BizHawk 2.9
BIOS: arm7, arm9, NDS-Lite Firmware
This is a TAS of Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia on DS. The game follows your journey to become a Pokemon ranger by attending ranger school and battling the evil Dim Sun team.
The primary game mechanic is looping with your stylus. Looping in a casual playthrough is simple: Draw a line and create loops from a section of that line. The loop will disappear, but not the entire line you drew. However, if you tried to draw a perfect circle, the game would enter a fail safe and spawn part of a line based on what you drew. I abuse this mechanic by first drawing a triangle using 3 points. Then, when I return to the origin on the 4th frame, I slightly nudge my stylus by a pixel or two, triggering the fail safe. It just happens that the line the game decides to draw is one line of the triangle. Which line changes every loop, but it saves me a frame by making me use only 2 to finish a loop instead of 3.
Next is XP. The game will always display xp gained and tick that down, adding it to your total. My goal is to minimize this as much as possible. Therefore, I take damage when I can, and end every fight making sure that I've lifted the stylus at least once, as well as tapping when I have some waiting time (though I've included some secret messages in the tapping for a fun viewer exercise). These actions eliminate some xp bonuses, thereby saving time. However, it's not always worth doing. If I have to wait for an enemy to attack, then, unless it's only a second or so, it's not worth worrying about the xp. Another time save is catching multiple pokemon separately. This doesn't save xp, but it does save lag frames when teleporting the pokemon up.
Third, charged stylers. Why do I not use them more often? Simply put, they take too long to charge. By the time I've charged, most pokemon have been caught already. Not to mention using it grants bonus xp. However, taking damage while using it loses more xp than taking damage regularly. Therefore, it's only used on bosses as their large health justifies it.
Fourth, Munchlax. The rta community almost exclusively uses Pachirisu due to its paralysis ability. Since using abilities takes time away from looping, I was looking to avoid them as much as possible. After testing all of the starters, I found Munchlax had the shortest name and tutorial, thereby making him the optimal choice.
Finally, I need to address Arcanine and Vaporeon at the very end. In my testing, I found absolutely no way around either of them, and I saw that both the current and former rta world records get hit by them as well. However, I saw that other runners had managed to get different AI rng, causing them to walk away. I don't know how to manipulate the rng in this game. It appears very intricate; something you change may not take effect immediately, but it may happen an hour from then, for example. But, I've never been able to pin any specific thing to specific actions. Therefore, seeing that I couldn't get past them, that 2 world records had the same thing, and seeing that this was a common occurrence, I've elected to keep their encounters in. I leave them for either a future rewrite or an intrepid reviewer/judge.
There is one glitch in the run that I abuse. During pokemon ability tutorials, pressing and holding B while the stylus is going down to select abilities will keep an instant text flag set to 1. This causes the next two textboxes to have instant text. I'm not sure why this happens and it's just those instances, saving ~2 seconds total.
Beyond this, improvements could come from route changes and simply finding any errors I made in filming. The project has been in production for a long time and it's entirely possible I made some mistakes. Though I was careful to go through everything as thoroughly as I could.
The route isn't quite nailed down. Improvements were being made as I was TASing, and the rta community still isn't 100% sure they've planned everything perfectly.
