Attributes
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 1.11.3
- Aims for fastest time
- Resets to save time
- Manipulates Luck
About the Game
You are Ares and have fallen into a long lost kingdom which was cursed by a dragon. Ascend the Ruins and Cave networks in hopes of escape and earn your freedom. Purchase aid from fellow unfortunate souls while combating all manner of monster along the way.
This is a top down dungeon crawler RPG. Equipment, level ups, and story elements are all skipped. The camera instantaneously rotates around Ares and always faces North/South/East/West. Movement follows a grid system where Ares and monsters will stay within their square tiles and can only attack linearly (not diagonally.) To reach the end, you must traverse 40 odd floors. Bosses are varying degrees of skipped in this run.
About this run
The majority of movement uses a late game magic which can be acquired early, and the anti-stuck feature when that magic is unavailable. The limiting factor then becomes how much map I have revealed on each floor as I can move to any revealed point. A glitch is used on nearly every floor to copy map data from one floor to the next. An item dupe pays for potions to speed up movement. To beat the game I need a particular sword to damage the final boss. Get warp magic, get mana potions, rush to sword, beat game.
The main glitches used are only available in the Japanese release of the game and are frame perfect. They save so much time that the Real Time speedrun uses them even with the lowish success rate of frame perfect tricks. This TAS was made to fix the success rate of those tricks and see what time I can get. The item dupe sequence gives a peek into the real time run experience.
Glitches
- Map transition interrupt
- Text boxes can be used to gain one frame of input when in a state of being between two floors.
- Map Copy
- Use the map transition interrupt to save the game. This transfers item locations, map revealed state, and floor artifacts (doors, special tiles) from the previous floor to the next.
- Item duplication
- A byproduct of map copy.
- Wrong Warp
- Use the map transition interrupt to use warp magic. Select warp coordinates from the previous floor but apply the warp to the next floor, irregardless of collision.
Game Mechanics
- Warp Magic
- Select any walkable point on the revealed map and instantly teleport there, at the cost of a full mana bar.
- Emergency Escape Operation
- On the file select screen press l+r+select+a to warp as soon as you load into the game, at the cost of one level in all stats and a HP and MP (and luck) refill.
- Resting
- l+r to enter rest state, speeding up HP and MP refill rate but setting defense to zero and monsters move faster. l+r again to exit rest state.
- Double magic
- Double attack strength, except for the final boss where it is more like +2 damage per sword swing. Cost is based on knowledge level.
- Auto Save
- Each floor transition will save the game.
- Inspect
- Press l+Y or r+Y to examine a tile. This is how I make all of the text boxes I use for glitching in this movie. I never inspect stairs because the resulting text box would be too short.
Jumping is faster than walking when you advance two tiles.
Walkthrough
- Strange movements are when I am revealing the map for future warps.
Ruins 1: Start by increasing game speed and message speed to speed up the game. Drop sword and ring for inventory management. Door opening animations have idle frames so do menuing there when possible. Hold jump to access the secret room.
Ruins B2: Take a slightly longer path to gain more map vision. Pick up warp magic here.
Ruins 1: Go back down stairs to be in the normal part of B2. Drop warp to prepare the item dupe. Saving causes the dupe to occur. Turn around to pick up the duped warp magic then go down stairs (These stairs retain your orientation). Pick up the original warp magic. Go back up stairs. Rest for mana. Warp to the magic shop using the copied map data from B2. Sell the copied warp magic and buy mana potions. Get vision for my next warp. Head back to the B2 stairs and wrong warp to where I just got vision, into B2.
Ruins 4: Warp to top right for map vision used in Ruins 6.
Ruins 5: Reset so I can warp from file load as warp is disabled here.
Ruins 8: Dodging the frog gives vision for Foot of Tower.
Foot of Tower: The Crab boss should not be here. After entering the tower, I save and reset to skip the cutscene.
Tower Top: After entering cave, save and reset to skip cutscene.
Cave 7: Map copy would crash the game here, so I lose all of my map progress. Wrong warp to the back entrance to the floor in preparation for Cave2.
Cave 1: Map copy replaces all doors with varying objects, in this case holes in the ground, and despawns the boss. Warping one tile lower would load the boss music causing lag, but making the credits more amusing.
Dark Zone 2: Save and reset to skip the Fortress cutscene.
Fortress 7: Get Double magic here.
Top of Fortress: Warp is disabled here. I use resets to warp around.
Backbone: Map copy would despawn the sword that is needed to beat the game. Use resets to warp past the guardian and then warp out.
BTOWLS: The damage I deal is a set amount and not dependent on the character sheet. Double magic does 6-7 per hit, without it's 4-5. Damage rolls are manipulated for more damage. The movement is very tight on frames so I don't have double up for every hit. Green circles teleport me to the back of the room. Fireballs and spikes are instant death. (input note: attacks can be queued 20 frames in advance.)
Potential Improvements
- Final boss optimize DPS. Double uptime, hitting twice, and manipulating damage RNG all compete for frames while shaking up the encounter RNG.
- Frame hunting
Previous Publications
FatRatKnight's movie is still the fastest way of running the English release of the game as it does not have access to the major glitches. It is categorized as a "No Major Glitches" or "Natural Route" or "English Any%" speedrun now.
This is more than 27 minutes faster.
feos: This game just doesn't get much recognition. The
current run has been in Moons for 3 years, not even in Vault were runs are just hidden by default, yet it still got only 4 votes (one being mine), and those votes aren't great (commentary didn't help). These 2 new submissions didn't get much attention either, despite of how cool the glitches are. If you're looking at this game for the first time, you can understand why it doesn't excite many people: repetitive gameplay, repetitive music, flipping level layout that makes everything hard to follow. And that's true to both this movie and the currently published run.
