Super Hydlide is the third game in the venerable kuso series. It was ported to quite a few systems but this Genesis version is the most popular. It is also an action RPG with a lot of complexity making for an interesting run.
Important mechanics
There are four classes that differ mostly by stat growth. Warrior gets good stats for physical fighting but not as great for magic. Thief gets crazy high dexterity and pretty good attack and hp but terrible int and mp. Priest and Monk are the magic classes with Monk being a little more well rounded on physical stats. The Priest and Monk get a 50% xp bonus that goes away if they reach level 5 or higher and they also get the first 6 spells at a discount. They get access to higher level spells but we don't need any of those.
One of the big routing issues is that the final boss is a simple dps endurance check that requires building a combination of HP and attack power. This favors Warrior or Thief but with a little luck the Monk can reach the necessary power level much faster because of the xp bonus. The Thief's unique ability to open chests without magic is actually based on his dex stat. 170 is the minimum to have any chance and reaching that amount would require level 7, very inconvenient. His low int also means that he would need a higher level to enter the Subterranean City and his low mp would be inconvenient as well. So Monk it is. This is the same reasoning as the RTA run though we will finish on a much lower level by getting perfect stat growth on levelup.
Stat growth is very random and depends on your *starting* stats. It is crucial to start out with max or close on almost every stat. Your *starting* luck sets a factor that adds a higher random factor to the growth of all stats.
- Life: limiting factor for final boss DPS check, we get max every level.
- MP: Not critical but more is better because it means we need to carry fewer mp restore herbs.
- AP: attack power, important for all fights and we need close to max to hit a breakpoint for final DPS check.
- INT: We need 50 to enter the Subterranean City. After that it doesn't matter. To hit that at level 3 we need close to max at that point.
- STR: Sets the amount you can carry without getting overburdened. We need this maxed early on but can ignore it on later levels.
- AGI: Controls hit rate. Not critical but does help reduce frames needed to get fights going our way.
- DEX: Dodge rate. If you get 170 you can open chests without magic, but that is way too high. Ignored.
There are numerous difficult and in some cases inscrutable mechanics to figure out here.
First of all we have a carry limit system. Everything has weight including your money. You can carry over your limit but it slows you way down. Food and MP restore herbs weigh quite a bit. Money is divided into $10, $100 and $1000 coins that each have the same weight, encouraging you to keep the higher value coins.
You learn magic at a spell shop in the first town. There are 6 spells and you have to learn them in order, paying xp for each. The last one is Move, the only teleport method this game. So we need to get them all for a total of 2275 xp. We will also use Learn to open up chests. Time switches day and night which we need to enter the final dungeon.
The in game clock has two significant effects. First, you need to eat. This happens automatically as long as you have a Ration of Food in your inventory, refilling your health a little. This is not really optional because skipping one meal puts you in a hunger state that drains your hp and kills you very quickly. The other problem is that at midnight you get tired and your attacks no longer damage enemies. This is actually not a problem for most of the run when we are ignoring the enemies anyway. When you stay at an inn you wake up refreshed at 7AM regardless of when you went to bed.
As for combat, your full attack power is your AP plus weapon power. The Stone of Warrior gives you a small bonus, enough to lower our final boss DPS threshold. There is armor but we don't bother with it. Damage is computed based on a division between AP and defense with some threshold to get damaged at all. For example even at level 3 the outer world plants can't touch us. It seems that the devs realized the game was too hard and added a hack when your hp gets down to 10. Any hit that would put you under 10 hp gets capped and leaves you at 10. After that your hp goes to 5, 2 and 1 before you die. This is true regardless of the attack/defense matchup.
The Life-water is a one-time revival item that can be bought at the Cloud city shop. Instead of dying you get restored to 20 hp. This is actually pretty valuable because the 10 hp hack gets reset so you can take at least four hits before dying: 20 hp -> 10 -> 5 -> 2 -> 1
There is a sort of critical hit mechanic that is totally hidden. When you attack there is a 0-255 hit roll. If it is under 21 then that hit value gets added to your damage.
The only basic consumable we use is the Bundle of herbs. It restores 20 mp. At level 3 we have just 41 MP. Learn takes 15 and Move is 30 mp. We get a full hp/mp refill at inns and on levelup but outside of that we need to use herbs to get mp back.
When you get the Move spell only the starting City of the Woods is on your warp list. You need to stay at an inn *after* getting the spell to add it. This has a pretty significant impact on the route, forcing us to make a return trip somewhere in the early game -- grinding out the xp for it straight off would take way too long.
You get a choice for the game speed - Fastest, Fast, Normal, Slow, Slowest. You move faster on faster speeds so it seems like it should be an easy choice. Well, it turns out that lowering the speed can be beneficial for some boss fights because the ratio of your attack speed to the enemy movement gets better. If this means beating them in fewer cycles then it can be worth moving around slowly for a little bit -- you can't go to your menu at all during boss fights so you are stuck at the same speed until you finish them.
| Move | Attack | Enemy | Ratio | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fastest | 2 | 2 | 8 | 4 |
| Fast | 4 | 2 | 16 | 8 |
| Normal | 8 | 4 | 32 | 8 |
| Slow | 16 | 4 | 64 | 16 |
| Slowest | 32 | 8 | 128 | 16 |
On Fastest the enemies also get the fastest attack speed. On Fast your movement speed is cut in half but your attack speed is the same. The enemies do move slower so you get twice as many attacks in for each enemy attack. On slow speed you move a painful 8 times slower but get four times as many hits in for each enemy hit. Normal and Slowest are not useful since you get slower without improving the ratio.
The RNG is very strong in this game. The code doesn't just cycle the RNG when it grabs a number, it advances it on a cycle-based interrupt schedule as well. This makes the RNG very strong but also possible to game in many ways. The best way to change our luck is to tweak our movement, mostly on screen transitions, just because that does not cost us any time. There are a lot of cases where we need to clear out some some long, narrow passages or force some lower probabilities for crits. In that case we wait out some frames standing, in our menu or while paused. Pausing is particularly powerful since the RNG keeps cycling when the action completely stops and we can even do it on bosses.
The B button makes your hero crouch down to open chests and trigger secrets. This crouching state also makes you invulnerable to non-boss enemies though you cannot attack either. However it turns out that if we crouch every other frame at Fastest speed we can get this invulnerability with no loss to our movement speed. Very convenient trick that we use throughout the run.
Route
Starting in the City of the Woods we set our speed to Fastest right away. We use a hidden trick to gain xp by throwing money in the pond. We get 30 xp each time and our money doesn't actually get used up. At 270 xp we can reach level 3. Level 4 gets us a little more power and we still get the 50% xp bonus but with max stats level 3 will be good enough for the early game and we can get the xp for level 4 a little more efficiently.
We invest some of our $2000 starting funds in two Rations of food and four Bundles of herbs. The herbs are cheap at $10 but heavy. For a weapon we pick up a Dagger for $1520, good enough to get us past the first couple bosses.
There are actually a few different ways to route the beginning, all with advantages and drawbacks. The main reason for going this way is that we can clear the tower and pick up all the things we need in the Cloud city without needing any magic. This means we can't get the Cloud city on our teleport list but that is ok since we will not need to come back. We do need to pick up the I.D card in the Water Palace so we can come back to there later, a minor inconvenience. By contrast, we could avoid that return trip if we did the Cave of the Dead first but we need magic to open that chest and warp out.
The lower floors of the tower are a nasty maze with a few hidden shortcuts. We focus on the blue Balu Balu enemies since we can take them out quickly in two hits for 22 xp. Vampire bats are worth 15 and take one hit but their high evade is annoying. Slimes are only worth 4 xp so we ignore them. We can hit enemies on the other side of thin walls except when facing right. On higher floors we see teal colored vampires that are worth 67 xp but are too tanky to be worthwhile. The dark eyes are a little better since they take fewer hits and give 75 xp though they also have an annoying evade level that requires a little luck. Our whole trip through we conveniently spawn the enemies we want on our path so we can get the xp we need efficiently. On the way we pick up a Talisman from a chest.
After a few floors we reach the elevator power switch. For some reason we fall a few floors after hitting it. With the elevator we can reach the top of the tower and take on our first boss Hellsmoke. Hellsmoke comes out, fires at you and then turns to the side and flies off before coming back to repeat. This cyclical pattern makes it worth considering lowering the speed. At fast it is a lot easier to finish it in two cycles. However we can two cycle it in fastest with heavy luck manipulation using pauses. This turned out to be faster overall because we don't need to bring up the menu to tweak the speed back and forth.
Our reward is the Cloud stone which lets us walk across the clouds into Cloud city. Here we visit the item shop where we sell the Talisman to raise money for the Stone of Warrior, Life-water and more Rations of food. The other task here is to enter the Sky Palace and fall down the hole to the Water palace. We grab an I.D card that will let us access this palace from the outer world so we do not need to climb the tower again.
A short walk brings us back to the starting town where we cash in our xp for the six basic spells. Now we can open trapped chests with Learn, teleport with Move and add new towns to our teleport list by staying at inns. This is why we stay at the inn in the Subterranean City. To get into this town we push a gravestone. There is a rather strange hidden requirement of 50 INT to do this.
Continuing on the theme of required areas locked by obscure secrets, we walk through a hidden passage to the storage area that has nothing we are interested in, except for the secret entrance to our next dungeon that can only be accessed by checking an empty chest twice. The cave is rather inconveniently dark but we can at least see our character. Walking in the dark are enemies including zombies worth a juicy 165 xp. We spawn a few of these to build up some xp on our way to the boss. The three-headed dragon is a pretty straightforward fight where we need to wait for each head to pop out. Finishing off the last head nets a hefty 3220 xp with our low level Monk bonus. Back in the dark, we use our magic to disarm the chest and grab the Dragon's fang. Then we teleport back to the Subterranean City. At this point we need to lighten our load so we drop our Dagger. While it is our only weapon it is quite heavy and we will be picking up a different weapon before our next fight.
The Water Palace King wants the Dragon's fang and lets us raid his treasury as a reward. The only thing we need is Jeem's Scroll so we grab that and Move to City of the Woods. At The Sacred Temple we cash in our dragon xp to advance our level up to 7. This ends the xp bonus but gets us more carry space for a couple heavy items we need to pick up and enough fighting strength for the next boss. We also get a lot more mp and an hp/mp refill. Turns out that teleporting two screens to the inn was slightly faster than walking so we do it.
Our next adventure is the Tech Palace that rises from a lake when we use Jeem's Scroll. All we need to do is climb to the top floor and grab a Space suit. Besides giving us a cool astronaut look, it protects us from the vacuum of space.
Putting on our Space suit, we Move back to City of the Woods for our spacewalk. Space is accessed by falling in a pit from the outer world. Yeah, that is some interesting physics. Anyway, space seems to stretch endlessly in all directions with strong enemies on every screen. There are a few different patterns of background stars and one is chosen randomly to prevent navigation that way. Somewhere though is a spaceship that we need to visit. We skipped the space compass that points us to it so we go without it. Behind the scenes space is a 32x32 grid. You land randomly in one of the 7x7 middle squares and the spaceship is in the corner. This being a TAS we naturally land on the closest spot though we still need to go 13 screens in each direction to reach the spaceship.
The spaceship has two things we need: the Horn and a quick lore dump from The Computer Memory Bank. The computer explains that we need to pick up a talisman from the Cave of the Dead so we can get to the first dimension and confront Kaizack.
With our space trip done we Move again to the Subterranean City and head back to the secret Cave of the Dead where we fought the dragon. This time we just need to walk a few screens to a certain spot where we can pick up the Time-door talisman (nothing happens if you come here without getting The Computer Memory Bank message). We use the Time-door talisman, drop our very heavy Space suit and then Move to the Subterranean City once again.
Like the fissure that drops you into space, the portal to the first dimension is just sitting in plain sight in the Fairy Land outer world. Without the talisman you get warped around to a few places in the outer world. Since we have used it we end up in the first dimension. After a quick walk to a central spot we use the Horn to access the City of Illusion. Are you following all of the random unmarked trigger spots so far?
We spend the night at The Fantasy inn so we can come back here later. Note that it is 4:51 AM at this point and our hero has been in the tired state since the spaceship. However after a quick nap he is all refreshed and reenergized at 7 AM. The general store is our other stop as it is the only place we can acquire Holy water. We also top up on Rations of food before a Move back to the starting City of the Woods.
The Holy water gets us into the Forbidden Cave in the back of the starting town. This cave is also dark with narrow passages where strong enemies pop in and block us rather easily. Near the entrance we pick up our Flaming sword, the weapon required for the final boss. But first in the back of the cave we have a warmup against the series perennial nemesis Varalys. Varalys has an annoying ability to heal himself up to 13 times when his hp gets low. More specifically, he checks on a recurring cycle if his hp is under 100. If so he heals himself back to his max of 400. But if you can take him from 100 to 0 in one cycle then he dies before healing. The key here is that switching to Slow speed lets us get four attacks in this window, enough to get the job done if they all hit and we get a couple good crits. Our hit rate is a bit low so we need to do some super heavy manipulation with pauses. Pausing stops but does not reset the heal cycle clock while the RNG keeps thrashing. Anyway our reward is the Statue of Varalys.
We need one more level to beat Kaizack. Conveniently Varalys gave us enough xp so we make a quick stop at the City of the Woods to hit our last levelup to 8. After that we Move to City of Illusion for our final confrontation. The final dungeon entrance is yet another hidden trigger. We must use the Statue of Varalys at night to get in. Since it is still daytime we cast the Time spell to advance the clock 12 hours. Our meal and sleep schedule stays on a separate internal clock so we actually have plenty of time before getting tired even if the official game time has advanced.
The final dungeon is a five floor maze with the added requirement to free a fairy before the fated encounter with Kaizack. There are three steps in this somewhat annoying sequence. First we talk with the fairy on a hidden corner of the third floor. Then we release the lock at the end of a passage on floor four. Finally we go back to the fairy on floor three. The fairy tells us "I will become your eyes" though in truth you simply can't reach the final fight without her. Anyway, on the fifth floor we step into a room at the end of the hall and finally meet our final boss Kaizack.
The final boss fight differs from the rest of the game in numerous ways. Kaizack moves at the same speed regardless of your speed setting. You need to pop the four bulbous pimples on his back while avoiding very fast shots from his mouth. Shooting his mouth does no damage but keeps him from firing back. This is preferable to dodging so after his opening shot we feed him enough Flaming sword shots to suppress his fire. The pimples are only vulnerable to ranged attacks from below -- attacks from the side do no damage. Thankfully every shot hits with no RNG. Finally there is a rapid fire trick we can use to increase our Flaming sword's rate of fire. Basically you can have have either one or two shots active at a time. You can get capped to one if there are no shots in the air. On the other hand if you waste a shot then you only have one more you can use to attack. The solution is to keep two shots up and send out a stray shot when we need more time to reposition. This looks a little funny but the resulting fight is very fast.
Once the pimples are popped it is time to hop into Kaizack's mouth for the DPS check that we have so carefully prepared for. Kaizack does 4 damage every four frames while we do 16 every other frame. Kaizack's damage is subject to the 10 hp rule so on breaking 10 hp we hit 10, 5, 2, 1 as with any other hit. This explains why the Life-water is so useful here. Instead of dying at 0 we get restored to 16 (technically 20 hp followed by 4 damage the same frame). After that our hp goes down to 12, 10, 5, 2 and 1, giving us two more hits than a flat 4 damage per hit. Our damage does scale with attack power, 1 damage per 10 AP. Our final stats are 84 Life and 162 AP. Crunching the numbers, getting through Kaizack's 900 hp before he digests us requires 83 Life and 160 AP or 91 Life with 150 AP.
Watching the ending is highly recommended. Kaizack's epically confusing final words are not to be missed.
Special Thanks
At RPG Limit Break 2019 I watched a live speedrun by Mikwuyma and he asked if I was interested in TASing it. Turned out to be the sort of interesting action RPG that is very interesting for a TAS so I took him up on it. In the process I was able to help refine the RTA route as well.
Darkman425: Claiming for judging.
Darkman425: I've been looking forward to a TAS of this game for a long while. This definitely delivered with all the careful routing and enemy navigation. The subtitles during the run also helped with giving context of what happened as events zoomed by.
Accepting.
A small note: as noted by the subtitles, the darkness effect in the dark caves can be disabled by turning off Background Layer A. The side effect is that the HUD on the right side of the screen and text boxes also disappear.
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