Ys: The Vanished Omens is the first in a long series of role-playing games. Young swordsman Adol Christin has arrived in the town of Minea, only to find that a great evil is sweeping the land. He must seek out the six books of Ys and use the knowledge they contain to defeat the evil forces.
But after our hero visits a nearby shop, the shopkeeper decides he likes him and gives him his personal copies of all the books of Ys to complete his quest.
About the run
- Emulator used: BizHawk 1.9.1
- Abuses programming errors in the game
- Abuses major skip glitch
- Skips final boss
- Corrupts memory
- Genre: RPG
I started this after seeing the SDA run while updating the
SDARunsWithoutAPublishedTAS page. It seemed like a fun run to make, so I made it my first TAS of the new year.
A copy of these comments is included in the bk2 file's Comments.txt for your convenience.
Subtitles are also included in the movie file (best viewed at 3x Window Size) and the encode. A subtitle file, which allows for a 2 second publisher intro, is available here [dead link removed].
The Mirror Glitch
Pim's Pawn Shop Mirror Glitch is triggered when the player buys a mirror (there's only one for sale), attempts to buy it at least two more times, and then leaves the store. The game will usually crash, though sometimes it will also soft reset, hard reset (which forces BizHawk to reboot the core), jump to a random glitched room, or warp to the credits.
This glitch has been known since at least
2009. However, the setup for skipping to the credits was apparently found by Twitch speedrunner
Nudua.
Memory Addresses
I start out by pressing 1 to start the game. 1 and 2 start the game equally fast.
Walking controls are very responsive. Pressing any D-Pad button for one frame will move Adol one pixel in that direction on the same frame you pressed it.
You can do "corner boosts", but they will only move Adol out of an object at his normal walking speed, so they aren't any faster or slower to perform. I do them anyway because I think they look cool.
For the glitch to warp to the credits, the overworld screen needs to be in a certain position. Specifically, it needs to be within a one-tile (8-pixel) range both horizontally and vertically. I move the screen to the edge of that range. Not moving the screen down far enough usually causes a soft or hard reset, and not moving it left far enough warps you to a small blue room.
Opening the menu is also necessary for the credits warp. It can be opened anytime before you enter the shop, but the frame you open it on can affect the outcome of the glitch.
Selection arrows in this game don't have the "wraparound" behavior of arrows in newer RPGs like Pokémon and Paper Mario, so I have to move down to every option.
Inside the shop, the 2 button selects and the 1 button goes back a page. You can press 1 instead of 2 on some screens to change the outcome of the glitch. Like with
Kirby's Adventure, different input causes different outcomes.
Like how you can only walk in 4 directions, you unfortunately can't speed up the shop menuing with diagonal input. However, you can press 2 at the same time as a directional button to select options as you're scrolling to them.
Attempting to buy a mirror the third time is what specifically causes the warp to the credits. I found that I didn't need to waste any frames with the glitch setup I had, since it would've ended up slower.
Possible improvements
It's always possible that triggering the glitch through a different sequence of events could allow the credits to be reached faster. The most likely place to change things up would be outside the shop, where different screen positions can do anything from
warping you to different locations to
increasing your energy and level. I tested a few different screen positions, but I didn't find anything useful.
Suggested screenshots
1008, 1031
Thanks to
- KrazyRasmus for making the SDA run, which brought the game and route to my attention
- Hikaruon, Frenom and Patashu for their helpful posts in the Ys thread
- Red Hairdo on this forum for the correct spelling of the shop owner's name
- The BizHawk devs for making SMSHawk
- You, for watching
feos: Even though the votes are relatively positive, actual feedback matched the overall look of its run: it's one of those boring "game end glitch" runs that put a shadow of doubt towards having other run of this kind in Moons at all. So while those indeed
look bizarre, and entertaining because of that, this one has no content that might surprise the viewer, except for the very fact that credits glitch is possible so early. Accepting to Vault.
