Brain Lord is what I like to call an action RPG, full of Puzzles and platforming, I believe this to be the first completed TAS of the game ever, enjoy.
this game follows the story of Remeer, the last descendant of the dragon warriors, Remeer starts his adventure following the steps of his lost father in search of a dragon, in a world where dragons are said to be extinct, soon he and his new friends get involved in the fight to stop the evil lord. This game features a good variety of weapons, stat increases through armor and items, magic spells, and fairy companions known as jades
I chose the Japanese version of this game due to noticeable differences such as text speed, but the most important one is lower enemy HP, armor having better stats, and weapons having double the attack power
At the start of the TAS, most of the text has to be cleared manually. As soon as I get to move Remeer I start hopping, bunny jumping is the fastest way to move around on solid ground, right at the start of the run, I perform a skip known as "rotayo skip", found by rotayo himself, tho I prefer the name "Canadian border skip", this skip allows us to go from Arcs town to Toronto, skipping the first two main dungeons. In an RTA run, we gotta make sure we don't get hit because of low stats, in this TAS no armor is actually necessary, even though I got one later in the run for safety reasons. After Toronto, we go to the ice castle
In the ice castle, There are sliding floor tiles (Looks like running water in this dungeon) and ice tiles, sliding tiles can move either up, down, right, or left, they give you a speed boost if you walk along with them and slow you down if you walk towards them. Ice tiles make the floor slippery, which affects your movement a lot, walking on ice tiles gives you the same speed as bunny hopping on solid ground, there is also our first saving point, these red statues work as a point where we can be revived at after losing all our HP, they also work as a warping point... pretty soon in the run, we do a skip called "Ocean Key skip", we don't actually skip the key, we skip a walk of about 5 minutes to get it, soon after we go to meet Barness, an old guy that sells stuff and replenish our health, right here we buy 10 warp gates (might be improvable with better routing), we might also sell unnecessary armor to make room in our inventory. later on, we come across the first puzzle in the game, puzzles are almost always about pushing rocks, metal balls, and pressing switches, a technique we use could be done by jumping at the same frame as we move an object, doing this, as the object finishes moving, we can make it move again remotely just by facing the direction we want it to move, this technique is called "double push". Sometime later I get chest armor, I believe this was unnecessary to the run, in the same room as the armor there is also a shield that might be more useful than the armor but I didn't get it either, a shield can be either activated with Y, or it can be activated automatically by getting too close to an enemy, it also damages the enemies by a small amount. we also get the fire sword, this sword is necessary to melt some blocks of ice. After we talk with Rain and Vanessa, Rain gives us the stop magic, magic can be charged with B, there is a technique to charge it faster, simply jump, and in the next frame press and hold B. The stop magic is used to make enemies unable to move, also to make the ice castle's boss hittable. something small to note is a puzzle that is kinda weird, the solution is to press X in front of the door, otherwise, the X button is not needed anywhere else in the run (or any kind of normal play), the next important thing to do is a dead warp, dying in this game takes you to the last saving point you use and also replenish your health, this is pretty useful and only costs half of your gold (which at this point we don't need). The next thing to do is to get the heavy maul, the last weapon I get from now on, it's pretty slow but powerful. Lastly, we defeat the boss by using the stop magic and defeating the 3 ghosts
Back in Toronto we actually gotta go back to Arcs to get a Gem to open the path to the Droog mountain, we also get the ice magic which allows us to create land on top of lava, then we get to Droog. Droog is a nightmare to navigate, it has dark rooms with rocks that change position randomly depending on the RNG, it's all trial and error, we use a lot of damage boosting, and platforming is also important in this dungeon. lastly, we meet the dragon, he gives us a stat boost and that's it... back at Toronto, we go into the dark tunnel to get to the Platinum Shrine, in this tunnel, there is a simple technique to avoid the enemies, simply attack the enemies to activate their rollout attack, then jump repeatedly into the top wall, this can also be done RTA
In the Platinum Shrine, our major concern is the dark rooms, these rooms are pitch black with the exception of door entrances and enemies, some of these rooms also have sliding floor tiles which makes navigation even harder. Much later into the run Barness give us the Phaser magic which is used to create bridges across pieces of land, if you wanna use this magic more than twice in a row, sometimes is better not to follow it so it can go offscreen sooner, then you can charge the magic sooner... about at this point I used a technique where if you jump for just one frame multiple times, you can make enemies not updating their instructions to follow you, this also applies for orange steel balls, which are supposed to follow you as soon as you get close to them horizontally or vertically. Now it's final boss time, the final boss has multiple phases, first, you gotta defeat the tail, then the head, after some hits one of his arms detaches and becomes a worm kinda creature that moves around, appears and disappears, has a gravitational force that affects your movement, and when you hit it counter attacks with magic. some few hits more to the main body and the other arm detaches, it becomes a flying enemy, it doesn't do much other than fly around and hit you on contact. Finally, we hit the main body a few more times, and done, Brain Lord is complete!
All this was made by myself, ZoroarkGX, with special thanks to:
-TheSuperSNES on youtube for its awesome RTA speedrun that I used as a guide for most of the game, also for helping me directly with questions I had about the game
-My friends on Facebook, that encouraged me to keep doing this project
-Tropicon and FlyingArmor for the amazing maps they uploaded to vgmaps
-Many other useful websites I used to get as much info as I can get
-And you
For any questions about this game or TAS you can contact me at mau.bleachgoo@gmail.com
Darkman425: I replaced input file with truncated input to better reflect the actual TAS time.
Darkman425: Hello, ZoroarkGX, and welcome to TASVideos!
As a note, this does sync with the officially released BizHawk 2.8 so luckily
emulator version isn't a problem.
There was a minor part I found suboptimal. There was an 84 frame time save I found near the start traveling to Toronto by never stopping to attack and getting more favorable enemy spawns. Outside of that, this is a solid run throughout. The routing is very nicely considered with planned warp gate usage and utilizing the armor for late game damage boosting. The movement within the dungeons is pretty solid with some interesting puzzle solutions. While there might be more minor movement improvements, actually navigating around enemies is a pretty tricky affair since they do their best to get in the way with their chunky hitboxes.
Accepting to standard.
