New Game+ mode (transfers items/status from a save-file into a New Game)
aims for fastest possible time
manipulates luck (especially to avoid lag)
abuses glitches
Genre: RPG
Total Frames: 34489
About the Game
Chrono Trigger is a phantastic role-playing game made by Square. It is known as one of the best RPG games of all time. The story is about time-traveling in which a group of young adventurers is trying to save the future by defeating a mighty creature called "Lavos" which has infected and destroyed the world.
Moviemaking & Comments
This is a improvement of my previous Chrono Trigger New Game+ TAS. Once again I used my own save-file I have optimized for this movie to reach the fastest possible time in this mode.
Big thanks to Hero of the day, who discovered a crazy trick to skip Marles "Candy-Scene" that alone saved incredible 1017 frames! It actually was the only reason I did this improvement. Also thanks to inichi for another crazy suggestion to lower "Battle Speed" from 1 to 2, which allowed to skip one major attack of Lavos (the Hand Sickles) and even though all battles were slightly slower because of that, it still saved another amazing 314 frames in the end result.
The 16 more frames saved from v2 against v1 by finding even better ways to reduce lag during boss-fights, are still count in. Except of that, I couldn't save even one frame anywhere else, including the entire End Of Time scene, and this despite hard analyzing and testing in every place. This just shows how frame-perfect the 1st run already was. :-)
This runs completion time is 9:35 (slightly lower actually, but it was rounded up), with a total improvement of 1347 frames (or 22,45 sec) to the 1st version.
Enjoy!
Truncated: Luminaire, luminaire, luminaire, etc. Well, it is an improvement, and as such it should be published.
Joined: 11/14/2005
Posts: 1058
Location: United States
Saturn, you are too much!
Busting out a frame perfect movie like this so quickly after the candy skip was discovered. Much respect to you man.
Seeing lavos get owned so early in the game brings me much joy, and the dream team ending has always been one of the coolest hidden features of the game.
Great work Saturn, voting yes.
Bob A:
I don't know if you knew that this run was already published along side my run. It is in the concept demos section. I don't see why it shouldn't obsolete the old ng+ run. Do you think it shouldn't obsolete saturn's old run because the candy scene skip was used?
i've just been thinking recently that there should be runs that don't abuse bugs because of their arbitrariness. maybe this is a bad intstance in which to use that idea.
Joined: 11/14/2005
Posts: 1058
Location: United States
Well, I actually agree with you about the use of certain bugs. In many games, obviously abusive and ugly bugs are exploited. It can ruin the whole feel of a game.
But, in this case I don't think so. The skipping of dialog does not cause any serious graphical abnormalities or anything that would look abusive. If you weren't familiar with the game, you would not even know that an "unskipable" scene was just skipped. I guess the whole issue is just a matter of opinion.
Nice work on this! The manipulation is just amazing. The glitch that hero found is also very cool. I love to play a good long RPG but to watch someone play for hours bores me more then all so this is surely getting a YES from me. Great game, great optimization and great time.
Btw, I'm not saying the long run is bad but i have more time to watch these types of run.
Voting yes for this movie to be published next to the long run.
Thank you guys! I really appreciate your comments.
Regarding the obsoletion problem, I agree with Hero and notBowen. I think no matter if this run skips the Candy Scene or not, it should obviously obsolete the previous version. It's a New Game+ so it really doesn't matter if you use any kind of glitch there or not, since the main goal is to get fastest possible time, and you skip the entire game anyway.
Joined: 6/4/2006
Posts: 97
Location: Everywhere including nowhere
hero of the day wrote:
Well, I actually agree with you about the use of certain bugs. In many games, obviously abusive and ugly bugs are exploited. It can ruin the whole feel of a game.
Murder Beam anyone?
But yeah, it's stupid to single out a single cutscene that's skipped when the entire game is skipped. Besides that, this run definitely does not qualify as "glitch abuse" when it comes right down to it. There is only one glitch "abused" in the entire game.
Will vote a few minutes after I watch it. The vote will probably be yes, mostly since I could never imagine beating Lavos without what I like to call the Pwn Squad (Frog, Marle, Crono - Ice Sword 2 + Leap Slash and Double Cure, plus Frog Squash when the moment is right).
Yeah, that's a yes vote.
By the way, does anyone else find it odd that the Marle and Crono act exactly like they do at the end of the natural game when they defeat Lavos this early on?
Also, is it just my brain playing tricks on me, or did Marle say "This is my, Crono's, everyone's - and I mean EVERYONE's world!" when she should have said Satur's?
Some people seem to be worrying that this run should be published alongside the long one, as if there wasn't this movie. I mean, like, come on, as if you don't know what run this is going to obsolete.
Also, voting yes.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
curtmack:
Even if it abuses only one glitch in the entire game, what is the difference? It's still a run that abuses glitches, because if I wouldn't say so I would lie, since it abuses a glitch. :-)
For information, Frog sucks as a overall character. He has no powerful fullscreen single magic attack, nor does he have any powerful physical attacks. Frog Squash is always dependent on your HP, so it's not a very useful tech (who wants to fight a boss with 1 HP all the time just to get max damage power of the Squash?). Robo on the other hand is the exact opposite: Powerful fullscreen single magic attack, powerful physical attacks, best single-healer in the game and on top of that, capable to use 3 out of 4 magic elements: Lightning, Shadow and Fire.
Also, Marle never said anything about Crono. I think you missread that.
The actions before the fight are odd, but thats probably hardcoded into the game, so no matter when you fight Lavos, the Characters always act the same.
Joined: 6/4/2006
Posts: 97
Location: Everywhere including nowhere
Saturn wrote:
For information, Frog sucks as a overall character. He has no powerful fullscreen single magic attack, nor does he have any powerful physical attacks. Frog Squash is always dependent on your HP, so it's not a very useful tech (who wants to fight a boss with 1 HP all the time just to get max damage power of the Squash?). Robo on the other hand is the exact opposite: Powerful fullscreen single magic attack, powerful physical attacks, best single-healer in the game and on top of that, capable to use 3 out of 4 magic elements: Lightning, Shadow and Fire.
You don't necessarily have to go with 1 HP. At 150ish Frog Squash deals 3500+ damage, and that's plenty at the level I usually face Lavos at (low 50's). Frog's major strong point is in his double techs anyway - Spire and Swordstream are both powerful (especially if you can type match), and he has that one really powerful one with Ayla (Bubble Snap I think?), plus Double Cure with Marle. Leap Slash is also fairly powerful.
(For the record, I'm speaking from a regular gameplay perspective - I know nothing about speedrunning Chrono Trigger and never really intend to.)
Some people seem to be worrying that this run should be published alongside the long one, as if there wasn't this movie.
This is kind of what i meant since i dont look often in the demo pile. I say it should be in SNES next to the long run not in a dark corner.
I even say STARTIME!!! But thats IMO!
I say it should be in SNES next to the long run not in a dark corner.
Not going to happen since it starts from an arbitrary savestate. :\
If there was a 100% run submitted, the SRAM generated by it could serve as a reference starting point for this run, thereby making it legit TAS-wise.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I say it should be in SNES next to the long run not in a dark corner.
Not going to happen since it starts from an arbitrary savestate. :\
Oops... Guess i forgot about that :P Alrighty then i guess taging a star to it is also impossible (or maybe not). Anyways i shall just pay more attention to the concept demo from now on :)
Frog's major strong point is in his double techs anyway - Spire and Swordstream are both powerful (especially if you can type match), and he has that one really powerful one with Ayla (Bubble Snap I think?), plus Double Cure with Marle. Leap Slash is also fairly powerful.
(For the record, I'm speaking from a regular gameplay perspective - I know nothing about speedrunning Chrono Trigger and never really intend to.)
Yeah, I speak of the regular (or maybe half-speedrun) perspektive as well.
About attacks, single-attacks are mostly of much more use than double and triple attacks, since with 2 other characters free to do other techs, you have much better control of the fights. Having Robo in your team makes double tech healing absolutely useless, since he can heal all party members at once with one single-tech which only eats small 3 MP per cast. However you are right, in the early parts of the game, Frogs double techs can be very useful. In the later parts of the game however, they mostly get obsoleted by the heavier techs that you can only learn after getting many tech points. Thats exactly where Robo gets much more useful because of them.
This is my first time to come to Workbench forum. So just now I finished watching your video, though a little too late. It's a nice run! I'm ashamed to say, I had assumed that it is necessary to talk to every developer for seeing the ending before I watched this video. Of course, I will vote yes.
But, I found a minor improvement in Lavos Battle. If you set Battle Gauge Speed 2, you can use Luminaire twice and kill Lavos's hands before they use sickle attacks. Because the battle takes a bit longer than usual, I'm not sure if it could make whole time faster, though.
You may want to try it out.
I actually managed to skip one of the arm sickles at speed 1, but I had to allow Lavos to use both ones in order to restart his Battle Gauge from "0". If I would skip that one sickle, I wouldn't be able to kill him with the last Luminaire + Marles shot combo before he would use his "Shadow Slay" attack, which would most likely waste more animation time than a sickle.
If it's possible to skip both ones with Speed 2, and still be able to kill him before the Shadow Slay attack, only then it might be faster in the end, though I don't know how many frames you would lose in all fights because of Speed 2. Personally I doubt it's possible even at S2, since his Shadow Slay attack message appeared before Satur/Crono could recharge his battle gauge. Even if you could cast Luminaire during the Shadow Slay message first, it would still follow before your Luminaire attack, which for example was the reason why I had to set Battle mode to "Wait" instead of "Active" in order to skip that last attack of Lavos at all.
Thanks for your trick though, I will take a look and test around with it to find out if it might work.
About the End of Time scene, I just did backwards testing to find out which characters would trigger the Spekkio door to open, and which not. That was done in the currently published first version of this TAS, so I just had to copy that strategy into this one.
Sorry for the double post, but I had to note that inichis suggestion worked brilliant!
I redid the movie and updated the smv to v3 now. Check it out.
Turning Battle Speed down from 1 to 2 allowed me to skip Lavos' both hand sickles, which saved unbelieveable 314 more frames in the end, even though all fights were slightly slower (much less than I expected).
Thank you for this fine trick, inichi!
Saturn, have you already finished the run? It's awesome. I've never imagined my suggestion could save more than 5 seconds. This time, I wasn't able to find anything to improve in it. I'm glad to have contributed to be a part of your run.
I used this trick, which turns Battle Gauge Speed from 1 to 2, in my last run. It makes a sufficient space between Lavos's fatal attacks, which enables even my low level party with few healing items to beat Lavos.
