Legend of the Ghost Lion is a knock-off of the RPG Dragon warrior with a female protaganist. It has the same look and feel, with a few tweaks to the system.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: FCEUX 2.1.5
- Genre: RPG
- Manipulates luck.
- Aims for fastest time.
- Takes dammage to save time.
Comments
The battle system is pretty straight foreward. There protagonist is fairly weak, but you can summon some friends to help. There are quite a few summons available in the game, but I only get the required four. You can have multiple summons active concurrently. You can also keep recalling your summons after they lose their energy.
The Level system is a bit different, fights give you cash but there is no such thing as experience. The only way to level is to find 'Fragment of hope' items in treasure chests scattered throughout the land.
Due to luck manipulation I manage to keep the number of fights down to eight. One is just a quick way to get the money I need to buy passage on a ship, the other seven are required.
Battles are difficult to manipulate, I was only able to change events based on previous actions. Other input and timing doesn't seem to change the results in battle.
Encounters are a bit easier to manipulate, they seem to be running off and RNG that changes every 16 frames. On the world map and in early dungeons I was able to simply delay a few frames here and there to avoid encounters. In later dungeons I was able to avoid encounters by bringing up the menu.
I think the path I took tries to go to the required things in a fairly direct way. I picked up levels ('Fragment of Hope' items) that were nearby as I went through. I wanted to pick up as many levels as possible to try to save time in the fight against the last boss.
Overall the game is reasonably good for a knock-off, and as a TAS it is reasonably quick for an RPG.
Other comments
Because I was using TASEdit the rerecord count is 0.
Potential improvements:
The balance between the level and the length of the last boss could be manipulated to save a bit of time. This would take quite a bit of time to experiment with.
I did quite a bit of experimenting to try to make the battles quick, but I did not try all options exhaustively.
Acknowledgments:
I'd like to thank the following for the helpful resources:
- The dungeon maps, guide, and other game details by hiryuu at http://shrines.rpgclassics.com/nes/ghostlion/index.shtml
- The FAQ from Wilson Lau at http://www.gamefaqs.com/nes/562945-ghost-lion/faqs/7740
- The Youtube Let's Play by Firewizard23 starting at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4zhrt57LyI
Mukki: Judging...
Mukki: Broadly positive response to this one. Accepting...