Emulator: Bizhawk 2.11.1
Game Name / Region: Beast Wrestler (USA)
Beast Wrestler is a Wrestling / Fighting game released in 1992 in the US. It was first released in 1991 in Japan under the name Beast Warriors. Unfortunately, this game suffers from awful hitboxes, awful balancing, and numerous glitches. The goal is to get through all 15 Matches in the Tournament Mode to finish the game. You have to fuse with one of two monsters after Match 6 (then another fusion happens during the second half of the game). Fusing with Velvent leads to a faster run than fusing with Diecoon.
This TAS makes use of multiple glitches, oversights, and opponent RNG manipulation in order to finish every fight in under a minute. The last input is at Frame 82605 since you still have to press the Start button at the final win screen to start the Ending.
General Overview: To win, you have to KO the opponent 3 times. When you KO a monster, they'll cry out a few times before letting out a roar (you cannot attack or run during this animation). The blue orbs at the bottom represent how many KOs are left. An orb turns red when the KO animation ends and the fight ends when all 3 of the opponent's orbs turn red.
There are multiple ways to KO, but the fastest ways involve grabbing the opponent from behind for a Backdrop, using your monster's Deathblow (Super Attack), or by taking advantage of a health glitch that I'll explain in a bit. Deathblows become available for both monsters at 19 seconds and go on a 25 second cooldown upon use. However, the KO will only trigger if the opponent's LP (health) is low enough. The game does not show this value. Since both monsters recover 1 LP per second and damage output is relative to how much LP the opponent currently has, it's important to know exactly how much LP they have.
Stats: Each monster has 3 different stats.
PP: Power Points affect how strong attacks are. Very important for winning as fast as possible so it's mandatory to max this out first.
LP: Life Points represent how much health a monster has. Striking the opponent will lower your own LP by 5 points (but not if it's under 35). The lower the opponent's LP, the less damage your attacks will deal. When the opponent is KOed, the amount of LP they regain depends on how much they had left. Backdrops will KO if the opponent was at 31 or less LP and deathblows have different LP thresholds for KOing.
SP: Speed Points represent movement speed for walking and running. The sprites are huge and the arena is small, so it's not worth prioritizing over Power (this should always be the second stat to increase).
The RAM Addresses below represent the PP and LP stat for both characters during a match.
P1 PP: F2AE
P1 LP: F2B0
P2 PP: F2C6
P2 LP: F2C8
Strikes are the fastest way to deal damage since grabs are atrociously slow. Once the opponent's LP is low enough, that's when it's time to go for a KO. However, there are some glitches that can allow for a much faster victory. These include...
Negative Health: Certain opponents (such as Federico in Match 7) will deal fixed damage to themself upon hitting you with their deathblow. If their LP is low enough upon them doing this, they'll enter "Negative Health" and you can instantly KO them with one strike. This is undeniably the fastest way to win since the next strikes will KO them again in one hit! But again, this only applies to certain fights since not everyone can enter negative health.
Ghosting: By mashing C rapidly, your monster's walk animation will come to a halt (but you can still move). This can make you immune to being grabbed, which makes getting behind the opponent much faster than trying to go around their huge sprite without grabbing them from the front. This was used in most of the fights.
Continuous Hit Count: Hitting the opponent multiple times without missing or taking damage will knock them down. If you keep this up till the end of the match, the game will still think you didn't miss in the next match. This means that your first attack will instantly knock down the next opponent, which means less time is spent trying to position out of their attack range. This also leads to a knockdown loop where you can Tail Whip the opponent while they're down to make them get up, then instantly knock them down again with another strike.
My post below goes more in-depth on the game and matches.
In the post I did mention that there can be some optimizations, but the awful hitboxes, universal LP regen, and the Opponent RNG makes that incredibly difficult. This run did manipulate the RNG of the opponent by delaying certain strikes since they'd otherwise move out of range or do something completely different (such as running straight into the player, causing both monsters to fall down). This was especially true with Match 8 since Ulvolos has a chance to instantly use its Deathblow to one-shot the player every time it got back up. I instead had Ulvolos use its deathblow for the last KO since the self-damage it caused put it in range for my deathblow to KO it.
Darkman425: Input file replaced with a truncated input file to the last input to better represent the TAS time.
Beast Wrestler in my mind has been a mysterious game. Reading your notes about the mechanics under the hood was quite helpful for understanding what's going on and the decisions in and between fights, although it kind of raises more questions such as why there isn't a visual representation of a wrestler's LP status during a match. The matches and the stats/fusion routing look well optimized to me. Nice work!
Accepting to Standard.
fsvgm777: Waiting on a response on which metric to be used, then processing.
