Dungeon Magic, known as Light Bringer (ライトブリンガー) in Japan and Europe, is a video game released in arcades by Taito in 1994. The game is a beat 'em up with an isometric perspective and includes some platform gameplay. Blood and gore can be adjusted through a setting. (Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Magic).

All the characters have a basic combo attack which hits mid to high enemies. There is a dash, but the dash ONLY seems to work left or right. It requires a bunch of frames to not have any directionals too. The dash can be combined with an attack. Each character has a special attack which is used by holding attack button long enough then released. There is a level 2 version which requires a much longer holding period. The magic attack of each character requires a magic stock item. Magic is not infinite and while the player starts with three stocks, additional stocks need to be picked up in the stages or have the three stock refreshed after a continue is used (no continues are used in this tas though). Each character can jump and attack in the air. Characters can grapple medium to human sized enemies and throw them, but the damage is quite low and it takes a long time. Various items can be picked up through chests, destroyable objects like statues, or enemy drops.

The characters have several types of main weapons that can be picked up and used. These are the basic weapon, the elemental effect weapons, or the power weapon. While the basic weapon (and I believe the power weapon) can also do critical hits, the critical hits are fairly rare. I went with basic weapon, then lightning weapon, then holy weapon route. A predictive lua script for critical hits might have better luck with using the basic and power weapons. When there is text above an enemy saying "Hit Weak" this means that the enemy is weak to whatever element just hit it.

The main item types are health pickups, weapons, shields, magic stocks, and items that give points. Drops that give high amounts of points are extremely important in this game due to its leveling system. The game has ever increasing thresholds of points that increase the attack and health once reached. The best items to get are the diamond crown and the jewel brooch at 50,000 points and 40,000 points respectively. Using RNG manipulation I cause them to drop from statues that would not waste time when possible. The main statues that have the high point items are the half broken woman statues. Casually doing this is risky since the statues can also cause effects that can harm the player like poison, transformation magic, or lightning. Not all woman statues give random high points rewards though. Some give nothing or a fixed drop. Killing bosses gives a large amount of points, and afterward a bunch of high point items drop from the golden chests that spawn after. All chest drops seem fixed.

The dungeon layouts consist of a series of connected rooms. Rooms that have multiple exists usually need specific actions to open other doors besides the normal one. The actions usually consist of killing all or a certain number of enemies, activating a switch on the wall or floor, or destroying objects. Room and enemy arrangements are usually fixed, but some rooms change things up a bit. This can be changed by waiting or taking an alternate path.

Boss fights usually include some kind of additional enemies in the fight. As the fight continues enemies will spawn and cause problems. In the tas though the bosses are defeated so quickly additional enemies are not spawned. The only exception is the spider woman where she spawns spiders, but that is an expected part of the fight itself.

The one sort of useful oddity I found is that character state can carry over to the next room. While rarely used, the dash can be used right at the exit trigger to a room, then that dash can carry over into the next room. This sounds great, but unfortunately it usually ends up slower. This is because of how the dash is restricted to only moving left and right oriented on the screen NOT on the isometric axis.

For more details look through the gamefaqs link below.

Gren is for the tas since he has a lot of nice properties. His magic is a fire element aoe attack which works well for ice enemies. One quirk of the magic is that while it is an aoe attack the hitbox is much wider left and right than it is up and down. The aoe magic range also extends high enough to hit flying enemies. Gren also has a strong attack string that can be looped indefinitely on most enemies and even bosses. The string is three punches, followed by a wait, then repeat. The other characters might be good as well, but the game would have to be tased with them to really see how they perform.

In the rooms with lots of enemies the idea is to try and group them together to keep doing the punch loop combo, and if necessary use the magic.

In the room with the single chest surrounded by spikes pickup the lightning weapon for Gren since it is quite effective on many upcoming enemies including the boss.

There is potential to save time here before the Giant Snake miniboss, but the rng was too good on it, so even though I tried multiple times this is currently the best. The Giant Snake is not a boss where levels would make a huge difference since most of the time the player will be attacking the various segments of its body. All attacks on a segment do fixed damage so the trick here is to hit as many segments as possible. Gren's special sword attack is one of his only moves that can actually damage the segments. The head can be hit with the first two punches of the basic combo, which is used to finish off the miniboss.

The boss's main attacks are the sword swing, which here never happens since after getting hit while holding the sword it drops. However the sword flies back to its owner and can hit the player along the way. The boss slow walks towards the player hoping the grab the player to do damage. As long as those are managed the boss goes down quick.

After the boss is defeated is the largest rng manipulation section in the game besides the last boss. Several of the woman statues can drop the diamond crown which I get to drop, but in addition to that I also get the pillars to drop decent items as well. The pillars do not drop high point jewelry, but they can still drop decent gems, stacks of money, or the gold chalice.

Similar to the last stage, but there are a couple standout rooms in this stage.

The first is a chapel like room where two lizards jump in. Here the strategy is copied from Replay Burners to use the crossbow to hit both at once. One twist I do is make it so that the orc hits the statue behind Gren. With the right positioning the orc happens to hit it where the RNG coincides with a diamond crown drop.

One room has poison water around the edges of the long horizontal room, and the left side is filled with coffins. The coffins contain skeleton enemies, or a poison gas effect and treasure. Two Ghosts spawn and move around horizontally in addition to a flying imp that throws spears. This room is very tricky since it requires a certain number of enemies to be defeated. The ghosts can count towards that and they have low hpo, but to kill them in one blow requires a strong hit otherwise they respawn elsewhere. The skeletons slowly come out of the defeated coffins, and the imp is a serious problem since it is a flying enemy. Flying enemies besides weak bats are very difficult for Gren, and thankfully they are extremely rare in this game. The strategy here is to use the level 2 special to break open the first coffin, then move in such a way to avoid the imp's spears, and have the ghosts spawn in good spots. Then I need to get the skeletons health down to a point where the magic can kill them, and hit killing enough of the other weaker enemies in one hit.

A special note about the ice dogs that start to appear in this stage. They suck. They are short little chihuahuas that only specific attacks or grapples can damage. These little chihuahua dogs can freeze the player, and while frozen the player takes continuous damage. The dogs can keep using the freeze attack essentially stun locking the player to death.

Before the boss room is where there are a bunch of lizards that spawn in and swarm the player. There is a good spot near the middle where I have Gren jump in, then he can continually use the punch combo. With the lizards though the punch combo needs a specific timing or they break out of the combo and hit the player. Usually this room gets out of control without good positioning.

The boss is a spider woman, and the rng for the first section is very obnoxious. While trying to modify the rng I brought in a barrel in to the fight and placed it on top of the an enemy skeleton, then beat down said skeleton. Sometimes after a couple hits the boss will flinch and take damage, but it does a lengthy knockdown. Sometimes attacking her while being too low or high on the screen immediately causes knockdown. Here is there a wait added after the first couple attack strings to avoid a knockdown. About halfway through the boss's healthbar tons of tiny spiders spawn. Gren's AOE attack is perfect to destroy these. After that, avoid a jump attack and its time to spam attacks.

This stage has three paths. Here I take the path for the holy weapon since it is extremely effective against the last boss. The stage is long and the goal is activate three magic structures in three separate rooms. Once complete the game warps the player to the boss room.

While a lot of rooms can have some tricky things in them the path with the holy weapon for Gren is pretty easy. The hard thing would be to figure out how to advance and avoiding traps. One tricky statue shoots out lightning when destroyed even though it is the trigger to open the next door. A couple rooms have some no time loss pickups which I take. There are two no time loss magic stock pickups, and one room has just enough free time for me to manipulate a diamond crown out of a statue.

An early tricky room is one which consists of a very long stair guarded by two black orcs and two slimes. The black orcs have two unusual characteristics. The first is that on death their axe spawns as an enemy projectile that is thrown out and this axe weapon can hit the player. The other odd thing about these orcs is that after death their shield also becomes a low positioned enemy that shoots outs projectiles. Thankfully on the stair with the right position Gren can punch the prone shield. To open the gate in this room four enemies need to be defeated. Here I punch out the two orcs, punch the slime and axe(since otherwise it hits me, then take out the shield.

There is one hard room in this path however with a bunch of coffins with hard red skeletons. Moving and positioning in the right way allows the punch combo to continue and taking them out without much of a fuss.

The boss is highly susceptible to the basic looping attack string. There is some slight rng manipulation to prevent knockdown.

The stage has a hard fight with a pack of dogs and skeletons, and a re-fight with the first boss. The re-fight has the boss also have a shield which can fly and shoot lasers, but besides that it is the same fight. After the first boss is complete and treasures are acquired Gren turns level 6 in time for the final boss. Then the final boss follows shortly after. The final boss requires a lot of rng manipulation during the fight to prevent the boss from using invincible attacks or dodges.

Once the final boss is defeated no further inputs are necessary so I do not do anything more for the main submitted video. Note that the final boss is defeated as soon as possible using a quick jab instead of ending input even earlier with a stronger punch or magic.

The movie with extended inputs however I do move around, pick up treasures and try to make it interested for the viewer since there is an extremely long wait. After the credits I input initials and the video ends.

This is a complex game with a lot of choice. While ideally I could test everything out the time spent making the tas would become exponential. I think I made a good effort with this, but there are potential improvements.