The cartridge is oversized. The boxart boasts "6 MEGA." Might and Magic II is a huge game. But like many western RPGs, the ratio of side quests to main quests is high. In this TAS a thief and a ninja finish quickly and bloodlessly with the help of a clear plan, luck manipulation and glitches.
- Fastest time
- Manipulator
- Glitcher
- Pacifist; no damage
- Gens_9.5c
- There must be no SRAM or a zero-byte SRAM present.
- Save-load during playback may cause desync.
The script has some cheeseball humor here and there which you may enjoy if you can read fast enough.
Also, keep in mind this is a port of an Apple II game made at about the same time as FF1.
Forbidden teleport glitch
Enter an area where the teleport spell is forbidden. Rest to clear the forbidden flag. Now teleport can be used as normal. This saves walking and skips battles that would otherwise have to be manipulated away.
Weird characters glitch
Choose View Char then press A+C at View which? to reveal a nameless character with invalid stats. You can take his weapons and money. It saves a minute or so of doing the Pegasus quest to get money.
Sequence of main quest events
- Rescue Sherman from the Amazons to access the time machine.
- Get the four machine parts to access the orb.
- Get the four elemental discs in year 800 to access the talons.
- Get the talons in each elemental plane.
- Get the Element Orb and sneak it out of Dawn's Cavern with a hireling.
- Give the orb and talons to Kalohn in year 800.
- Complete the juror quest and black triple crown to deal with Lamanda.
- Visit Kalohn in the year 900 to activate the Square Lake events.
- Enter Square Lake and encode the cryptogram.
For detailed info see Andrew Schultz's guides.
Selected discussion
- It's optimal to just hold ↑ or ↓ to continuously move the party or the cursor.
- Sometimes it's faster to walk backwards or even take a longer route to reduce screen drawing time. The less stuff in the viewfield, the faster the movement.
- Walk on Water and the elemental transmutation spells are accessed by manipulating temple blessings instead of a cleric. This has the added benefit of activating Wizard Eye, which shows a small overhead map.
- Fly and Teleport spells are accessed via Witch's Broom and Teleport Orb items instead of a sorcerer.
- Whenever TP would save time, TP was used. Whenever TP wouldn't save time, TP wasn't used.
- There are portals between the castles in their basements. These are faster by a small margin than breaking in through the front gates.
- You need someone with the Crusader skill to accept the "rescue Sherman" quest. For this I use: Sherman.
- The Mountaineer skill x2 is needed to pass the mountains in A1.
- It's only necessary to make one character a "chosen one," so only one juror quest is done. The ninja quest (kill Dawn) can be done on the way to get the orb, so I bring Nakazawa, who is rescued with Sherman. He shirks his job though.
- The Hermit is chosen because as a robber he may tag along on any juror quest.
- Sir Felgar is chosen because he starts with some money to donate to the temple.
- We, the people of Terra, in order to form a more perfect union, establish...
- If you are dissatisfied that the end screen says "C" to Continue, here's a gmv that presses C to continue.
- Turns out the SNES version is awful so I didn't use it.
If you like this video, check out this submission.
Edit: Fixed the php errors and uglified the text. I can't direct link an image with link text and without inlining.
NesVideoAgent: Hi! I am a robot. I took a few screenshots
of this movie and placed them here.
I'm not sure I got the right ROM though. (I tried
Might and Magic - Gates to Another World (UE) (REV01) [!].gen, which was the closest match to what you wrote.) Well, here goes! Feel free to clean up the list. Dammit: Sorry, NesVideoAgent, you only made it halfway through. Also, I suggest you ignore the file extensions on ROM names. They only make you nervous.
mmbossman: I admire the technical achievement demonstrated in this run, but I believe it makes a very poor TAS to watch. Nearly a third of the action is cursor movement, and I don't think that the rest of the run would be entertaining for a viewer who is not familiar with the game, even with subtitles present. Therefore, I am rejecting this submission.
nanogyth: Processing for publication...