The Ninja of the 4 Seasons is a 2021 NES homebrew in which a ninja must cross Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter to become the best ninja. Many enemies are scattered throughout the world to challenge the ninja's progress and some have even locked access to the next screen which can only be taken down by killing the enemies. This TAS effortlessly controls enemies to get them exactly where it wants and also manages to skip almost half the game in order to complete the journey in record time.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.8
- Aims for fastest completion
- Manipulates RNG
- Takes damage to save time
- Major skip glitch
This is one of many games that can't really be explained any further than what is visible: you jump on enemies to kill them to sometimes unlock a gate blocking access to the next screen and pressing A after bouncing on an enemy ends the jump boost. RNG manipulation is also fairly simple and it was quite easy to get desired enemy patterns since it was another 'press random buttons and hope for the best'. There may have been some examples where it took a little more effort than other places but it wasn't too bad overall.
Major skip glitch
As expected, one of the barriers can be jumped on top of and the first and only one (I couldn't find any others) is found halfway through Spring. We could just walk over it into the next screen or we can jump up into the above screen because there's no ceiling collision here. Now we can keep walking to the right and we'll eventually pop out towards the end of the castle after Fall.
However, there is actually more to this than it seems. Just walking right into the wall won't immediately warp the ninja to the castle and it'll take a while for it to do it. Instead, we can press L for one frame about halfway across the screen (it didn't want to work if it was pressed too late) which instantly takes the ninja to the castle. Excitingly, there's a little more going on. The jump over the barrier at the very start was carefully done so that a second load isn't hit as the ninja enters the castle, saving some time.
Apart from that, that's basically it. The snow region was a pain to TAS since it was almost exclusively vertical which I absolutely hate but it turned out ok in the end. Working out the best enemy patterns and then finding the fastest way to beat a screen was also a lot of fun but I'm a little unsure whether or not I did actually manage to find the fastest routes though I did try all I could think of.
ThunderAxe31: Another nice homebrew game. The movie is enough optimized. Accepting.
