This movie completes Secret of Mana by using a dialogue glitch to reach the ending early.

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: BizHawk 1.8.4
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Abuses glitches
  • Manipulates luck

Comments

This movie takes advantage of a bug in the dialogue handling that was discovered by accident during a live streamed playthrough. Under certain conditions, the game will erroneously present a dialogue choice allowing the player to skip to unrelated parts of the game script, which is used to skip to the "The End" screen. This shaves more than 40 seconds from the previous canceled submission.

Glitches used

Item selling glitch

If the selling menu is opened with the initial cursor position past the end of the menu, you can sell an empty inventory slot and get paid for a Griffin Helm. This is possible because the selling menu does not save the cursor position when leaving the menu. Therefore, at first a candy and a chocolate is bought. The inventory menu is brought up and the cursor moved to the chocolate. Both items are then sold. It is then necessary to open the shop menu to populate the menu with items. Then, the selling menu is opened again. The menu will always be rotated so that the initial selection comes first, and this procedure assumes that a menu contains at least one item. One therefore overflows into the old items from the shop menu. These item positions all correspond to empty slots in the inventory, with the invalid item code $1F, which sells for 29666 GP.

Preventing enemy spawns

By pausing movement for one frame just as an enemy is about to load, the enemy will not be loaded.

Dialogue option glitch

If a script is triggered on a specific frame following the disappearance of a status message from the screen, and the script displays the player's money before printing anything else, the game will instead give an invisible prompt using the last parameters. Entering the save menu will clear the number of options, allowing underflowing to option 256 by pressing left. After making a choice, both the jump table pointer and the script pointer will point to the selected entry in the jump table. Furthermore, if this location contains text rather than a script command, the game will continue giving invisible prompts. The table pointer is also used to point at the tables for printing names of enemies, equipment and spells.

Route

Summary of in-game frames per screen (menu frames and dialogue selection lag not counted):
ScreenNewPublishedFrames gained
Waterfall3957398225
Forest 11108113931
Forest 25375414
Potos295529605
Mantis Ant2435244510
Potos19831982-1
Elder132713270
Potos6586580
Road to Pandora726
Outside Neko169
Neko2127
Outside Neko184
Road to Pandora280
Dyluck369
Road to Pandora840
Cannon man788

Waterfall to Potos

The beginning is basically the same as the published movie, except that the first enemy is not killed. 74 frames were gained from more optimized stair movement and a better boss fight.

Neko

The item selling glitch is executed and the money is used to buy a barrel. Then the save menu is invoked, which clears the number of dialogue choices.

Dyluck

Talking to the second soldier from the right advances the part of the story that has to do with the Water Palace so that you no longer have a free ride in the cannon.

Cannon

A barrel is used before entering this screen, to arrange for a "A's barreled" message to come on screen. Also, making the selection prints the word "Barrel", which set the script table pointer to an usable value. After the message vanishes, talking to the cannon man triggers the dialogue glitch. A sequence of choices is made that ends up advancing the script to the command that invokes the ending screen.

Other information

RAM addresses:
AddressDescription
7E00F4Frame counter
7EE002Position
7EE006Speed
7ECC48Items
7E1873Item cursor
7E1D00Text related flags
7EA200Current dialogue choice
7EA1D4Number of dialogue choices
7EA1D5Table pointer
The following Lua script was used during the making of the movie. It displays information about characters, and predicts critical hits. It also automatically makes the correct dialogue choices to arrive at a given location in the script when executing the glitch. http://www.mediafire.com/download/hmlq9015op565a3/som.lua

feos: Added the branch, judging...
feos: Accepting to Moons as a new branch.


TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 15527
Location: 127.0.0.1
This topic is for the purpose of discussing #4511: HHS's SNES Secret of Mana "game end glitch" in 08:15.50
Active player (475)
Joined: 2/1/2014
Posts: 928
Temp Encode No Audio Sorry. Will reupload with audio soon. Link to video Edit: Audio Added Link to video
ars4326
He/Him
Experienced player (775)
Joined: 12/8/2012
Posts: 706
Location: Missouri, USA
Well...who knew that the key to stopping the resurrection of the Mana Fortress was the barrel guy?
I liked this. Yes vote.
"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." - 1 Corinthians 2:9
Skilled player (1736)
Joined: 9/17/2009
Posts: 4979
Location: ̶C̶a̶n̶a̶d̶a̶ "Kanatah"
Must be one hell of a salesmen to be able to sell "Nothing" for $29666. Also how does this compare with the cancelled TAS? A table comparing that would be nice.
Experienced player (643)
Joined: 11/23/2013
Posts: 2230
Location: Guatemala
jlun2 wrote:
Must be one hell of a salesmen to be able to sell "Nothing" for $29666. Also how does this compare with the cancelled TAS? A table comparing that would be nice.
Not only that, but the movie should have a "game end glitch" branch or something. Just to keep the movie we already have to not be obsoleted.
Here, my YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/dekutony
Joined: 4/1/2010
Posts: 90
...After the banished boy scammed the fair merchant, he continued his way towards the Water Palace. Before he arrived there, he met some soldiers on duty. After short talk, the boy decided, that the fate of the world was safe within those experienced soldiers hands, and decided to find a place for shelter. Having played too much Metal Gear Solid, the boy tried to sneak on board the cannon by using a barrel, to get a free ride towards Pandora. But as one would expect, the cannon travel guy catches him and requests an explanation for the boys behavior. After a few mumbled words about having no home and looking for a place to stay in Pandora, the soft-hearted cannon travel merchant decides to give the boy a home and a future within his own family of cannon travel merchants. The End
Awesome work HHS, definitely like what I'm seeing ^^ Also, I agree with the branching of categories. While Touch-mes TAS is a bit outdated, it is still an extremely well-done work, which takes a drastically different route
Active player (268)
Joined: 7/14/2014
Posts: 57
Location: Kansas City, MO
So awesome to see one of my favorite games broken like this, especially by way of one of the most worthless (or at least under-utilized) items in the game. Excellent work, yes vote.
Current Project: Pocky & Rocky (SNES) improvements Status: Stage 2 - fighting the octopus Frames improved so far: 577
Joined: 6/9/2006
Posts: 614
Location: Mettmann
t0ast wrote:
So awesome to see one of my favorite games broken like this, especially by way of one of the most worthless (or at least under-utilized) items in the game. Excellent work, yes vote.
it's nice too see such glitches but... i don't know sometimes those end-game glitches make me really sad because after that only some more optimized submissions of the "end-game" run appear and the "normal" tases fade more and more ah and yes vote
Site Admin, Skilled player (1250)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11468
Location: Lake Char­gogg­a­gogg­man­chaugg­a­gogg­chau­bun­a­gung­a­maugg
Can someone post a note on why this ending is technically valid? HHS?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Player (145)
Joined: 7/16/2009
Posts: 686
feos wrote:
Can someone post a note on why this ending is technically valid? HHS?
In the discussion of the canceled submission there appeared to be a general consensus that this way of reaching the ending is valid. The scene that appears does indeed occur after the credits, and apart from that there isn't really anything that can be verified: there's no post-ending save or anything.
Site Admin, Skilled player (1250)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11468
Location: Lake Char­gogg­a­gogg­man­chaugg­a­gogg­chau­bun­a­gung­a­maugg
I know, I hoped for the author's insight, game internals stuff.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 15527
Location: 127.0.0.1
This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [2739] SNES Secret of Mana "game end glitch" by HHS in 08:15.50
creaothceann
He/Him
Editor
Joined: 4/7/2005
Posts: 1874
Location: Germany
High-quality encode
  • video set from 60.0985 to 60.0fps and audio slowed down to match it
  • video encoded at 512x448, aspect ratio = 4:3 via MKV stream properties
  • video=x264 CRF16 (~2330kbps), audio=lame's "-V 0" (~220kbps)
Joined: 5/8/2010
Posts: 177
Location: Entropy
I missed the voting for this gem, having played this game over and over this glitch is godly. What a great video.