SMS Heroes of the Lance. Some D&D heroes kill a dragon. Six out of eight heroes die to save time.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1
- Genre: RPG
- Aims for fastest time
- Takes damage to save time
- Uses death to save time
- Manipulates luck
The game starts with 8 characters. The goal is to kill a dragon and retrieve The Disks of Mishakal. The story is good for an SMS game.
The front character is the one who has the special weapon that can kill the dragon. Avoiding damage takes lots of time so a hero needs to be switched to the front, so that the important character does not die. At the final room it takes 100 frames to switch to the character who can kill the dragon, so now we have the master plan: In order to avoid switching the position back to the front we must do something else, namely, the most important strategy is to switch the position of the characters and manipulate RNG so that the front members die just before we reach the end. It looks really nice when the correct character switch happens automatically just before the final battle begins.
If you transition a screen by pressing up, then the player faces to the right in the next screen. Pressing down makes the player face to the left. Knowing this saves time turning around.
The minimalistic TAS route plan
format: movedirection transitiondirection, enemy damage/miss
in the first room press down to face left
left down, human 5
right up, dwarf miss
right down, dwarf 8
right up 2nd door, demon 10, human 4
right down, demon 3
right down
left up, human 3, rock 2 (1st death), magic 5, gargoyle 2
left up, arrows 12
right up, demon 8
left up
right up, zombie miss, ghost 1 (2nd death)
right up, switch hero to fly over the chasm and switch hero again
because the flying wizard is slow, demon 2
left up, traps 39 (The traps are good for a wide range of damage
variations.)
left up
left down
right down, spider 2 (3rd death)
right down, spider miss
left down, zombie miss
right up
right down
4th door
right down, zombie 9
right up, spider 8
right up, spider miss
left up
right up, spider 2
left up, zombie 6
right up 3rd door, spider miss
left up, gargoyle 10 (4th death)
dragon boss
There may be a faster solution, if you try all combinations of dodging attacks and taking damage. I got the optimal health outcome and made no pointless delays, so it is unlikely that a massive timesave can be done without a big route change or a glitch. I did not test all spells at all locations, so there are probably glitches everywhere. I did the whole run four times to finally get the correct health management, but the run could be done a thousand times to save some frames.
The current human speedrun WR by Vriaeliss uses 3 spells: sleep, detect traps(?), heal. All these are skipped in the TAS. The in-game frame is 8 frames, so this TAS can be matched by good human players. Humans probably lose some frames on menuing, which requires more precise input.
Darkman425: I had one concern about a doorway transition and facing direction. The author helpfully
answered my question about it, as some doorways don't have an option to turn around. With that cleared up, the damage routing and movement all look good to me. While there could potentially be better damage routes, finding the right RNG alignment for that seems hard to find. Nice work!
Accepting to Standard.
