- Achieve the best ending
- Aim for fastest completion
- Use of deathwarps
- Heavy luck manipulation
The TAS for Breath of Fire is an interesting beast. Human speedruns are able to buy items which completely prevent random encounters (Mrbl 3) and guarantee critical hits (Mrbl1), and most sources of damage (dragons, spells, and items) have no damage variance. The TAS gets away with less armor and healing than a human speedrun, as expected, but the most interesting advantage is actually to do with menuing. Breath of Fire has infamously slow menu animations; in some fights nearly half your combat time can be spent inputting commands. The TAS gets around this by taking advantage of the much faster autobattle command and guaranteeing critical hits with rng manipulation rather than having to use Mrbl1s from the item menu.
This TAS manipulates two extremely rare DarkDR from Gobi's flea market halfway through the game. This is functionally the strongest weapon for both Ryu and Karn, the game's two best physical attackers, and further bolsters the autobattle plan. The TAS is also able to take heavy advantage of the game's red bar mechanic: characters under 1/8th hp receive approximately a 30% boost to both their physical damage and their critical hit rate. Even with no known glitches to exploit, these factors save nearly an hour over the current best human time.
This video improves over the TAS by janus from 2010 in many places, but for the sake of brevity we'll mention only the most significant.
- The old TAS gets only one DarkDR, which seriously hampers damage output. This is especially noticeable when fighting Mote, where the second DarkDR saves almost 40 seconds.
- The old TAS spent a little under 3 minutes learning Karn's strongest fusion, Puka. However with careful manipulation Karn is able to near the damage cap with his weakest fusion, Shin, rendering Puka not worth the time invested to get it.
- The old TAS prioritizes keeping Nina alive to reach level 17 and learn Renew. Careful routing renders the ability to revive characters unnecessary, and letting Nina die more often saves time from both level-up text and from in-combat menus.
- The old TAS buys Mrbl3 to avoid a sky-high random encounter rate in Mogu's dream world. This is presumably because, at the time, it wasn't known what causes that high encounter rate. The cause is Bleu's Gown; when she leads the party it multiplies the odds of a fight on each step by 16, and the game defaults to having her lead the party at the beginning of the dream world. A much quicker solution is therefore to just move Bleu out of the lead slot, which returns the encounter rate to normal.
- The old TAS rides the Scande elevator three times. One of those times is unnecessary; you can cast Exit to return from the top of the tower directly to the world map, which saves about a minute.
- Early in the game we need to buy a G.Bar for 65000Z. Prior to this we take an optional random encounter against a single Mage and manipulate an M.Drop, which sells for 6500Z. This gets to exactly the money threshold we needed, and is significantly faster than using sidequests in the Auria area.
- Near the end of the game there are a bunch of objectives which need completing, and which can be done in nearly any order: fishing up Ryu's dragon equipment, learning the dragon spells, retrieving the I.Claw and the D.Hrt, and advancing some plot triggers in Spring, Gant, Scande, and Gramor. Optimizing the order in which these are done saves a little under two minutes.
Special thanks to iblink22, who currently holds the RTA world record at 4:57:45 and was a tremendous source of help in creating this TAS. The attached youtube link contains commentary from both of us.
Accepting to standard
