Symphonia came out a few days ago here, and I'll probably get it soon. So I have an urge to go back to the roots and have another play through ToP. Might as well record stuff, since I have 9x now. I know that some people here are fans (eg. Bisqwit, otherwise he wouldn't have translated it) so it may get _some_ support.
Some things to consider:
a) It's a long game. I've never bothered doing anything quickly on it, but it's taken me between 25-30 hour to do ~100% completions. I've played the game fully thrice. Obviously a run can't be this long, it should aim for a fast completion, not full completion. I suspect that doing only what's necessary would take maybe 5 hours? This is still extremely long...
b) It's an RPG, so there's a lot of randomness (pseudo, of course, but from some prelim tests it can't always be taken advantage of, because the values are set way before they are used by the game). There's also cutscenes+speech, and the game is very linear. The speech and linearity will no doubt make some parts a little bit boring to watch.
c) Setting speech is "fastest" is just a little bit too fast to read for the audience. And there is a lot of speech. The audience will probably only catch half of what's being said.
d) Can't record over 2 hours on a single smv, so have to use several files.
e) Battles, argh! Early on you really desperately need Lightning Bolt (it does like 10x damage of your sword), but you get it around lvl 8 (or was it 10?). So how far should one level up early in the game.. how much fights should one avoid later on in the game? Obviously Holy Bottles will be a god-sent, but they only double the required steps until a fight, so they need to be refreshed a lot (iirc, using a holy bottle resets the step counter, but using any other items or vising an adjacent area doesn't reset the counter - so using a bottle and reusing another bottle a few steps before a fight is the most efficient way to avoid fights altogether). But some dungeons are long, you can't buy holy bottles everywhere, and this methods exhausts the holy bottles quite quickly. Jet Boots halve the amount of steps to meet an enemy, so holy+jet cancel out. I suspect that a mix of jet and normal walking while always using holy bottles would be a good idea, to conserve the bottles yet still make use of the jet boots from time to time. Getting into a fight is not the end of the world, as long as you can run away quickly (mist rune? white mist? formation -> Cless on the far left).
I think anyone familiar with this game will agree that this is easily one of the most complicated SNES games to analyze for a time attack, probably on par with Star Ocean, and perhaps more complex than CT.
I really really don't want to get into situations like SMRPG where people are discussing the exact attack combinations at the exact level in order to defeat some boss with 0 extra hit points to spare just to save an extra round of attacking, because that could take months >=)
Fights will be fast because of save states, but the real issues are getting into as few fights as possible, yet having reasonably decent levels to learn cool techs (Teleport would pwn just about any boss in one or two attacks, but Cless gets it so darn late). Lightning Bolt and Tiger Teeth are two techs that you get really really early on, and they do a very disproportionate amount of damage compared to all other attacks you can do at the time, so those will probably feature quite a lot.
For Arche/Klarth, it's probably best to set them to passive. Their spell/summon animations take a bit of time, and I don't want them to execute spells if I don't need them (for example, running away). Setting to the next level above passive is useless for fights where I DO need them to help attack, because they will delay for a bit before summoning. So I think summons and spells will be completely manual.. at least it would give me full control of what's going on.
Mint is probably less useful than Chester. I've never really used any of her mana except for healing... do any of the other status-affecting spells help more than Chester could?
So yeah, does anyone know of any significant shortcuts to skip something in the game? Will anyone ever bother watching a ~5-6 hour movie split into several files? Has anyone ever heard of this game? Where did I leave my socks?
Joined: 8/1/2004
Posts: 2687
Location: Seattle, WA
alexpenev wrote:
a) It's a long game. I've never bothered doing anything quickly on it, but it's taken me between 25-30 hour to do ~100% completions. I've played the game fully thrice. Obviously a run can't be this long, it should aim for a fast completion, not full completion. I suspect that doing only what's necessary would take maybe 5 hours? This is still extremely long...
That is such a painfully correct statement. I've never beaten the game because I couldn't devote more than a few weeks to it at a time, but I'm pretty sure that I got close to the end.
This game would be great to watch, both as an RPG and an action submission, because of the whole Linear Battle System deely. The white/opal stone is supposed to let you escape from most fights much faster, but wouldn't you want to get phoenix/lionheart as quickly as possible? Also, would it be safe to assume that Mint will be leaving the team fairly quickly? No need for a healer if every shot is dead on, right?
Three cheers for Arche, by the way.
Mint can....um....weaken the enemie's defense! Ha! A perfect reason to use her. Now you don't have to use those idiots Klarth and Chester. And as cool as Arche is, Mint is so much more.
Still though, I don't think that it would make that great of a run. Even though it's a great game, many people haven't heard of it, let alone played it. And even though I really enjoyed it, I don't think that I could sit down and watch a movie of this being played.
Oh, and the other reason for not having a run is because the ninja village would be skipped, which makes any run instantly fail.
And people would of course have to use the Japanese version, because our rules rule out fan translations.
Japanese text displays a little faster than English text and as that, it's not that important anymore if nobody can read it - most audience couldn't understand it anyway.
Also, the game is much better enjoyed by playing it (the audience of the movie is those who have already played it), so anyone who watches the movie without having played the game before is just shooting oneself in a leg.
O_O;;;;
Crazy. As long as the random battles are kept down this ought to be interesting.
Is it a steps or random chance thing? I remember walking quite a long way sometimes. And other times just getting hammered one after another.
I was able to manipulate where I got a random battles somewhat by switching between walking and running. But it seemed to reach a limit on how far I could do it. Just a little tip.
But no fansub. ;_;
Yeah, Arche owns me.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
I was able to manipulate where I got a random battles somewhat by switching between walking and running. But it seemed to reach a limit on how far I could do it.
That hints towards frame-based randomness - the consequence could be decided at the frame when you walk into the next square.
Well, it seems to be timebombed as well. I could only get so far. (Not that I put an inordinate amount of work in it).
Also the timebomb seems to carry over between screens. I'm not sure about between world map and a random cave though.
It's also quite easy to manipulate which enemies pop up when. It's very sensitive to input.
(Which I fear means it'll also be somewhat sensitive to desync)
BTW, just a though. If you seem to be desyncing alot when you watch the movie try a clean load. (Sorry it just came to mind. I was thinking about the tetris movie. If the random seed uses information in RAM to initialize then that's probably most of the desync troubles for those games. If it's not news to everyone apologises. But it's news to me. And I haven't seen it posted explicitly yet.)
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
Since when has the choice on how to calculate randomness had any correlation on desync? As far as I know, the main problem with desyncs is the buggy sound support.
This game would be great to watch, both as an RPG and an action submission, because of the whole Linear Battle System deely. The white/opal stone is supposed to let you escape from most fights much faster, but wouldn't you want to get phoenix/lionheart as quickly as possible?
Phoenix isn't Cless' best tech. It's a fire-based tech, so it works great against some enemies (such as plants and trees), but lightning is just as effective on those! The problem with phoenix is that its animation is very very long.. Cless concentrates for a few seconds, and then wraps himself in flames and then dives, which is nearly 2 lightning bolts! Lionheart has always been one of my favs. But it doesn't actually do much damage. It pushes the enemies to the edge of the screen, so you can hurt several enemies at once - that can be very useful, but you get the tech quite late in the game (yo get phoenix before lionheart).
Zurreco wrote:
Also, would it be safe to assume that Mint will be leaving the team fairly quickly? No need for a healer if every shot is dead on, right?
Lol, yeah, her main job is healing. When you get Chester back, giving him the first bow you meet makes his attack over 500, which is more helping than Mint's "defense decrease" I think... But Mint is just so cute, I can't boot her out ("Fasto Edo") =/
And people would of course have to use the Japanese version, because our rules rule out fan translations.
Japanese text displays a little faster than English text and as that, it's not that important anymore if nobody can read it - most audience couldn't understand it anyway.
Also, the game is much better enjoyed by playing it (the audience of the movie is those who have already played it), so anyone who watches the movie without having played the game before is just shooting oneself in a leg.
Hmm, bummer. Text is alright t be in J, but I'm worried about the menus. There's a lot of item manipulation necessary, for in and outside battles. I don't want those names to be in Japanese...
But then it doesn't have to be an official submission, because I'd prefer to DeJap. It can be like that SF2T I made before, it can be just for fun. Can you even make an official submission if the smvs aer split over several files?
I agree that it's useless for someone who hasn't played it to watch it.
Is it a steps or random chance thing? I remember walking quite a long way sometimes. And other times just getting hammered one after another.
It's steps. When you leave an area for the overworld, leave the overworld for an area, or finish a battle, you "steps" counter is assigned some random number. If you're wearing a holy bottle, the number is bigger than usual. If you're using a dark bottle, it's much less.
So you just walk around, for every step you take, the counter decreases. At 0, you fight. If you have 1 step left before you fight, and you reuse another holy bottle, the counter is reset back to some large number again.
The trick here is the jet boots item. It makes you run about twice as fast, if you hold the B button. This is great for places where there are no enemies, and it makes the game looks so much faster. It does not work in the overworld.
But in dungeons, using the jet boots sort of takes 2 steps for every screen step, so you decrease your counter quicker, and meet enemies sooner. It might actually end up being more efficient to simply use a holy bottle and walk normally - this way you won't fight for about twice as long a time (and refreshing the bottle gives you an extra bunch of steps). The idea is conserve the bottles so that you can leave the dungeon with 0 or 1 bottle to spare and stock up again in the next town =)
As for Klarth, he's probably going to be the most useful character after Cless (until I get Chester again, I reckon.. Chester can seriously pwn if you equip him well and set him to "go psycho"). Sylphs, Gnome and Undine are teh suck for most enemies, but Maxwell is where it's at. Sometimes a maxwell ball does around 10x damage of the other balls, which can make maxwell instantly surpass Ifrit and Luna for damage (Faqs often say "use Luna" but that's not true, usually Maxwell is the best).. but Luna may well have her uses.. she hits everyone on screen with light damage. Might be > Maxwell against "dark" enemies.
Arche's most useful moves spells would be Thunder Blade (probably her most useful spell, considering how early you get it and how many enemies it hurts) and Indignation (but you earn it around half-way through the game), and perhaps Ray (see Luna). Her death spells (extinction, black hole and distortion I think) have a habit of not working no matter how many save states you use.
Oh, I forgot Flare bottles... a player should be well equipped with those. They raise Cless' attack about x1.5, I think. Ah, the wonders of drugs =)
Ahh, I see. Again, I said I have put almost no effort into it. And because I never ever walk normally unless I have to, it never occured to me.
@Bob, my SMRPG movie was desyncing because of small variations in the randomness that take a few frames (like winning a Mushroom at the end of a fight so the box takes longer to pop up).
That clicked it into place for me, why the randomness wasn't the same.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
Well, assuming it's loaded with the same condition (i.e. hard reset), then the randomness shoud be the exact same everytime, no matter how precise the randomness is. It has to be a bug in the emulator that causes the desyncs, since the rom can't do anything really random (just psuedo random).
Righto, I'm done. It's about 4:37hrs on the clock, so the game can be beaten under 5 hours after all. I suspect it can go down maybe even 10 minutes faster with cooler optimisations on the fights.
geocities.com/spenev/ToP.zip
Righto, I'm done. It's about 4:37hrs on the clock, so the game can be beaten under 5 hours after all. I suspect it can go down maybe even 10 minutes faster with cooler optimisations on the fights.
geocities.com/spenev/ToP.zip
whoa cool!
I'll watch this right now
/e: what the?!
Is this just me or is teh zip file empty ?!
I downloaded this 3 times and everytime same result...
Meh, me wanna watch this ;_;
unzip ToP.zip
Archive: ToP.zip
warning [ToP.zip]: 1 extra byte at beginning or within zipfile
(attempting to process anyway)
file #1: bad zipfile offset (local header sig): 1
(attempting to re-compensate)
inflating: ToP_part1.smv
error: invalid compressed data to inflate
file #2: bad zipfile offset (local header sig): 58175
(attempting to re-compensate)
inflating: ToP_part2.smv
inflating: ToP_part3.smv
inflating: comments.txt
(edit)
upon further investigation my guess is that this wont pass, your comments states that you've played using a dejap version (The rom is called "Tales of Phantasia (J) [T+Eng1.2LowCase_DeJap].smc") , which described in the rules are not accepted.
Joined: 5/17/2004
Posts: 106
Location: Göteborg, Sweden
[delurk]Yay! A finished RPG run - how I've waited! Now, Phil just has to complete that Ogre Battle run and all will be right with the world ...
Anyhow, just finished watching the first hour or so, up to the Ifrit battle. Overall, looks like a good, entertaining run but there's clear room for improvement. Arche's Thunder Blades could've been much better used in some fights, the spell often hits only two enemies when it could've hit four instead, or is used after a couple of foes have already been otherwise eliminated instead of when it could've affected all enemies and shortened the fight considerably. I'd think that turning off the skills AI and controlling party members spells manually would be more efficient, not to mention more impressive due to a general reduction in sloppyness.
I'm also not sure about the early TP strategy (flare bottles over TP gummies, spam skills in regular fights and have none left for bosses) in some parts but as I've never actually tried to play ToP fast I can't really say if this is suboptimal or not.
Some of the holy bottle use strikes me as queer as well (using one, then getting a battle two steps later) but I'm guessing that's just to control the randomness of the battle type?
I'm very glad that you decided to run on the translated rom. Text scrolls by slow enough to be read even on the fastest setting and being able to get the story while watching improves the entertainment value of the run considerably. The fighting is fun to watch, certainly more spectatable than that of other RPGs out there. 's a highly recommended watch for anyone who's enjoyed ToP or one of its sequels or spin-offs. Proper job![/delurk]
P.S. In case anyone wonders from where I got the run since Alex's link apparently doesn't work, someone posted a working one in a separate post which was later removed D.S.
Cripes...yeah that was me. When I first played a movie it "desynced" before the forest. Quotes because I used the wrong version of the ROM compatible with the movies. I guess because I thought the files were fucked I deemed appropriate to remove the archive from my FTP posthaste.
Regardless:
pkfixed
NOTE: this is alexpenev's movie, not mine...I'm just hosting a fixed ZIP
Sorry about that Zero. The zip file was fine on my end, but seems broken after geocities uploads it. Try again now, I used winrar this time, it should be ok now.
Ife: yeah, I'm quite aware that it's not a proper submission, it's just for fun ;). If it was a proper submission I probably wouldn't be braking it up into 3 files, and I'd play more carefully and fix those "ERROR" comments. I started making it before posting this topic but took a break at one point, so the smv start dates are older than the first messages posted here.
> I'd think that turning off the skills AI and controlling party members spells manually would be more efficient, not to mention more impressive due to a general reduction in sloppyness.
Yes, all spells and summons are manual. Setting the characters to "call many spirits" or "use many spells" is not very good, since they still take "long" (in a speedrunning sense) delays between casting, so I force them to cast all the time. That's what all the menu toying is.
> I'm also not sure about the early TP strategy.
Early on I have only very few techs, like (eww) Poison bolt. Yeah, I don't particularly like many of the fights early in the game (well some are works of art, others are pretty average). I wish I had some holy bottles before Harmel.
> "Some of the holy bottle use strikes me as queer as well (using one, then getting a battle two steps later) but I'm guessing that's just to control the randomness of the battle type?"
No no, it's not random, it's timebombed. There's a step counter, which is set when you enter a new area (not adjacent rooms in a field, but a new area altogether) and counts down for each step you take - that's why getting pushed along walls can be useful, since you move in 2 directions at once for the price of one step. It's not set randomly, it's always around the same number (give or take a few).
The counter is reset back to a high number if you tweak the scout orb (it's in lower moria, no chance of getting it) or reuse a dark/holy bottle. I use holy bottles about 1 or 2 steps before getting into a fight, so that I can at least walk a little bit further. Unlike the GBA and PSX versions, the encounter rate in this game is quite high.
There is another thing which is set in stone along with the step counter - the enemy you will meet next. Pressing buttons or changing directions when about to approach the last free step doesn't affect it. The enemy can be tweaked by refreshing the bottle or entering a new area, or entering an adjacent room in the dungeon, but I don't think anyelse else works =/
My best fight is probably Gnome, since anyone who remember playing this without save states know how frustrating this guy is. My worst fights are probably Jahmir and NeoDhaos (even though my level was around 40 which is "about half way" from the max of 99, I was still incredibly weak for this fight)
There is another thing which is set in stone along with the step counter - the enemy you will meet next. Pressing buttons or changing directions when about to approach the last free step doesn't affect it. The enemy can be tweaked by refreshing the bottle or entering a new area, or entering an adjacent room in the dungeon, but I don't think anyelse else works =/
Eh? I've had some success with tweaking it to avoid Lizardmen in the forest. I'll have to double check, but I believe you can change the enemy by alternating between running and walking. (ie run for a bit then walk for a bit.)
EDIT: Unless the sound bug applies to the version of the ROM I have. It works.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
After Gnome is just Undine, then I enter Moria.
OmnipotentEntity: perhaps it works in some parts. I'm not convinced that it works everywhere. The Moon Folux took me a while to get in Dhaos' Castle, I kept getting the same lizard/archer fight no matter what I tried and I really needed the Folux for the upcoming fights. I redid a large-ish portion of the castle in the hope of triggering something else, and eventually it worked. After that I didn't rely on tweaking the enemies, it seems like such a waste of time.. I just fought whatever ended up on the plate :)
