About The Run

The goal of this submission is to complete the Hoenn Pokedex in both games and get their respective diplomas. Glitches are not allowed.

Only the Hoenn Pokedex is completed, as a National Pokedex TAS is not possible (without glitches) as of the writing of this post. I'll explain more at the end of this post but since the Hoenn Pokedex has a diploma for completing it, that is what I go for.

Neither Ruby nor Sapphire can complete the Hoenn Pokedex by themselves without glitches, as they are locked out of getting more than one starter and fossil pokemon without trading as well as certain pokes for both games (i.e Ruby cannot get the Lotad line and Sapphire cannot get the Seedot line). Therefore, both games need to trade between each other in order to complete the Hoenn Pokedex. Pokemon Emerald cannot be used for this as the combination of Emerald and Ruby cannot get Lunatone while Emerald and Sapphire cannot get Zangoose.

Deoxys and Jirachi are in the Hoenn Pokedex but neither are required to get the diploma and both are also impossible to get without glitches.

Inspiration

The Inspiration for this run was Mr.Wint's Coop Diploma Run of Pokemon Red/Blue ( https://tasvideos.org/5034S ). This is one of my two favorite TASes of all time (the second being MGRoadkill's NSMBW any% TAS) and is what inspired me to make the gen 2 version of that ( https://tasvideos.org/8344S ). Many of the strategies I used were inspired by that TAS.

Routing

Fortranm and I discussed the route for ages. There's probably at least 5 different iterations of the route we came up with before settling with one. As such, it would be way too much explain everything about the route, so I added annotations to the TAS to both make it more entertaining and explain the strategies we used. Some of the major things to consider when routing include:

Trade Efficiency

Trading is slower than catching pokemon so there needs to be a good reason to trade in order for a poke to be traded. There are a number of pokes that are traded that don't absolutely need to be and those have different reasons to be traded. One being that they simply take too long to get so one player getting them and trading it over to the other is faster than both getting them. Another being for boosted exp. In the other two diploma TASes, it often wasn't worth trading pokemon purely for boosted exp; however, it's much more common here because exp is very tight in the Hoenn games. Compared to the Johto games, there are far less mandatory battles (only 50) and far more exp required, as many of the Hoenn pokemon (i.e Ralts and Slakoth) have horrible exp curves and high levels required for their evolutions. Therefore, the time saved from less fighting to get these pokes exp or Rare Candies far outweighs the time lost in trading them. Speaking of, how do we get those Rare Candies?

Pickup

Arceus makes itself unobtainable in all games it exists in because it lives in fear of the real Gods: Zigzagoon and Linoone. These two are the single most important pokemon in the entire TAS due to their ability: Pickup. After winning a battle, this ability gives them a 10% chance to pickup a random item, one of which being a Rare Candy. Therefore, we manip them to pickup a Rare Candy after every fight won, saving minutes, if not hours of grinding. This is so valuable, both players even catch multiple Zigzagoon, a rariety in the Diploma TAS series.

In order for me to RNG manip them into picking up Rare Candies, I created a python program (yes, I know) that simulates the RNG of Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire and determines which frames produce Pickup Candies. ( https://github.com/gabraltar/Pickup-Finder )

Productivity

It's very important that neither game needs to wait a significant amount of time for the other to be ready to trade. Therefore, important tasks are distributed equally among both players. Two of the longest tasks include getting the Legendary Golems and using the Berry Blender to collect enough pokeblocks for Feebas to evolve. The former task is given to Sapphire while the latter is given to Ruby.

In the end, there is a notable amount less of waiting in this TAS than in either of the previous Diploma TASes and I'm very proud of that

Useful Tools

Pretty much everyone who has created a TAS of a gen 3 pokemon game has probably used MKDasher's gen 3 lua ( https://github.com/mkdasher/PokemonBizhawkLua ). It displays were RNG rolls like crits and Quick Claw procs are and saves a boatload of time from not needing to find them manually

The Layout

The layout displays the pokedex count for both players as well as the parties for each player, making it easier for the viewers to know what's going on. The layout was mostly copied from UnopenedClosure's layout he made for 14Flash's Professor Oak Challenge TAS ( https://github.com/UnopenedClosure/ProfOakTASOverlay )

National Dex

The reason why a National Dex Diploma TAS is not doable as of now is that there's no combination of GBA games that gets the National Dex for all of them. You need all 5 of Ruby, Sapphire, FireRed, LeafGreen and Emerald to get all of the pokes required and even then, Ruby and Sapphire will not be able to complete it. They both require Ho-oh and Lugia, which are only obtainable with the GameCube games. Funnily enough, the other games do not require these two, likely because GameFreak already decided on making them essentially mythical pokemon when making those games (and they likely did not have this conclusion when making Ruby/Sapphire).

With the GameCube games, it becomes possible (and way more bearable since Emerald will not need to complete the Hoenn dex three times for the Johto starters). However, although multiplayer for GameCube and GBA games is tasable, it cannot be encoded properly due to there being no way to dump the GBA part. This isn't helped by this needing multiple instances of GBAs, which likely will never have support added for it due to there not really being an application (that I know of) other than this very specific TAS idea. Also, the optimal combination of games use two GameCube games.

If this were to be made possible to do, the optimal combination of games would be Emerald, LeafGreen, Colosseum and XD. Some lovely details of it include LeafGreen needing to complete the game and the sevii island quest three times for the Kanto starters (it can't trade with any non Kanto game beforehand) and Emerald needing to complete the game twice for the Lati twins. As can be observed, this would be a monster of a TAS, requiring far more work than even the gen 2 diploma TAS. Replacing Colosseum with FireRed would also work but then, Emerald would need to complete the game three times for the same reason as Leaf Green from earlier and the combo would be far worse since three games would need to complete the dex (the GameCube games would just be 100%ed by purifying all of the Shadow Pokemon).

A Little Bonus

The last 50 minutes of the TAS is spent entirely on trading and candy feeding. Since that's obviously boring, I used the annotations during that time to explain glitches in the gen 3 games. Shoutouts to BluMagma's discord and the Glitch City discord for helping me understand the glitches.

Special Thanks

Huge thanks to all of Fortranm, UnopenedClosure, 14Flash, and CasualPokePlayer for their help on this