• Aim at the fastest completion
  • Aim at the best ending
  • Use death as a shortcut
  • Take damage to save time
  • Use manipulation of luck
  • Some entertainment trade-offs
In this epic RPG, you have to fight an evil religion that tries to take over the world. Normally, this quest would require hours upon hours before you could hope to conquer evil and its many spawns. Put thanks to luck manipulation, this quest can be completed under five hours.
This submission is my very first one. Boy was that hard! It took me over a year to complete it. Mainly because is always found ways to make the movie shorter. Here are just a couple I found over time
  • Using the turbo function for text makes it scroll faster without bothering to find when to press a key
  • Fighting enemies can be reduce to a certain level. Entering/exiting a room resets the count (like inside Mount Maori)
  • Although dragons do elemental damage when appropriate (ice on fire, e.g.), I only used it on the guard eyes. Otherwise, I used the thunder dragon, the one with the shortest animation (about 540 frames)
  • During frame lagging, moving/opening the status menu can save some time
  • Calculate exactly what the shortest way to complete a fight is. If it's by keeping characters alive, I do it. Otherwise, they die.
  • Inside the Tunlan Queen's body - the most annoying part -, you don't actually have to fight. Fights can be manipulated so that you only confront enemies that flee. For my part, fights had to be made because scary monsters didn't come...
  • When there is a message during a battle (like when Katt is taunting), pressing A after the 46 (?) frames delay of after can change the outcome (critical, how much damage, counter)
  • Predict which character goes where in the marching order. This way, I avoid moving the team around (uses 70 frames)
  • Minimize trips to the dragon shrine
An entertainment trade-off I took was finding Bleu, the best magician from BOF I. Her high level is more than sufficient to help my crew (with warp, mainly), which doesn't level up.
Another was showing all dragon powers and other magic spells (hence using bomb against Deatheavn)
Inside the Sky Cave, I though I found a glitch (look at my progress in the appropriate thread). However, its happening looks sporadic...
And just so you know : the last battle frame is 1031901. The rest is just showing the best ending

Baxter: This longest TAS to date had a good viewer response. Accepting for publication.
Claimed for encoding by DeHackEd


TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #2415: janus's SNES Breath of Fire II "best ending" in 4:55:16.22
Joined: 4/29/2006
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An almost 5 hour TAS, is this for real? Have to check it our more thourougly in the morning before I cast my vote.
Editor, Player (54)
Joined: 12/25/2004
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So, it's finally completed? Great :) I'll try to watch it tomorrow, time to sleep here :(
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Could you detail how much time was spent on tradeoffs? I may get around to watching this during the upcoming weekend. Congratulations on finishing a ~5 hour submission.
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the main trade off was Bleu, so I guess the time it took to roll around thieves' tomb and going back to hometown to get her instead of going directly to tunlan. But it was taken away with warping for the dragons : the animation -540 (when I used puppies or dragons). For the Great Dragon, it was quite hard to change :p
Joined: 11/4/2007
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Location: Australia, Victoria
If thats how long the movie is, I wouldn't want to know how big the encode will be.
Joined: 2/1/2008
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This four hour movie (four hours and thirty minutes when encoded) was just over 600 MB. I suspect that this one will be less than 800 MB, probably closer to 700.
<ccfreak2k> There is no 'ctrl' button on DeHackEd's computer. DeHackEd is always in control.
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The initial avi dump was 92.2 GB, let's see how far I can compress this down. :D
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arflech
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I thought you were supposed to use H.264 lossless for initial capture; when I encoded the Metroid 100% run I never had a file above 2GB, even though it was a 40min run; I admit, it was an NES run, but is the detail so much greater that it takes about 6 times as much data per minute?
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Joined: 11/4/2007
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There are more lossless solutions than H.264 lossless.
Joined: 12/27/2006
Posts: 49
That was fun in a blast from the past short of way. I enjoyed it, but I rather doubt people who didn't play the game would get any fun out of this one. In the non obvious department, there is a part of me that wishes you got all the shamans even though it would've just wasted time.
Joined: 12/28/2004
Posts: 210
A year ago I promised you a yes vote and after watching this submission all the way through on 1x speed I gotta say, you deserved it. I'm actually a little inspired to start my BoF3 speedrun now. Great job Janus, congrats on your first submission, and good luck TASing BoF1
arflech
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Flygon wrote:
There are more lossless solutions than H.264 lossless.
Still, *that* one was like 235MB in the original output, it's just that the step where I made the file more amenable to subtitle insertion by mencoder was the one that used a codec that yielded a 2GB file... IMO OmnipotentEntity got an uncompressed capture, which I would use if I had that much space on my disk lol
i imgur com/QiCaaH8 png
Player (36)
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arflech wrote:
Flygon wrote:
There are more lossless solutions than H.264 lossless.
Still, *that* one was like 235MB in the original output, it's just that the step where I made the file more amenable to subtitle insertion by mencoder was the one that used a codec that yielded a 2GB file... IMO OmnipotentEntity got an uncompressed capture, which I would use if I had that much space on my disk lol
It is an uncompressed capture. And I do have lots of disk space.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day, Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
juef
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Joined: 1/29/2007
Posts: 208
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I'm really glad to finally see this on the workbench!! Seeing you restart your run or big parts of it so many times made me wonder how you kept on going, but now the run is done, and beautifully done. Congrats!
Joined: 2/1/2008
Posts: 347
Yep that was definitely uncompressed... Native resolution of SNES: 256x224 Bytes per uncompressed frame: 57,344 FPS: 60 Bytes per second: 3,440,640 Bytes per minute: 206,438,400 (206 MB) Bytes per hour: 12,386,304,000 (12.4 GB) Bytes for five hours: 61,931,520,000 (61 GB) Bytes for 5.5 hours: 68,124,672,000 (68 GB) Five hours of PCM 16/44 stereo audio is about 3 GB or 3.03 GB for 5.5 hours AVI overhead is about 24 bytes per uncompressed frame on average (not including initial overhead, but INCLUDING audio frames). This changes depending on the compression, however. 60 fps * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 5 = 1,080,000 video frames 1,080,000 video frames * 24 bytes = 25,920,000 bytes (25 MB) Let's assume that the audio is interleaved 30 FPS 40 fps * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 5 = 540,000 audio frames 540,000 audio frames * 24 bytes = 12,960,000 bytes (13 MB) So 68 + 3 + ~1 GB (overhead + round error) = 72 GB Now that makes me kind of wonder why it's 92 GB... Perhaps it's a higher resolution? Yep, information overkill, I know. But I was kind of bored... EDIT: Epic failure on the overhead part... I wondered why it was so big
<ccfreak2k> There is no 'ctrl' button on DeHackEd's computer. DeHackEd is always in control.
Mastania
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Oh hey this is in submission what I think a "yes" is in order :P
Waddle Waggle Wattle
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suggestion of image to put for the game : either the one-on-one fight against barubary (when ryu is in his normal state) or when ryu is the G dragon against Deatheavn. Or maybe against the guard eyes
Emulator Coder
Joined: 1/12/2007
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There were several points in that movie where I wondered how the heck you were going to get the best of a situation. The sheer degree of obvious manipulation, over such a long game, seems to have made it easy to question the capacity to do what's shown. Definitely worth watching. I didn't have 5 hours to kill, so I couldn't avoid the speedup button, but it's quite entertaining. It was even within the realm of possibilities that I could read enough text to know what was going on. A decided plus, in my opinion. Yes vote, because this was long and interesting and more than just watching a button-press-fest.
HHS
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You mean 25 MB and 13 MB, not GB.
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No matter how big the avi will be, I always get the .smv anyway...
I am old enough to know better, but not enough to do it.
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Joined: 9/1/2005
Posts: 803
Blaise wrote:
I'm actually a little inspired to start my BoF3 speedrun now.
I started one of these way back with pcsx 0.0.3 or 0.0.5 , but didn't get very far due to the version change, and the fact that random battles were seemingly unavoidable, though what you could fight could easily be changed. I watched this movie a couple of days ago. The only thing I could think of improvement wise would be to cut out the second trip to gantz and buy everything you needed the first time around, unless your funding wasn't good enough for that. Given that you improved my years old test run by a solid 40 minutes and bought it under 5 hours, I feel that this deserves a yes vote.
mklip2001
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I finally got around to watching this. It's a pretty entertaining RPG run, since most of the plot seems intact. (I couldn't figure out what the point of the colored crystal was during dialogue though... does that reflect whether you're good or evil?) The route looks pretty solid and the fights are well-manipulated, though the battles in the run become monotonous really quickly. Also, it doesn't really seem like any character other than the main guy gets any real use except for using powerups on the main guy or occasionally doing some extra damage. Eventually I fast forwarded through a lot of the battles. I don't really get how HP is decided in that game (Example: the giant cockroach in the frog palace seems to take more damage than some of the boss fights shortly thereafter!). All things considered, this is a solid enough run to get a Yes vote. Good job with your first TAS!
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
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Atma wrote:
I watched this movie a couple of days ago. The only thing I could think of improvement wise would be to cut out the second trip to gantz and buy everything you needed the first time around, unless your funding wasn't good enough for that. Given that you improved my years old test run by a solid 40 minutes and bought it under 5 hours, I feel that this deserves a yes vote.
i don't think I can avoid it. I always empty my wallet when I shop... However, I might work around trying to get the meow staff
Joined: 3/7/2006
Posts: 720
Location: UK
Atma wrote:
random battles were seemingly unavoidable, though what you could fight could easily be changed
That's right. BoF3 uses a step counter. You can manipulate first attacks and run away, I think. It's still annoying though thanks to BoF3's frequent small load times. I guess BoF4's are worse, though.
Voted NO for NO reason