About The Run
The goal of this submission is to complete the pokedex in all three games and get their respective diplomas. Glitches are not allowed.
For all of the games, it's impossible to do so alone without glitches but when trading with other games, it becomes possible. All of gen 2 games need one other gen 2 game for the starters and some of the of the gen 2 pokes that aren't in certain games (for example, Gold doesn't have Skarmory, Silver doesn't have Mantine, and Crystal doesn't have Mareep.) They also need at least one gen 1 game because there are a group of gen 1 pokemon unavailable in any gen 2 game (the gen 1 starters, fossil pokemon (except Aerodactyl), legendary birds, and Mewtwo).
The choice for the gen 1 game was very simple; Yellow is by far the best choice and it isn't even close. The main reason is that you can obtain all of the gen 1 starters in one save file in Yellow. If Red or Blue were to be used, they would have to trade one of the starters to gen 2 and reset, trade the second one and reset, and then pick the last one. Yellow still needs to reset for the second fossil pokemon (you can only get 1 per save file) but one reset is still leagues better than two. Yellow does have a group of pokemon unobtainable for it (Meowth, Ekans, Koffing, and Weedle lines, Raichu, Jynx, Electabuzz, and Magmar) but all of them are obtainable in the gen 2 games so it's not a problem.
For the first gen 2 game, Crystal was an easy choice. Doing this with Gold and Silver technically would have worked but Crystal has two big advantages. The first being that the pokemon Crystal can catch are far superior. Certain fully evolved pokemon like Weezing and Granbull are available in the wild that aren't in Gold and Silver and some pokemon like Slugma are found at much higher levels. All of this saves a lot of precious exp. The second being that in the Celadon Game Corner, Crystal can win a level 40 Larvitar that isn't available in either Gold or Silver. This is extremely crucial a) because the Larvitar in Mt Silver are only level 20 and b) getting it before Mt Silver lets Larvitar gain exp from the Kanto gym leaders. It's worth noting that a combination of Crystal and Silver or Crystal and Gold would leave the gen 2 games without one available Kanto poke (the Mankey line for Silver and Vulpix for Gold) but both are obtainable in Yellow so it's not a problem.
For the second gen 2 game, the choice is a bit closer but Silver wins out. The main reason is that Silver can catch Lugia much eariler than Gold can. This is significant because Lugia ends up being very useful in the run, thanks to its ability to learn both Fly and Surf (as well as Whirlpool and Waterfall).
The only pokes not obtained are Mew and Celebi, as neither are required for the diplomas and both are impossible to get glitchless either way.
Inspiration For This Run
The Inspiration for this run was Mr.Wint's Coop Diploma Run of Pokemon Red/Blue (
https://youtu.be/-ivGNZs_Mvw ). I was extremely impressed by it and wanted to do something similar for gen 2. Many of the strategies and things I've learned were taken directly form that TAS.
The Route
It would take way too long to explain everything so I instead added annotations to the submission to explain everything going on. The annotations were created using a Lua and Bizhawk was able to record it. Lua here:
https://pastebin.com/a1L9Mg99
Mystery Gift
There is a feature in the gen 2 games called "Mystery Gift" that is unlocked by talking to a girl in the top of Goldenrod Department Store. Mystery Gift uses an Infrared Port to communicate with other games that have Mystery Gift. When connected, the two games will send gifts to each other. One of the gifts is an item of interest for this run: evolution stones. Evolution stones are extremely slow to obtain in gen 2 otherwise so Mystery Gift helps a lot with that.
The reason why i'm writing about this is that infrared port. The port (IR for short) requires the use of a GBC instead of a GBA (the latter doesn't have it), which causes issues with console verification. Although even without that, console verification has a lot of issues due to the link process's cycle accuracy.
Useful Tools
Luas were a big part of the making of this TAS. They were necessary to see rng calls like rolls for critical hits and damage ranges and also for setting breakpoints for various things. However, an absolutely amazing tool was made by CasualPokePlayer (
https://github.com/CasualPokePlayer/PokemonGBTASTool ) that let me turn on and off breakpoints at will and also let me more easily choose what rng calls or stats to display. This tool alone probably saved several hours and I can't thank him enough for that.
Special Thanks
Special thanks to all of TiKevin83, RangerSquid, stringflow, and most of all, CasualPokePlayer for their help on this, none of this would have been possible without you guys. :)
This kind of TAS was hypothesized years ago, and it was clear that it would have needed years to be made... Years have in fact passed, and we now get this masterpiece. I don't know how could a TAS idea be more ambitious than this.
For the rest, I have to note that the goal for this movie is to achieve full completion while also forgoing the usage of any known glitch, which is something that isn't currently applicable for Standard. The fact that it's a Game Link movie doesn't affect this aspect.
With all that said, accepting this movie as a new branch for Alternative class.
ThunderAxe31: File replaced with a light spiked version that removes 131 blank frames at the end.