if we want to keep it in the future at all, seems to cover a whole lot of things that exist as separate rules. For example, we removed the rule about educational games, because it was incredibly hard to figure out, and the goal of that rule was still to avoid triviality. Similarly, I feel we should get rid of the rule about "visual novels and games of a Choose Your Own Adventure story book variety", because we only want to reject those if it's trivial to speedrun them, and we already have a decent rule for that. Opinions?
Removing the triviality clause altogether is a long term goal of mine, so I definitely support any and every step taken to get to that point. This change in particular makes a lot of sense, and it's yet another example of how our rules grew increasingly complicated over time to cover edge cases despite the fact that we already had rules that covered those edge cases. It happened before with looping games and us realizing that maxing out the difficulty is effectively just a difficulty choice, which has been up to the author for several years now, and I'm sure it'll continue happening as we keep looking through the rules.
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feos wrote:
How was your entertainment tonight? Did you enjoy it? Actually, there is more than one ending for each story. You, my guests, have only experienced a mere fraction. We look forward to seeing you again.
This has some similarities with #6933: DaSmileKat's NES Extra Mario Bros. "bad ending" in 05:24.35. The game is telling you you have more to do, however it's not outright telling you you've failed or it's a false ending. It's also related to [4469] NES Ghosts 'n Goblins by DreamYao in 08:04.45 and its "fake" ending after the first playtrhough. I personally feel this game has enough to offer for a single run-through, and "all endings" will in no way look similar to it. I'm leaning towards allowing this branch, but I don't have strong arguments for it.
I think I have an argument. Reaching the "tonight's entertainment" speech does mean completing every story once. And getting the "all stories complete" speech means replaying the same stories again and again, hoping to find new story endings. It's not like in other "bad ending" games the game tells you to go back and complete everything once again, but more. In other games you're informed that this ending is improper and you need to use a different route. Then you start from where you last saved or from scratch. With this game, there's no way not to run into "tonight's entertainment" speech even if you aim for "all stories complete". At some point you will complete every story once without having completed all endings. You can't even replay the same story to completeness until you've completed them all once. The game is not trying to discourage you from getting the regular "tonight's entertainment" ending, and there's no way to even avoid it! So we can't say it's an improper ending. Conclusion: this movie will be accepted once routing is final.
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.
Post subject: Movie published
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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. ---- [4548] PSX Dark Tales: From the Lost Soul by Xindictive & Spikestuff in 1:26:11.57