"Your quest was a dream devised by Hades."

Ghosts 'n Goblins is an arcade classic developed by Capcom in 1985, well-known for its relentless difficulty. In this game, you play as Arthur who has to rescue Prin-Prin from the clutches of the Devil. The game received multiple ports to various systems, including one for the Game Boy Color in 2000. This TAS clears two loops of the game, and improves my previous TAS by over a minute.

When landing from a jump, Arthur's horizontal speed is set to 0 for 1 frame. This makes repeated jumping sub-optimal, so I only jump when I need to. Arthur will also stop moving when either throwing a weapon on the ground or when landing before the throwing animation finishes. For this reason, I usually jump before throwing weapons instead of staying on the ground.

Arthur will automatically snap to ladders when up is pressed near them. By pressing up and then down next frame, Arthur can snap to the ladder and immediately descend from it, saving a bit of time. The same thing also happens for ladders below Arthur, but it is less powerful.

RNG can be manipulated by throwing weapons on different frames or by pausing. If you see me jump and throw weapons for seemingly no reason, it's to manipulate RNG. Enemy behaviour and enemy spawns depend on RNG, so manipulating it allows me to get enemies out of unfavourable positions, or leave bosses open to attack. Pausing loses two frames, compared to jumping, which loses one. So jumping and throwing weapons is the preferred way to manipulate RNG, with pausing being used when the former is not an option.

When Arthur gets attacked, he will always be knocked to the left.

If I continue to walk towards the Red Devil, it will start charging at me. I shoot a javelin at it to make it go flying in front of me, then defeat it while riding the moving platform. Flying Knights will usually swoop down and block Arthur's path if he continues across, but I can manipulate RNG with javelin throws, making them fly slightly above me. I have to do more javelin throws so that the Green Monster's don't spit projectiles at me and so that Forest Ghosts don't spawn in the way.

One important thing to note is that if you throw a javelin at the first possible frame when jumping, it can still be too high to hit certain enemies, like Zombies and Green Monsters, for instance.

At the end of this level, I pause to manipulate the Unicorn to walk towards me and jump, making for a really quick and easily kill. Arthur can only shoot a projectile once every ~13 frames, so the only way I can speed bossfights up is by hitting the boss as soon as possible and decreasing the distance the final projectile has to travel.

At the end of the first section, there is a platform that descends into the water once Arthur steps on it. Strangely, Arthur seems to get stuck on it for a few frames when landing. Landing on the left-edge of the platform doesn't give Arthur enough time to successfully jump back to land, so I have to take a detour to the top route in order to actually make it to the ledge.

Unfortunately, since all knockback forces Arthur to the left, I can't do the same skip that the NES TAS does in the large house area. I can however, make use of ladder snaps and do one damage boost to skip climbing a ladder.

After this, there is a section with elevator platforms. The elevators will only start moving once they're on screen, so I bring Arthur up so that I can get closer to the next set of elevators before they start moving. I do have to do a little bit of waiting on some elevators in order to get enough height, but it's worth not missing the cycles.

Two Unicorns have to be defeated at the end of the stage, and I can't seem to manipulate the first one from jumping all the way to the left. I throw as many javelins into it as I can as I progress to the second Unicorn. I manipulate both to walk to the centre and stop attacking, throwing javelins into both until they are defeated.

Not a lot to say at the beginning except that I have to manipulate enemies so that they stay mostly out of my way. At the end of the level, I pick up a torch weapon. Torches are really good. Since they are affected by gravity, they can always hit an enemy on the ground and their range depends on when in the jump you throw them. The only downside they have to javelins is that they can't go through walls.

Normally, the Dragon usually starts moving as soon as you get close to it, but by standing a certain distance away, you can make it remain stationary, allowing you to defeat it with ease. Unfortunately, a Red Devil is in my way, so I have to throw one extra torch in order to defeat the boss.

The first section has a lot of moving platforms. Moving platforms will only spawn once you're in a certain range of them.

The "holding down on a moving platform to hover" trick still works in this, but unlike the NES version, you can't jump to the left or right, only straight up.

At 4:36 in the encode, we need to catch the next platform that appears, but it's very fast and usually escapes Arthur's reach. I stand on the left edge of the upper platform, so that when the next platform spawns, I can use the platform to increase Arthur's speed. That gives me just enough time to close the distance.

The rest of the level is just enemy manipulation.

This stage has many routes. You can damage boost in different locations to skip having to walk to a ladder. Here's a comparison of the four routes I TASed. All of these damage boosts require spawning a Forest Ghost enemy to spawn at the right height.

At the end of the stage, we need to fight a Satan. I just manipulate it to stay in place for a quick and simple battle.

This stage also has different damage boost routes, but only two of them.

We need to defeat both Satans at the end with the shield weapon. If we give the final blow with anything else, the game does not let us fight the Devil next stage. A shield spawns upon reaching the right side of the screen. I throw torches at them while manipulating them to swoop into me as I go to the right, grab the shield, then defeat both of them. This fight is definitely the most difficult one to TAS. Satans love to go high in the air, making it impossible to land multiple shots in one jump, or impossible to hit at all. Sometimes their swoops are almost unavoidable, sometimes they go underneath the floor and can't be hit.

The final fight with the Devil! You have to throw shields at the middle of the Devil. Throwing shields too high or too low will not register as a hit. I manipulate the Devil to not do any attacks and start the second loop.

Shields don't damage Unicorns, so I have to find a different weapon in this level. In my previous TAS, I was able to get a javelin earlier in the stage, but I wasn't able to get it this time. Fortunately, I'm able to find a torch near the end.

I learned that when a Satan swoops down, you can make it stop ascending by moving the screen closer to it. I lose a bit of time doing this at the end of the fight, but if I didn't do it, the Satan would be too high up to reach.

This TAS beats the RTA WR by Rayquaza911 by more than 8 minutes.

Special thanks to Challenger for being really supportive about this TAS and for SelflessVanity to prompting me to look into alternate routes in Stage 5. Really glad I decided to go back and try TASing this game again.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to start practising my spells. I have this gargoyle statue that I'd like to bring to life. I want to see if I'm able to manipulate it into doing my bidding. What's the worst that could happen? See ya! - Walgrey

Challenger: Claiming for judging.

Challenger: The efforts + knowledge, and combining together = good TAS material. This GBC port is pretty nice, the optimizations and tricks are good and while the RNG sometimes can be unpredictable (as seen on both previous Walgrey run present in the submission + the WR run), the result is great enough to have the quality :)

Accepting for publication.

r3gamerz: Processing...

Challenger: Added cycle count that I didn't realize it was missing until recently.