Game objectives: Beat Dark Falz and become Queen of Algol
Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.3.2
Aims for fastest possible completion
Manipulates luck
The Phantasy Star series has enormous nostalgia value for me, and I wanted to try something a little heftier for my 2nd TAS, so here we are. I watched the previous TAS by nfq and was so impressed with the cleverness of the routing. Much of that routing remains unchanged here, but two key changes helped to bring the time under 2 hours.
Why the Japanese ROM?
Better sound
Less text
The cake (price) is (not) a lie
Notable route changes
Additional meseta gathered in Casba cave allows earlier Laser Gun purchase and eliminates some meseta farming
Experience lost from meseta farming is recuperated later from the more efficient Evildeads
Experience farming is now done in Bortevo cave to avoid lengthy battle screen transitions
A few other minor differences (e.g., skipping the 10 meseta chest in Odin's cave)
Gameplay changes
Heavy use of the magical Pause button to manipulate luck
Luck manipulation allows for semi-reliable control over: enemy selection, enemy numbers, turn order, which characters and enemies get hit, and damage rolls
Route information
Iron Sword
Roadpass and Passport
Myau
Odin
Dungeon Key
Cake
Governor
Noah
Luveno
Polymaterial
Hapsby
Luveno - get Spaceship
Uzo - top left house
Casba - right house above shops
Hovercraft
Flute
Laser Gun
Tarzimal cave
Light sabers
Meseta farm BARBRIAN
Blue dragon
Magic lamp
Silver claw
Experience grind EVILDEAD
Doctor Mad
Sell gear
Ice Digger
Eclipse torch
Titan
Laerma tree
Ceramic shields and Zirconian armors
Robotcop
Darmor
Light saber
Gold Dragon
Shadow
Lassic
Dark Falz
Become Queen
Glitches and Notes
There are no bugs that I know of. Considering the inventory glitches in the later games in the series, I'm surprised. There IS, however, a bug in the Phantasy Star Collection GBA version of Phantasy Star. I read a lot of old forum posts talking about how, at certain character levels, a certain monster would always miss. But after some investigation, I found that the bug is a little more interesting than that. It seems that the variance in damage rolls is broken, and as a result, with the right defense values, you are guaranteed to dodge. I made a table that illustrates. Ultimately, I suspect this bug isn't all that useful for a TAS, but I wanted to document it here for posterity.
If anyone's interested, I also took a bunch of notes while making the TAS and looking into disassemblies of the ROM.
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6441
Location: The land down under.
ninespaces has done an encode on their previous movie.
looking at ninespaces YouTube.
If they're unable to this time around I'll whip one up and I'll edit this post.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
Never played this, but it looks optimized. I did notice a little moving back and forth to get the next lich (english evildead). Would it have been possible to always get the next lich on the next tile? That last boss looked tight. It hurts entertainment that about 85% of the entire run is comprised of grinding though, but that is par for the course for rpgs like this I guess.
There is an English Phantasy Star on the site already so how would you calculate time saved?
Hmm, I can't say definitively whether you can get a guaranteed battle every tile. From my testing I'm leaning towards 'no', however.
I'm not sure how to precisely calculate time saved, unless all text in both versions was timed (ugh!).
theripper999 wrote:
Never played this, but it looks optimized. I did notice a little moving back and forth to get the next lich (english evildead). Would it have been possible to always get the next lich on the next tile? That last boss looked tight. It hurts entertainment that about 85% of the entire run is comprised of grinding though, but that is par for the course for rpgs like this I guess.
There is an English Phantasy Star on the site already so how would you calculate time saved?
Hi,
Yes I work on it and manipulate luck with scripts :)
I'm curious to watch it!
What a pity that haven't a route planning to explain this run!
Sorry, I don't seen the link at the end of explanation.
I think that I will have a lot of questions after watching it...
Watched your encode. Thanks a lot!
What a surprise! Although I'm not much familiar with this game and the published run (I watched a few times), this new run impressed me:
- Japanese version choice, because I like this FM sound, especially the dungeon themes.
- That "pause button"! Never knew that this game could be very manipulated with that. Seems that your work wasn't so painful after all.
- Every battle now looks more solid.
- New location for second experience farming.
Well, despite a lot of maniuplation, could be still possible to survive the last battle with 1-3 less levels?
My homepage
--Currently not much motived for TASing as before...--
But I'm still working.
Thank you!
Noah needs to be level 17 for the spell that opens magically locked doors, so I think this is the bare minimum unfortunately.
You did just give me an idea though. What if during the Evildead experience farming, you deliberately let Odin die to speed up the experience farming for the other 3, who all benefit from some level-dependent spells? It sounds good in theory but I'm not sure if it would end up being a net time save, because you'd need to boost Noah's attack to ensure reliable Evildead kills, and you'd have to revive Odin before Dr. Mad. Hmm!
Challenger wrote:
Watched your encode. Thanks a lot!
What a surprise! Although I'm not much familiar with this game and the published run (I watched a few times), this new run impressed me:
- Japanese version choice, because I like this FM sound, especially the dungeon themes.
- That "pause button"! Never knew that this game could be very manipulated with that. Seems that your work wasn't so painful after all.
- Every battle now looks more solid.
- New location for second experience farming.
Well, despite a lot of maniuplation, could be still possible to survive the last battle with 1-3 less levels?
Watching your speedrun, one question:
Why you didn't have used the Flowmover/Hovercraft in lava from Baya Malay? I think if you have used you can have saved some HP's from characters and some frames too
It's almost 500 frames faster to walk over the lava, because of the screen transitions required to use the hovercraft. It's the same reason the Ice Digger is not used to traverse one area on Dezolis. Even though it looks like it should be faster, surprisingly, it's not.
Hikaruon wrote:
Watching your speedrun, one question:
Why you didn't have used the Flowmover/Hovercraft in lava from Baya Malay? I think if you have used you can have saved some HP's from characters and some frames too
I played back the movie but it seems to be missing a final input or something. It beats the final boss and then gets to the final dialogue in the throne room. There it ends input after answering a question, while there is still some dialogue to go through.
Unlike the submitted movie file, your encode includes the full credits, so did you maybe upload the wrong file?
Warning: Might glitch to creditsI will finish this ACE soon as possible
(or will I?)
I played back the movie but it seems to be missing a final input or something. It beats the final boss and then gets to the final dialogue in the throne room. There it ends input after answering a question, while there is still some dialogue to go through.
Unlike the submitted movie file, your encode includes the full credits, so did you maybe upload the wrong file?
Didn't notice this until a few days ago. Amazing improvement. It's not going to be easy for zoboner to improve on this.
Regarding bugs, I noticed two, but they're most likely not useful:
1. Once when Noah was at level 26 and I went to the hospital to heal him when he had 0 MP and only 8 HP, it only took 6 mesetas to heal. I think it's because it would have cost over 255, which it couldn't, so it reset to 0.
2. When you use the flute during a fight, it says that the enemy falls asleep, but in reality nothing happens.
Fighting evildeads in dungeons was something I also considered back when I did my TAS, but I couldn't trigger the fights fast enough for it to be worth it (or worth my sanity? :P). Did you just do it by trial and error, or did you have some deeper knowledge of how the fights work? Also, did you try manipulating fights by bringing up the menu in dungeons? Bringing up the menu can trigger fights sometimes, and maybe it could have some advantages to walking.
I didn't know about the 5000+500 mesetas chests in the Casba cave. Probably those were discovered after 2010, like the dragon in that cave. Incredible time saver. Would be useful if there was some way to show/know secret passages in dungeons, because who knows, there might still be some that haven't been discovered.
When you walk over lava on Parma, you seem to take a route which have 1 lava square more (you enter a "corner" of lava instead of entering one tile above from the tree tile) than "safer" one. Since taking damage from lava flashes the screen AND freezes you in place for few tens of frames, wouldn't it be faster to walk through one less tile of lava? Or is there something I miss?
Thank you!
For the dungeon fighting, I would describe it as ... not especially deep. I did try to make some sense out of the game's assembly, but I'm not a coder by trade so I only really grasp the basics.
I noticed that if moving generated a battle, you could use the pause trick to add frames to cycle through the selected enemy type (and number of enemies). If moving didn't generate a battle, then I would wait a frame and try again, and repeat this process until it did. Generally, that triggered a battle in fewer frames than it takes to walk a whole tile. I wish I knew a bit more... like what register values lead to returned RNG values that predict battles etc., but unfortunately that's where the dive into assembly has me in over my head.
I didn't know the menu could trigger fights. That... is very interesting. I wonder if that would be a net time save or loss in certain parts. Hmm!
I'm not sure if I said this elsewhere, but I made an earlier version of the run where I didn't know about the 5000+500 MST. Credit should go to a youtube commenter, on your TAS, who pointed it out and gave me the idea to re-route. The various websites that have maps for Phantasy Star are inconsistent -- some have the secret passages and some don't! Does make me wonder if there's more to discover...
nfq wrote:
Didn't notice this until a few days ago. Amazing improvement. It's not going to be easy for zoboner to improve on this.
Regarding bugs, I noticed two, but they're most likely not useful:
1. Once when Noah was at level 26 and I went to the hospital to heal him when he had 0 MP and only 8 HP, it only took 6 mesetas to heal. I think it's because it would have cost over 255, which it couldn't, so it reset to 0.
2. When you use the flute during a fight, it says that the enemy falls asleep, but in reality nothing happens.
Fighting evildeads in dungeons was something I also considered back when I did my TAS, but I couldn't trigger the fights fast enough for it to be worth it (or worth my sanity? :P). Did you just do it by trial and error, or did you have some deeper knowledge of how the fights work? Also, did you try manipulating fights by bringing up the menu in dungeons? Bringing up the menu can trigger fights sometimes, and maybe it could have some advantages to walking.
I didn't know about the 5000+500 mesetas chests in the Casba cave. Probably those were discovered after 2010, like the dragon in that cave. Incredible time saver. Would be useful if there was some way to show/know secret passages in dungeons, because who knows, there might still be some that haven't been discovered.
Oh good spotting. I think that's a mistake!
dart193 wrote:
When you walk over lava on Parma, you seem to take a route which have 1 lava square more (you enter a "corner" of lava instead of entering one tile above from the tree tile) than "safer" one. Since taking damage from lava flashes the screen AND freezes you in place for few tens of frames, wouldn't it be faster to walk through one less tile of lava? Or is there something I miss?
