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Was definitely an interesting run to me, nice to see more depth into the item underflow. Its also quite surprising to see how little time this saves over the original Genesis run, and really showcases how much of a walking simulator this game is as a TAS. Definite yes vote from me!
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Link to video
Shows off the new route, but its a bit old and doesn't have the menu optimizations. I will delete it if anyone wants to make a proper encode.
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I'll be honest, I really have no idea how it works, even with the explanations given. I merely found the glitch, I had little to do with figuring out its manipulation and results. As far as renaming it I'm perfectly fine with that if "byte shift" is inconsistent with what you guys have discovered.
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feos wrote:
Is this the "byte shift" glitch? I see memory corruption and then you save the game, reset, and continue. It looks like you're loading the corrupted save data and that's the main feature of the movie. Is that correct, or you might as well not save/load there and just keep playing, getting the same speedrun benefits?
No, the byte shift takes place in the battle with the Fanbite after Ladea Tower. What happens here is a product of the macro glitch used to do the save warp, more specifically the tile that it was done on. If we moved down and to the left a little bit it would look a lot cleaner with similar results (just farther away from Kadary upon loading). Old RTA runs did skip doing this save warp and the game was completed in the same way, so it has little effect on gameplay aside from skipping the "slug cave".
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feos wrote:
Which glitches listed in the first section are unique to this movie, not present in our existing TASes of this game?
As far as I can tell, everything in the glitches section is new when looking at the other TASes. The only glitch that it shares is the Shadowblade MTL underflow for the Juza boss fight. On a personal note I'm in favor of this being a new branch as Janus' TAS, while a bit dated now, is a fantastic work of RNG manipulation. The small amounts I had to do while making this movie really showed me that, and I think it deserves to stick around.
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Zeupar wrote:
Maybe ruadath? I wonder if they would be denied co-autorship again were they to improve this run with new ideas.
I'm glad we agree on this! I think Ruadath's input would be invaluable, considering all the work hes done on the SaGa TAS for instance. While this isn't exactly the place to discuss my previous submission, I cant imagine you're alone in your thoughts. The fact of the matter is co-authorship as a courtesy was indeed offered but subsequently not accepted or even acknowledged. Despite this he is still thanked in the submission text among the greats of Phantasy Star 2 routing for his fresh new ideas and routing help for the TAS. Now that thats said, keep it to this submission please.
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Hey, I'm not sure if Janus is still working on his movie, but I decided to work on one based on the knowledge we have from the current RTA route. That being said, it doesn't use the exact same route as the RTA but one very similar in spirit, and one only reliable in a TAS.
Link to BK2 file: http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/51297363189959931
Youtube for lazies: https://youtu.be/tLWERl9xHPA
Most of the heavy RNG manipulation besides one random battle in the Land Rover is done with, but I'm feeling a little over my head with the Juza fight in particular. It came out pretty well, lots of Zans and got the average Nawat damage over 173 for the 9 turn kill but I'm still a bit unsure about it. Also theres no shadowblade since with the xp route there would only be one use of Tsu, and doing it that way forces a save and reload later on which costs more frames than it saves.
Any suggestions or comments are appreciated, thanks.
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Alright, I went back and did the RTA shop route and it turned out to be the fastest. Ruadath's shop was 6 frames faster than the one used here, but you save 10 frames from the name used. Additionally, I found that transferring items to Nei instead of dropping them saves 3 frames so thats another 9 frames. The walk was a little worse, but using menu buffering made it not cost any more time.
Edit: link to new file: http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/50894628322332836Link to video
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Looking back on my RTA run I thought a telepipe from the inventory would be the way to go in the end, guess that was the case after all. Oh well, I kind of liked grabbing it from Nei's strength. I'm assuming that the only things you changed were the name, shop, telepipe and didn't optimize the encounters then? Also I'm not super sure about the rules on the site, did you want co-authorship Ruadath?
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One question, though: how in the world does that power meter work in the upper-right? I can't figure out what all the colons are doing in that display. And are there ways to refill that meter without dying?
The colons are just there for stylistic choice, its easier to think of it as being a value of 9999. Energy is taken off of it when two things happen, either you use a special move or you continue after dying. How much is taken off is based on what kind of attack you used (light or heavy) to perform the special move. For example, if I used a light power punch it would take off 83, but if I used heavy it would take off 98 (completely made up numbers). The only way to get this meter back is by grabbing the various "Spawn tokens" that are given to you after you defeat some bosses (stages 1, 4, 5 and 8), or from the tokens that are hidden throughout the platforming stages.
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Been working on something for this game for a bit, thought I'd post the finished product here for people if they were interested. My goal was sub 20 RTA time, and I was able to get that so I'm pretty happy with it. That being said, I'm a complete novice at this and would certainly appreciate feedback.
Bk2 File: http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/30490608572706121
Encode:
Link to video
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Another small and easy improvement is to hit start during the space "docking" cutscenes in order to skip them entirely. This would save several hundred frames during the run.
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I've updated the movie file to get rid of the extra frames.
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/25847118462265823
I couldn't get it to stop on last input so it has one extra frame, but I'll chalk that up to Tastudio.
I'm not sure what I could really offer in the way of commentary, I really don't know the why of the technical details, merely the how. This is heavily based on my RTA route, and all my discoveries were from trial and error for the most part.
Thanks for all of the kind words, this is my first TAS attempt and I hope I haven't messed it up too bad.
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Hi there, I've been a long time Phantasy Star 2 RTA speedrunner and created the RTA route for the (J) version based on some of the findings by AmaizumiUni as well as my own experimentation with the game. Seeing the TAS recently made me think about whether or not the RTA route would be faster due to not having to manipulate or even fight any battles on Motavia. I set about creating a TAS over the past week in order to test my theories, and I turned out to be correct.
It follows the same principle of using status values to get the Nei items, but focuses mostly on using items to manipulate the consistent attack and defense values present on Nei and Amy. We accomplish this by also performing the inventory overflow glitch on Rudo, which allows us to quickly access Amy's stats. Using the various equipment obtained from the glitched characters, as well as from the values of the characters in both Rolf and Rudo's names, we can get the stat values we need to get all of the Nei items. The rest of the game from using the Neisword to the end is identical to the current run.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1763994622/PS2v2paseo2ok.tasproj.bk2
That's the link to the bk2 file of the run, I'd love some feedback on it. Take note that this is my first TAS attempt, and I actually ended up doing most of Noah by hand - so things might be a little sloppy. I created it using Tastudio in Bizhawk in case it matters. I'll put a youtube link up as well.
Link to video