Submission #7734: ShesChardcore's GBC Wizardry II: Llylgamyn no Isan in 02:25.40

This submission is for the Game Boy Color version of Wizardry: Legacy of Llylgamyn which is the second game in the series if you go by Japanese release numbering. The game expanded some of the mechanics of the original including making alignment super important, making good grind spots few and far between, and emphasizing exploration of a somewhat "living" area.

The current publication for Wiz: LoL shows off the SRAM glitch which is definitely worth a watch. However, it doesn't show off the actual game, so I took it upon myself to work through this TAS and let people watch the full game being run in a very understandable 100 mph and entirely in Japanese.

The GBC releases of the original Wizardry trilogy are different from the other versions. The maps are smaller (though with a similar layout) the mechanics are a little different, and the default party starts at level 3 instead of 1. This gives you access to second level spells right off the rip, which is important for the boss fights. The game also loads and processes encounters way faster, whereas the NES versions have that slight delay.

The gist of the game is that we need to recover 2 orbs and combine them into one orb to save the world. There are 6 floors (including one we don't even go to) in the game, and this is where alignment comes into play.

Neutral characters can go anywhere.

Good characters can go to 1, 2, 4, and 6

Evil characters can go to 1, 3, 5, and 6

IF you go to a misaligned floor you get booted back to town (which we actually use as a warp later on)

Once you have both orbs, an aligned character must combine them. Neutral characters cannot do this.

Right off the bat, we roll 3 fighters with 20 strength. Strength factors into hit chance and damage calcs, like levels but strength is more impactful. However, though the premade fighters are level 3, their stats are garbage. Rolling new ones is very worth it. This allows us to do 6-13 damage with a broad sword, which is the minimum we need in most situations (we do farm a better sword before the bosses, more on that later.

The mages come with two very important spells - Katino and Melito. Katino is a sleep spell. If you put an enemy to sleep, melee hits do double damage and they obviously can't act if they are sleeping. By sleeping some of the stronger enemies we can punch above our weight class quite a bit. Melito is a small AoE spell that we use in the second boss fight to deal with the surprisingly weak minions he comes with.

We also grab the evil priest. Since our first boss fight takes place on an evil floor, we start evil and change him later. The priest also comes with Montino, a spell that can silence enemies from casting spells, another very important part of the first boss fight.

We do a brief shopping trip to buy braod swords for our new fighters, as well as an extra one that we trade for a key item on floor 3. Armor is nice, but we skip it because we don't NEED it.

The objective here is to get out of this floor ASAP. To do this, we have to infiltrate a castle beyond a moat. In this moat are two encounters with moat monsters. They can roll with 7-25 HP. Since we can hit for 6-13, we want to fight as few of them as possible. The group size is rolled at the same time as the HP and we can look in RAM to see what HP they're rocking, (around 0x14A6) and keep finessing the RNG around until we get something we can kill. RNG is affected by every frame and every action so we can keep making minor changes and re-rolling until we get a possible win.

After 2 groups of moat monsters are dispatched, we enter the castle and abuse a game mechanic.

When you encounter an enemy, as long as they're flagged to be possibly friendly, you'll see a "friendly encounter" happen meaning they don't want to fight you. You can still do so but letting them go is immensely faster and we force friendly fights up until the miniboss, a Captain.

His minions are cowards and they run away as we slaughter him. It's a pretty easy fight, and we move onward to floor 3.

This floor can be frustrating if you are inexperienced with the game, as each step you take closes a one way door behind you forming angled corridors as you keep advancing. There are hidden teleports in here as well, taking you where you don't want to be.We have two errands to run here.

First, we trade our extra broad sword for a gold medallion. Seems like a nice trade! After that we navigate the one way doors and come out by our next item trade. In this room we trade the gold medallion for a crystal vial (holy water) which acts as both a healing item and a "bypass a tile you can't get past without it" item. This lets us take the ladder up to level 5 and prepare for our first boss fight.

On the way to the center of floor for the boss fight, we encounter a few enemies through doors, this is a forced encounter and while we were bypasing everything before, there's one fight we actually want to take.

We fight a T'ien Lung. They can have 14-32 HP, meaning if he rolls low our ragtag group of fighters can drop him on the first turn, which we do.

The thing about forced door encounters like this is that enemies drop closed treasure chests. Normally you'd bring a thief to identify and disarm traps, as locked chests can drop items, but you can also wing it and just open it and hope it doesn't kill you.

This chest serves two purposes. It gives us a boat so we can take a shortcut on level 1 between 5 and 4, and through the magic of RNG forcing, we get a Sword of Slashing. This ups our damage considerably as it adds more damage, has additional swings, and lets us hit for well over 30HP on a good roll. With this, we can kill the boss fights much more quickly so this is worth it all-around. The trap we got was a Gas Bomb, which has a chance to poison everyone in your party. We avoid it through sheer force of wil- I mean RNG manips and it's off to the boss.

This fight sucks even if you're not level 1. The Angels have 16-56 HP, can summon additional angels, have access to mage spells including Mahalito (a big AoE that would effectively wipe the party) and are pains in the ass. They come with Crusader Lords (25-45 HP, mage spells) and regular Crusaders (2-16 HP and Montino)

We force a preemptive encounter (you cannot cast spells during the surprise round) and spin the wheel of RNG, trying to keep everything either slept or silenced as we pick away with our fighters. The fight actually goes somewhat smoothly and we barely get by. We delay some frames so the priest gets the crystal (so we don't have to trade it around) and we use our alignment trick to get back to the castle.

In "friendly" scenarios, doing the opposite thing of your alignment can cause you to change. If you're good and attack a friendly group you have a chance to turn evil and vice versa. We go to the nearest forced encounter, leave them alone and our priest turns good. Since we're incompatible with the floor, game boots us back to town, where we cross the river using the boat and get to level 4.

FLoor 4 is pretty straightforward, we avoid encounters and go to the Delf fight. He has 60 HP and his minions have 13-19. We get a surprise round, kill him in round 2, and spam his minions with melito (which does like 1-8 damage) and they go down fast. Priest gets the other crystal, combines them, and we're ready to beat the game.

We traverse an area with a bunch of forced encounters and get to floor 6.

The first order of business is to meet L'kbreth, a literally invincible dragon who fights you if you don't have the neutral crystal. Seriously, there's no way to kill it but it has an AWESOME battle theme. Kinda wasted since if you play the game right you never hear it but I digress. L'kbreth says we're worthy so on we go.

Floor 6 has no friendly encounters, so if we get forced fights we have to fight our way through. Luckily, there are numerous enemy types that can spawn with only one unit and low enough HP for us to kill them. We trade our crystal for the orb that will save the world (there's actually also a fake crystal that you can get but its not a good idea.

Once we have the orb and ponder it for a little bit, we head through a teleporter back to town and the game is won.

There actually is an English option in all 3 of the GBC Wizardry games. But it would've cost some time, so I opted to become fluent in Japanese instead.

slamo: Claiming for judging.

slamo: The overall strategy looks good, and you certainly beat your own RTA record by a lot. Accepting!

slamo: Oh, and updating movie with fixed cycle count.

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