Lil_Gecko
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Joined: 4/7/2011
Posts: 520
God, that was painful... I don't know how many hours I've spent on it, but here t is finally : 100 Dragons have been slaughtered. Dragon Crest is now doing 9999 damage. Healing Beaches sidequest is also done. Left to be done : - Maxing levels. - Maxing Thievery. (currently at 83, needs to be 572 to do 9999 damage at level 99). Both against Yans I suppose. I thought of doing it like this : Quina goes first and use Night, so Yans don't counter. Zidane with Auto-Haste, Bandit and Master Thief, steals both items of each Yans. I haven't tested it yet but I assume they're gonna wake up before every steal is complete, so Odin to kill those we don't need and Freeze from Ice Brand or Sleep from Bistro Fork to neutralize those we still do. Any thoughts ?
Joined: 5/9/2005
Posts: 748
Ha! Semi feels like we had this conversation 2 years ago. I'm too used to you knowing everything rather than asking for strats. Well I guess my initial question is regarding AP gain. You going to be able to max everyone's level, max stats and get enough AP while having Zidane and Dagger on the field for 99% of the fights? I think I've already asked this and you said it doesn't work, but just in case... Having added status with Ultima Weapons Sleep added effect couldn't be used to keep Yans asleep after a mug right? Obviously Zidane has to be level 99 at the time for that to be an option. Also 'grats on all the landmarks hit thus far; have been following each one, but, I can only say you're kicking ass so many times!
Lil_Gecko
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Haha, yeah. I just wanted to make sure I didn't miss an obvious strategy before going for hundreds of fights. Tested a few of them for the last couple hours, and nothing beats Odin. Guess Dagger is gonna stay for all fights and will get Virus when she hit level 99. AP shouldn't be a problem, since the main characters nearly know everything and the others should get enough AP provided I switch equipment in between gaining levels. Fastest, so far : Link to video EDIT : I just did the maths, and if I'm not mistaken, I'll need 240 fights againt Yans to have everybody at level 99. So, to max Thievery, I can steal 4 items per fight, and use Night only once, instead of Night twice for 6 items. Even if I estimate spending 1min10s per fight in average (stealing and not) that would still do 4h40m of Yans grinding... Meaning the leftovers are going to take close to 10 hours. I guess I'll make two encodes, with one skipping the grinding parts so it's not too boring.
Joined: 5/9/2005
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Lil_Gecko wrote:
Guess Dagger is gonna stay for all fights and will get Virus when she hit level 99.
Very minor thing, and you should test this as I have only read it, not done it myself, but; I've heard if a character is level99 and other members of the party are not, the surplus exp goes to the other party members. Like I say, minor, and possibly not even accurate, but saves a few seconds getting Zidane and Dagger (and Quina I guess?) Virus'ed.
Lil_Gecko
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Tested it yesterday to find how much Exp I still need. They keep getting exp even at level 99. They only stop when they reach 9 999 999, which is well beyond level 99. :)
Joined: 5/9/2005
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Ah; oh well, good to have it cleared up on my end at least. Thanks, sorry for the bad tip! Trying to recall where I read it now... Hardly a big deal anyway, with the Yans already being a prime sauce of Virus. You planning on your early Yan fights, till you get the Ore that makes Odin viable, to use similar strats the the videos you put up a couple of years ago?
Lil_Gecko
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Paused wrote:
Ah; oh well, good to have it cleared up on my end at least. Thanks, sorry for the bad tip! Trying to recall where I read it now... Hardly a big deal anyway, with the Yans already being a prime sauce of Virus. You planning on your early Yan fights, till you get the Ore that makes Odin viable, to use similar strats the the videos you put up a couple of years ago?
No I exchanged 99 Ore in the Chocobo Hot n Cold sidequest before maxing the points.
Lil_Gecko
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Just finished maxing stats of the Tetra Master Cards. Took 184 games. Link to video On a side note, I've been accepted in the school of my dream and started last monday, so next progress are gonna go way slower.
Joined: 5/9/2005
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I'll assume lil_gecko wont mind me posting his youtube video of where hes up to with the post Excalibur 2 stuff, considering by the sounds of things he's simply too busy to do it personaly. Link to video
Lil_Gecko wrote:
On a side note, I've been accepted in the school of my dream and started last monday, so next progress are gonna go way slower.
That's great news Gecko! I'm guessing its not going to be the easiest of courses; but I have a hunch you'll kick ass at it! Looking forward to the next update when ever it will be; but of course it can wait, sounds like you've bigger fish to fry for the moment! Best of luck!
Lil_Gecko
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Thanks a lot ! :) As planned, progress has been really slow. And even more, because I changed my mind along the way. 1) Originally I exchange Chocobo Points against 99 Ore. You got enough points to buy 12 Ore per game. But then, after arriving on Vile Island for Yans, I figured out that with 87 Ore, I still have barely enough good odds to kill them without losing too much time manipulating RNG. So I went back and it saved me one round of Chocobo Hot and Cold, so about 40 seconds . However it would completely change the RNG in a way I can't catch up with what I previously did. So I had to redo everything from that point. Then 2) At first, I bought the perfect amount of missable items (by that I mean items that can't be bought anymore after Excalibur II), like the guide tells you to do. However, some of those items are used in combination with other non missable to synthesize new stuffs. But I didn't have enough of those non-missable ones to synthesize the perfect amount of objects. No big deal, since I can still buy them anytime. BUT that would require a new detour on a lot of places that I actually visited during the Mognet Sidequest. So I went back in the movie and hex-edit shoppings everytime I had to. Got a lot of desync to fix, but after a long period I finally caught back with Yans today.
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Joined: 12/13/2016
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A recent test and digging resulted in a discovery that Lil Gecko's FF9 runs will not sync on Bizhawk 2.0 for the following reason: Lil Gecko's run appears to one of the late builds of version 1 (1.9-1.11) of Bizhawk, with both memory cards and both controllers (dual shock) plugged in. Due to the implementation of waterbox in v 2.0, the timing for loading memory cards/controllers in the system boot up has changed. Since the initialization of the RNG table is dependent on the system clock (0x1F801120), this means that it is impossible to sync the old run on the new version of Bizhawk. It is interesting to note that when no memory cards are inserted, the two versions of BizHawk agree with regard to system clock time. Different results are produced based on the number of controllers plugged in and whether or not they are game pad or dual schock, but it is consistent across both versions and does not appear to affect the frame count (unlike the memory card). This could be an interesting avenue of RNG exploration if another pass is made at the any% TAS of this game.
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ruadath wrote:
A recent test and digging resulted in a discovery that Lil Gecko's FF9 runs will not sync on Bizhawk 2.0 for the following reason: Lil Gecko's run appears to one of the late builds of version 1 (1.9-1.11) of Bizhawk, with both memory cards and both controllers (dual shock) plugged in. Due to the implementation of waterbox in v 2.0, the timing for loading memory cards/controllers in the system boot up has changed. Since the initialization of the RNG table is dependent on the system clock (0x1F801120), this means that it is impossible to sync the old run on the new version of Bizhawk. It is interesting to note that when no memory cards are inserted, the two versions of BizHawk agree with regard to system clock time. Different results are produced based on the number of controllers plugged in and whether or not they are game pad or dual schock, but it is consistent across both versions and does not appear to affect the frame count (unlike the memory card). This could be an interesting avenue of RNG exploration if another pass is made at the any% TAS of this game.
PSX core isn't in Waterbox?
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Oh didn't know that, I guess it must be due to some other update that changed between version 1.11 and 2.x in the Octoshock core.
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Lil_Gecko wrote:
Talking about close call... But, hooray, we can now move on to complete every sidequests.
Why was it such a close call? From what I understood, the perfect run (as defined by gamefaqs) should be doable non-tool-assisted. Was there extra work done before getting EII (like some of the post-EII stuff)? I do plan on watching the videos posted thus far but I figure I'll probably get a quicker answer asking.
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He did a bunch of other random stuff he didn't need to do and didn't skip cutscenes.
Lil_Gecko
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Indeed. By the way, the project is still alive, I just haven't worked on it in a while. There is a lot of things I do before Excalibur II that a segmented run would do post. Like Frog catching, Blue Magic, Ragtimer, picking up nearly every chest and so on. In addition to not skipping cutscenes, there are also loading times in Bizhawk that are way longer than a PS2 with Fast Disc Speed. If I had done only the necessary stuffs listed in gamefaqs, I would have got Excalibur II way before the 12 hours mark, but the total time in the end would be much longer.
Patashu
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I was wondering recently how this project was coming along! I eagerly look forward to the final result, whenever it's done :D
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Lil_Gecko
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Patashu wrote:
I was wondering recently how this project was coming along! I eagerly look forward to the final result, whenever it's done :D
Before I took a long break, I was in the process of resyncing the Leftovers after adding a few improvments. At the moment it's still in the middle of fighting Yans for levelling up.
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Lil_Gecko wrote:
Indeed. By the way, the project is still alive, I just haven't worked on it in a while. There is a lot of things I do before Excalibur II that a segmented run would do post. Like Frog catching, Blue Magic, Ragtimer, picking up nearly every chest and so on. In addition to not skipping cutscenes, there are also loading times in Bizhawk that are way longer than a PS2 with Fast Disc Speed. If I had done only the necessary stuffs listed in gamefaqs, I would have got Excalibur II way before the 12 hours mark, but the total time in the end would be much longer.
Interesting. Out of curiosity, how long would it take to get 99 of all the items that you just get "max number of equippable + 1 for the inventory?" I'm assuming that it's still impossible, even if you had focused on this instead of the extra stuff you mentioned above?
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Yeah, the problem is not the time it would take, but that it's impossible to have all at 99. Let's take the 'Save the Queen' for example. It's synthesize with 'Javelin' and 'Silver Gloves'. But by the time you reach the location to synthesize them, 'Javelin' and 'Silver Gloves' are no longer obtainable. You can buy 99 Javelins and 99 Silver Gloves early, but then you'd have to make a choice. 98 Javelins, 98 Silver Gloves and 1 Save the Queen ? 97 Save the Queen, 2 Silver Gloves and 2 Javelins ? and so on. The guide decided to settle for a "less arbitrary" amount, which is one equippable and one in inventory, so 2 Javelins, 3 Silver Gloves and 1 Save the Queen, which is what made the most sense to me so I followed it. For the other items, I might go for 99, still unsure. It would require hours of Chocobo Hot N Cold for the Gil and Points necessary.
Joined: 1/14/2016
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To me it seems logical from a completionist view to get at least one of every item, and then from the items limited in quantity, as many as possible. This would get you a complete inventory, and exhausts all itemsources that can be exhausted. I personally think that after this, getting 99 of every unexhaustable item is quite uninteresting. The same could be said for max gil, or max playtime, which also seem unneccessary to me.
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Lil_Gecko wrote:
Yeah, the problem is not the time it would take, but that it's impossible to have all at 99. Let's take the 'Save the Queen' for example. It's synthesize with 'Javelin' and 'Silver Gloves'. But by the time you reach the location to synthesize them, 'Javelin' and 'Silver Gloves' are no longer obtainable. You can buy 99 Javelins and 99 Silver Gloves early, but then you'd have to make a choice. 98 Javelins, 98 Silver Gloves and 1 Save the Queen ? 97 Save the Queen, 2 Silver Gloves and 2 Javelins ? and so on. The guide decided to settle for a "less arbitrary" amount, which is one equippable and one in inventory, so 2 Javelins, 3 Silver Gloves and 1 Save the Queen, which is what made the most sense to me so I followed it. For the other items, I might go for 99, still unsure. It would require hours of Chocobo Hot N Cold for the Gil and Points necessary.
Is it possible to have 99 javelins and 99 silver gloves in your inventory, and then equip 1 more of each? Or is 99 the max whether you have any equipped or not? I'm really just curious because I might bust out the old PS1 and start a sans-EII perfect run just for myself, and 50 of each of these types of items would seem "max" to me.
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It is possible, but as soon as you unequip it, your inventory goes back to 99 and not 100. So in theory you can have 99 Javelin and 99 Silver Gloves + 1 Save the Queen. But there are other missable items were this couldn't work. Like Zorlin Shape. You can get 99 of them, but then you need to use it on Sargatanas, Thief Gloves and Masamune. And as Zidane is the only one that can equip it, you can't have 99 of it if you synthesize everything, even just once.
Joined: 5/9/2005
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Can't say I saw this one coming; but Lil_Gecko is having another go at the 'hundo %' for lack of a better term for it. Here's a youtube vid of the first disk along with dovetailed text commentary. Link to video For what it's worth; lovely to have you great Gecko. And from what I can tell your English and commentary in general has much improved. You did a great job on it on what I've seen so far. (I'm... assuming the gameplay is pretty ok too, but you'd know better than me there!)
Joined: 1/14/2016
Posts: 98
Certainly did not see that coming, as the previous 100% tas was done, except for the final bosses I think (and commentary if you want to count that)? It clocked in at 22 hours or something, so I'm not all that giddy to watch everything again, but I am interested in what the differences are between the old and the new. At hte very least I see that 99 of every possible item is not a goal anymore.