Game objectives

• Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.3.1
• Primary objective: speed
• Takes damage and uses death abuse to save time

Game mechanics

Route

Stage by stage comments

Overworld, part 1 - The road to Pax Tharkas

• Every movement in the overworld moves the character 16 pixels in either direction. Each movement introduces a few random lag frames. I haven't found any pattern in how many lag frames a given movement will produce.
• The enemies in the overworld home in on the player on average, making it difficult to avoid them, even in a TAS setting. I stopped for one frame in two different places to prevent enemy spawns. If someone invested more time into this game, I believe a script could be written to test the many different movement possibilities and find inputs to reduce stops and random lag.

Overworld, part 2 - Finding the entrance to the secret path

• Same general comments as above. I stopped twice for one frame to prevent an enemy spawn.

Dungeon, part 1 and 2 - The secret path and Pax Tharkas

• The dungeons appear to be completely consistent. I did a few iterations because of reroutings and the movie synched every time.

Bosses - Ember and Verminaard

• The normal method to defeat Ember is to use magic missiles three times. However, it turns out it can be damaged by other attacks as well. When it lowers its head, a high sword attack will damage the dragon. The second time, the sword attack was timed to inflict a double-hit, which was just enough to kill it. The time gain of mixing sword attacks and magic missilies over simply using three magic missiles is just a handful of frames though.
• Verminaard teleports to either the left or the right side of the screen after each hit. The new spawn location only depends on the player's x-position and is therefore easy to manipulate.

Possible improvements