Joined: 8/8/2005
Posts: 296
Location: NSW, Australia
Kirkq wrote:
We will probably want to utilize sacred feathers as well. It probably cuts the step increments in half, this is easy to check.
Don't forget about the Avoid Psynergy as well (this becomes available to you as soon as you get Mia, as she comes with a Water Djinn; move it onto Garet).
Kirkq wrote:
A note about colloseum. According to pkGamerB, the time it takes for the opponent to get to the end is always the same. As long as you get to the end first, there is no reason to go out of your way to speed up the sequence.
Party members should be placed in the closest areas, and no psynergy should be used unless necessary.
There's never any need to use them; you can always win the race without Psynergy.
Kirkq wrote:
In the case of the final fight, he claims it is faster to kill yourself. (You only lose the lure cap supposedly.)
This is 100% accurate. Related to the earlier point though, you should enter the arena second on this one. This will give Navampa (?) the stronger weapon.
Kirkq wrote:
I think the real issue is how many Djinn can be skipped. In pkGamerB's run, certain Djinn are highly necessary for boss fights.
I'd have to imagine the summons are mostly the way to go. I once felled Manticore in two turns using a summon rush and then strong Psynergy, I would imagine something similar is possible for Killer Ape, Hydros Statue, Kraken and those other bosses in that part of the game.
okay. Honestly, I don't feel suited for this run... I fell like I need more knowledge that I don't have. I'll put this to the side for now, and go acquire that knowledge. If anyone wants it, they can have it.
I think you shouldn't fear about all the "knowledge stuff"... in fact this it's almost useless to getting "frameperfect" on the first run on a such complicated game, because my thought is that this is absolutly IMPOSSIBLE to get the best route, right at the first attempt. Even an expert player can't do this.
Go use the turbo, forget about all the lua stuff for now. Maybe just using frame by frame feature is enought... simply for getting a gameplay that look "enought TAS".
This isn't like that website was enought asshole to reject a such long game, while your gameplay look good and it beat any other non-TAS run, even if not 'perfect' at the first publication.
Just to spur a bit more discussion.
I'm quite unfamiliar with the classes assigned based on djinn combinations. I've read that the stat gains and spells are different. We probably need to figure out which stats are most helpful. Does anyone know of any particularly good setups? Possibly one for random encounters and one for bosses.
Also I've been wondering, do summons deal more damage if the character utilizing them has higher current stats? For example, if a character has all djinn set to summon, will a summon they attack with do less damage than someone who has all djinn contributing to stats?
Is there any one hit kill moves in this game? (on random encounters with special weapons or something.)
We should be able to easily figure out which of avoid and sacred feather is better (or equal) by observing the step counter memory values I posted earlier.
I'm going to speculate that the minimal number of djinn necessary to beat the game in a timely manner is around 4-5 of each type. Flash and Granite are absolutely necessary. With 4 characters it may be feasible to get the Fusion Dragon to use weak attacks every turn. (Stat break, etc.) This depends if the attack type RNG is dependent on your attacks though, which it may or may not be.
PkGamerB beat the game in 32 youtube segments averaging 9.5-10 minutes each. He did fast forward some dialogs. Probably saving about 20 minutes worth. So I'll throw out an estimate that his run was under 6 hours. He collected all djinn, and he had no control over how random battles went. (running away, quick kill, etc.) He probably spent well over half an hour in side dungeons or backtracking to get some of the djinn. I would speculate a TAS to be at around 4 hours.
I do want to do a battle disassembly eventually, but I haven't quite figured out how to use the debugger yet. It seems I need to connect some external program to VBA or order to use it effectively. Learning to read the instructions will be a project by itself, I did find a few data sheets. If anyone has experience in this and is willing to help me get started let me know. I probably won't work on this for quite some time though.
For useful information on class setups and which are best, I recommend this guide: http://db.gamefaqs.com/portable/gbadvance/file/golden_sun_class_setup.txt
He even recommends what djinn setup to have for key fights. Whether his recommendations are useful for a TAS, I don't know, but he does explain stats and stuff.
Joined: 8/8/2005
Posts: 296
Location: NSW, Australia
Gonna help where I can, but I can't promise all of it will be useful.
Kirkq wrote:
Also I've been wondering, do summons deal more damage if the character utilizing them has higher current stats? For example, if a character has all djinn set to summon, will a summon they attack with do less damage than someone who has all djinn contributing to stats?
I'm almost certain that the only two factors in the summon damage equation are elemental power and enemy HP.
Kirkq wrote:
Is there any one hit kill moves in this game? (on random encounters with special weapons or something.)
Condemn is a one-hit kill move. It's Earth type, but you need to mix it with... wind or fire, I forget, for it to be available. Basically just give Isaac various types of Djinn and see what happens.
You may also need four Djinn, but don't quote me on that (at least until I look it up).
Kirkq wrote:
I'm going to speculate that the minimal number of djinn necessary to beat the game in a timely manner is around 4-5 of each type. Flash and Granite are absolutely necessary. With 4 characters it may be feasible to get the Fusion Dragon to use weak attacks every turn. (Stat break, etc.) This depends if the attack type RNG is dependent on your attacks though, which it may or may not be.
I think that if you use any summon (which increases elemental power) then Fusion Dragon will use Break to negate it, but again, don't quote me on that. If true, though, that could be combined with the aforementioned Flash and Granite to effectively halve the amount of turns it gets - though whether that is the most efficient solution is another question entirely.
As for optimal Djinn, that's really hard to work out without a moveset in front of you. Four of each may be the best way to go about things because in many cases you will get new moves - for example, Mia only learns the venerable Wish series with four water Djinn. There's other such examples but I can't remember them all now.
Kirkq wrote:
PkGamerB beat the game in 32 youtube segments averaging 9.5-10 minutes each. He did fast forward some dialogs. Probably saving about 20 minutes worth. So I'll throw out an estimate that his run was under 6 hours.
The last segment gave his clear time as 5:12 - quite some feat, in my opinion (speaking as someone whose best time is 5:28 with 23 djinn >_> <_<). Given you lose probably half an hour on the Bane and Tonic sidequests alone... yeah, four hours seems reasonable.
Hi, I know this TAS is just getting started but I'd like to throw out a far-sighted idea: the Retreat glitch. Put Retreat on a shoulder button, use it without PP, and enter a door, and you can be teleported strange places. For instance, you can skip most of both Lighthouses, including the part where you recruit Mia if that strikes your fancy. Most of the time it just sends you to the dungeon entrance which wouldn't be useful (besides a slightly faster way of actually Retreating) and some doors lead you back to Vale, which would be helpful for a 28-Djinn run.
But I've only messed around with the glitch; with more research we could find something more gamebreaking.
I think you shouldn't fear about all the "knowledge stuff"... in fact this it's almost useless to getting "frameperfect" on the first run on a such complicated game, because my thought is that this is absolutly IMPOSSIBLE to get the best route, right at the first attempt. Even an expert player can't do this.
Go use the turbo, forget about all the lua stuff for now. Maybe just using frame by frame feature is enought... simply for getting a gameplay that look "enought TAS".
This isn't like that website was enought asshole to reject a such long game, while your gameplay look good and it beat any other non-TAS run, even if not 'perfect' at the first publication.
Hey, thanks for all of this encouragement. I've decide to restart this, and with your guys' help, I'll see how well I can do. Thanks again :)
okay. Honestly, I don't feel suited for this run... I fell like I need more knowledge that I don't have. I'll put this to the side for now, and go acquire that knowledge. If anyone wants it, they can have it.
I think you shouldn't fear about all the "knowledge stuff"... in fact this it's almost useless to getting "frameperfect" on the first run on a such complicated game, because my thought is that this is absolutly IMPOSSIBLE to get the best route, right at the first attempt. Even an expert player can't do this.
Go use the turbo, forget about all the lua stuff for now. Maybe just using frame by frame feature is enought... simply for getting a gameplay that look "enought TAS".
This isn't like that website was enought asshole to reject a such long game, while your gameplay look good and it beat any other non-TAS run, even if not 'perfect' at the first publication.
Thanks for the encouragement. Although it won't be perfect, I've decide to reinstitute this TAS, and post WIPs and whatnot here (assuming no one else has started it). But guys, before I try again, what should I know beforehand, like right now?
The groundwork is as follows.
1: Routing -
What places to go in what order?
Melismatically wrote:
Put Retreat on a shoulder button, use it without PP, and enter a door, and you can be teleported strange places. For instance, you can skip most of both Lighthouses, including the part where you recruit Mia if that strikes your fancy.
This is a great place to start. Figure out how much can be skipped. I feel that you will probably need all four characters or you are just handicapping yourself.
How do you get to the end of the game fastest?
2: Minimum Completion Conditions
What is the minimum level, djinn combination, and equipment the final boss can be beaten with. Since the RNG is very predetermined, the optimal scenario in each fight will be a given tree of attacks. You will not be able to manipulate perfect misses and enemy attack choices.
Even if the final boss fight is slow, the lowest level, lowest djinn, minimal equipment scenario will be close to fastest.
Are there any other bosses that will cause limitations on the leveling conditions up to a certain point?
These two things are the bulk of route planning. To test minimal completion conditions, take an end game file with max djinn, overwrite the stats in memory for testing, and just turn off the djinn you don't want to "have"
If you need some help with simple memory overwrites, just ask. I would like to help you to spend your time testing as efficiently as possible, as it means the run will be produced sooner.
If you can complete all of that, we can discuss the more technical aspects of performing the run. Essentially you need a plan before you get started on a long RPG run like this.
I can detail the optimal way to skip texts later, but without proper planning you will become increasingly more suboptimal beginning at the first random fight. You may need to spend one turn in a fight to increase the distance to the next fight. That will influence the quality of the run a lot is how well you are able to plan fights away. The other part is how well you set up the RNG for a boss fight.
Sacred Feathers will be helpful in setting up quite lengthy periods with no monster encounters.
I'm sorry if I'm being a bit demanding, but if you want to undertake such a long run, I would hope that you would want to do the run to the best of your capabilities. I will try to offer some help with the portions that will cause you problems (The RNG.), but the plan for the run needs plotted before that is of any use.
Anything allowing you to monitor the RNG and the results it produces will require a pretty significant investment at this point in time.
If you have anything in particular that would help you better test methods, I would be glad to help. Altering bytes to produce stats is where you should start testing as stated.
Skim through the previous posts again, I've detailed some other thoughts you may or may not have read.
This is a great place to start. Figure out how much can be skipped. I feel that you will probably need all four characters or you are just handicapping yourself.
Notice that when you only got 3 characters, each of them gets more djinns (since its equally splitted). Maybe this fact and the lighthouse skip will make up for the loss of that character. That has to be tested too ;)
That is a phenomenal note, I didn't think of that. It is very possible that 3 sturdy characters is better than 4 weak ones.
Also of note: during Colosso, the game recalculates your party size, but NOT your party members. After its conclusion, if you didn't recruit Mia you'll end up with a "doubled" party member (which you can change by switching the order of your team) -- he'll act twice in battle and get hit twice by multi-target moves. You still only have to share Djinn among three members.
(Sadly, there don't seem to be any good tricks with this glitch and Kite)
You'd have to weigh these perks against the time you'd lose from Imil to Tolbi and being crimped for Water Psynergy and healing for awhile.
Also, as the final boss goes, last time I played I ran from every random battle and ended around level 20. That's high enough to win without resorting to super-defensive strategies like Flash and Ground, especially if you can luck-manipulate Fusion Dragon into doing mostly physical attacks. Which gives you more time to just wail on the Fusion Dragon with your own attacks :). I'm fond of making Isaac a double-Ninja and having him Annihilate the dragon over and over, but I wonder if a summon-only strategy would be faster.
Edit: I forgot this was with full Djinn. Since Djinn (and equipment) matter to your stats more than level, not having many would make the fight much harder. In this case you probably would need Flash, Ground, and/or Granite to tide you through.
More reading. This particular post references Lost Age locations, but it gives you a better idea of how to use the glitching.
http://speeddemosarchive.com/forum/index.php/topic,8737.15.html
Also I should have provided this earlier. This lua script should remove random battles and allow you to manually set Isaac's PP for more convenient testing.
local AD1 = 0x0200053a --Isaac Cur PP
local AD1Value = 0 --Value to set PP to
local AD2 = 0x0200047a -- Step Counter High Byte
local AD2Value = 1 --Removes battles
while true do
--gui.text(0,0,"Isaac PP " .. memory.readword(AD1))
--gui.text(0,10,"Step Counter" .. memory.readbyte(AD2))
memory.writeword(AD1, AD1Value)
memory.writebyte(AD2, AD2Value)
vba.frameadvance();
end
Copy to notepad, save as " Something.lua ", run in emulator.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i6c6BfK_u0
Here's the results of today.
There are 3 rooms in Sol Sanctum that point to the entrance when retreat glitching. If you save while retreat glitched, your coordinates are preserved, and then upon reloading you end up in the room pointed to, but at the preserved coordinates.
It is possible to get inside an overlapping room on the first floor by retreat glitching. The room I glitch out of is not actually on the first floor. We'll call it the second floor. By glitching out of the second floor, my coordinates get translated to the first floor and I am either actually in a room, or outside all rooms. There are two rooms on the first floor with coordinates that match positions in the room I glitch out of. I can physically get into these two rooms, and they act normally. If I am outside of any rooms I cannot get into any rooms on the normal map.
I then experimented walking around while examining my coordinates in memory. When I passed the y coordinate boundary, (it underflowed), I found strange walls that didn't seem to represent rooms I had mapped. I randomly found this door, it randomly put me in the final room.
More investigation is needed to find out exactly what is happening when I cross the map boundaries.
Sol Sanctum now takes roughly 1 minute to traverse. This saves around 2-3 minutes of gameplay.
All right! Looks like this game can be broken yet. I found that in addition to the door you found, there's at least one more roughly southeast of where you started. It leads to the left door of the room with all the statues.
I also tested it with a few other caves and areas but haven't yet found any more hidden doors.
What seems to be happening in Sol Sanctum is that room 3 is on a separate floor from most of the other rooms. When walking around off map you can run into the boundaries of most of the other rooms, but particularly you cannot run into the rooms you can retreat glitch out of.
It is really strange that when I underflow Y coordinates I can suddenly get inside room boundaries or something. I may make a camera hack soon.
Use this new script to observe and record coordinates.
local AD1 = 0x0200053a --Isaac Cur PP
local AD1Value = 18
local AD2 = 0x0200047a -- Step Counter
local AD2Value = 1
while true do
gui.text(0,20,"Isaac PP " .. memory.readword(AD1))
gui.text(0,30,"Step Counter" .. memory.readbyte(AD2))
memory.writeword(AD1, AD1Value)
memory.writebyte(AD2, AD2Value)
gui.text(0,0,"X: " .. math.floor((memory.readdword(0x02030ec4))/1000000))
gui.text(0,10,"Y: " .. math.floor((memory.readdword(0x02030ecc))/1000000))
vba.frameadvance();
end
If you find new doors please give coordinates to describe them, in addition to which room you left.
Doors I found off screen:
1: 30, 4282
2: 28, 4278
3: 4265, 4278
4: 4263, 4289
5: 50, 4280
6: 4289, 4284
(The maximum coordinate is 4294.)
Note that doors 1 and 2 compared to doors 3 and 4 seem to be mirrored coordinates of the same staircases. I have yet to figure out exactly what is happening, this is why a camera hack may or may not help.
Also a friend of mind mentioned trying this twice in a row. Retreat glitch warp off map, retreat glitch warp while off map. I may try to find a 'floor number' address in memory.
I really want to get to the upper floor of the sol/luna room and possibly skip the ridiculous Kraden cutscene.
EDIT:: Some relevant camera values, I assume these are merely reflections from somewhere else in memory, as manually setting them only messes things up. I may try to see if there is a byte representing "center camera on Isaac." I'm not sure if I'll be able to make this part work.
--Differentials from X and Y position
local dxHigh = 43515904
local dxLow = 7864320
local dyHigh = 39845888
local dyLow = 6291456
local AD2 = 0x0200047a -- Step Counter
local AD2Value = 1
while true do
gui.text(0,10,"1: " .. memory.readdword(0x02030db0)) --LowX
gui.text(0,20,"2: " .. memory.readdword(0x02030dd0)) --LowX
gui.text(0,30,"3: " .. memory.readdword(0x02030e00)) --LowX
gui.text(0,40,"4: " .. memory.readdword(0x02030e30)) --HighX
gui.text(0,50,"5: " .. memory.readdword(0x02030db4)) --LowY
gui.text(0,60,"6: " .. memory.readdword(0x02030dd4)) --LowY
gui.text(0,70,"7: " .. memory.readdword(0x02030e04)) --HighY
gui.text(0,80,"8: " .. memory.readdword(0x02030e34)) --LowY
gui.text(0,90,"9: " .. memory.readdword(0x0203108c)) --EqualY
gui.text(0,100,"X: " .. memory.readdword(0x02030ec4))
gui.text(0,110,"Y: " .. memory.readdword(0x02030ecc))
memory.writebyte(AD2, AD2Value) --Remove Encounters
--0x03001ad4 , 0x03001ad8 , and 0x03001adc (words)
--seem to contain an x coordinate for the background layers.
vba.frameadvance();
end
EDIT: New idea, try glitching in room 9 once glitching to room 9 from room 3 and see if it puts you on a different floor. The goal is to skip the Kraden cutscenes by getting onto the top floor, or by some random chance get into inner sol sanctum.
Goma Cave
Strategy:
-Enter the Cave
-Go through the southwest door in the first room
--(optional, move the log for the Mars Djinni)
-Go to roughly 24 14 in the same room (a more optimal spot probably exists)
-Retreat Save Glitch
-Walk north through the door
--(optional, go back and get Mars Djinni, it is a room away.)
-Exit the Cave
Originally off map you will find numerous doors that lead to the cave in Vale. Note that if you exit the cave your retreat glitch location gets reassigned to the exit as opposed to the entrance. This setting allows you to find off map doors to various places in the cave. (Seems useless currently.)
Bilibin Cave: It may be possible to glitch to an area in the cave currently inaccessible at this point. It is possible to get off the map and cause some abnormal exits, but none are too notable.
Mercury Lighthouse: a normal retreat glitch after going up the stairs in the room filled with water will take you to the aerie.
Required Fights: Lizard Guy, Saturos
More thoughts:
We arrive in Imil just a few minutes after exiting Vault. Djinn count will play a factor in the routing. Unfortunately this run is going to have a huge cutscene density. Most of it will probably be fast-forwardable.
EDIT: It seems that most of the bosses are weak to either Fire or Water, further research suggests that 2 Mercury Djinn are fairly essential to fight Saturos effectively.
One possible strategy: recruit Mia, go down the stairs you came from, retreat glitch up the stairs, backtrack ~3 rooms, fight the Djinn, Retreat glitch out of the Djinn room. This still seems pretty mediocre, I can experiment with save glitching later, there are multiple retreat points in the lighthouse.
That is a phenomenal note, I didn't think of that. It is very possible that 3 sturdy characters is better than 4 weak ones.
Off-Topic: I've been considering replaying Golden Sun lately, and a 3-character party throughout the game sounds like a lot of fun!
I have a couple questions about that though.
1) Since there are 28 Djinn and 21 possible available slots, what happens? Do you cap out on the Djinns you can pick up, or do they get put on the right hand side where Mia would be, or what?
2) Are all sections of the game, including dialogue and the like possible without glitching out the game?
3) How do you actually skip getting Mia? >_>
Because with what was mentioned about the game competition for the Lure Cap, it sounds like it may have been intentional that you could skip Mia. I tend to rush to get Mia before grinding, because I get annoyed with myself that I could be leveling her as well. Playing without Mia, would mean I could grind earlier, experience a new challenge, and tinker with glitches. =)
1) Since there are 28 Djinn and 21 possible available slots, what happens? Do you cap out on the Djinns you can pick up, or do they get put on the right hand side where Mia would be, or what?
No clue, worth tinkering with. I haven't really looked into the ramifications of skipping Mia yet. I wonder if it skips dialogs, etc.
t3h Icy wrote:
2) Are all sections of the game, including dialogue and the like possible without glitching out the game?
Don't really know specifically what you mean by this. It's probably something I haven't looked into
t3h Icy wrote:
3) How do you actually skip getting Mia? >_>
In the room where Mia joins you, use retreat on a shoulder button without enough PP and go back out the door you came in. (I think there is a statue you need to move for Mia to progress or something.)
t3h Icy wrote:
Because with what was mentioned about the game competition for the Lure Cap, it sounds like it may have been intentional that you could skip Mia.
Since this seems to be the only way to skip Mia, I doubt it was intentional. The thing is that the game assumes you have Mia at Colloso, and since all characters are taken out of and put back in your party at that point, another glitch occurs.
Definitely let me know what you test so that if I or anyone else gets around to running this, we don't have to redo things you already tried.
Definitely check out retreat glitching and save glitching (both detailed in this thread). Also my lua script removes random encounters and sets Isaac's PP to zero.
EDIT: Also, I've tried skipping areas up until Kolima Bridge. I've only had luck skipping through dungeons instead of bypassing them entirely, but it's extremely possible that it is entirely possible to bypass later areas. (It may be very possible to glitch past Babi Lighthouse into Venus Lighthouse for example.)
EDIT2: I never actually went off map in Mercury Lighthouse. As stated previously, off mapping in one of the early caves had a secret door to a cave requiring whirlwind in Vale. It is very possible that hidden warps to other locations exist. How useful? Who knows.
Are you saying there could be some secret exit off one the maps that leads to the Venus lighthous? If so you'll still have to overcome the difficulty of beating Saturos+Menardi and Fusion Dragon.
Would it be practical to skip Mia? After all she plays the role of the sterotypical healer during the boss fights.
EDIT: Out of interest for GS2, does anyone know the password to transfer max stats over to the characters from GS1?
I'm going to try a Mia-less quest (maybe I'm the first one! :D) and I'll let you guys know what happens. However, I am playing this for my own purposes of fun and stuff, so I won't specifically be looking for glitches.
I'm only going to use the Retreat glitch once to skip getting Mia and I'll "report" on any quirky things I see such as dialogue, Djinn, etc.
Hopefully something interesting happens.
Are you saying there could be some secret exit off one the maps that leads to the Venus lighthous? If so you'll still have to overcome the difficulty of beating Saturos+Menardi and Fusion Dragon.
Yes, this is a possibility, since I found a secret exit (in some cave listed earlier in the thread) to Vale. The game would then become djinn collection. My thoughts are that we may only really need 4 water and 4 fire djinn to beat the game. I want to find all feasible shortcuts before I start testing this.
Mitjitsu wrote:
Would it be practical to skip Mia? After all she plays the role of the sterotypical healer during the boss fights.
It is not very practical if there are no glitches to be gained. She comes at level 10 with a water djinn, which makes the Saturos fight much easier. (Collecting another water djinn in Mercury Lighthouse seems optimal.)
Mitjitsu wrote:
EDIT: Out of interest for GS2, does anyone know the password to transfer max stats over to the characters from GS1?
I'm sure this exists on GameFAQs. (EDIT: I sort of misread this, I thought he meant maximum completion/djinn)
Yes, it is possible to have max stats. Here's a password generator off of a site (and I have used it before and it does work).
Now to determine the actual max stats, check out this guide from GameFAQs. It'll tell you how to calculate them.
And just as a progress report: I'm at where you get Mia and I'm grinding at the moment, maxing out my gear and collecting items. Shortly I'll be able to start glitching.
Well I've run into a problem.
Through glitching and tinkering around, I've managed to get to the end of the Mercury Lighthouse. The thing is though, there's a statue that requires you to use Ply, which can only be used by Mia or Issac/Garet with two Water Djinn, which is impossible to have without Mia. T_T
I've also yet to find a way to get to the Psynergy Armor, which I'd like to grab (I like to collect everything).
Would anyone be able to find out if the top of Mercury Lighthouse is in the same section at the main level in the code? If they're close to each other, it may be possible to Retreat glitch there, but otherwise, I'm at a halt.
