Wow... KissMyAfroCard is REALLY on a roll! Not satisfied with a new WR on Castlevania 1, he now REALLY ups the ante with ANOTHER new WR! 3h38m43s!!! He thinks sub 3h30m is possible... insane!
Holy crap!!! Congratulations goes out to NesCardinality, who despite getting a Level 22 Bikill [Insane since your aim is for Level 21!] and a slow ass Zoma Fight [and slow Ortega]... has NOW taken the WR with a new time of 3h33m57s!!
Absolutely incredible time, and more so for now taking all 4 NES WR's!
Also props for giving shoutouts to Everhate, KMAC and Darkwing_Duck
KMAC takes it down a small bit more in his latest attempts [And after such an abysmal Zoma battle that reaked of trolliness] with a new PB time of 3h38m19s!
While I was gone on vacation I heard that KMAC had found a Metal Babble grind spot. I've only just started to get into this since I've been concentrating on DW2, but I had also found a Metal Babble grind spot, on my Bomb Crag save of all things. Mine is wing to Soo, take ship up around to the land northwest of Soo, to the sliver of land next to the mountains.
I wanted to share some of the route that I've worked on a bit. The basic layout is:
-the same up to Dhama -grind 1-2 Metal Slimes (so the Wizard learns Outside and Increase) -defeat Kandar 2 -Ship to Soo -grind 4 Metal Babbles -grind 1-2 more Metal Slimes to get Level 21 -change the Wizard to Pilgrim -possibly 1 more Metal Babble for the Pilgrim.
The experience for this route is a bit tight for the Wizard LV 21 (45,676 XP), because you don't want to use the 4th Metal Babble to level up to 21, as it is more difficult to kill if you don't learn BiKill. The fights+xp are as follows:
Bomb Crags – 880 Henchmen – 107 Kandar 2 – 1654 4 Metal Babbles - 40200 Total - 42841
Left for Level 21 (45676-42841) = 2835
3 Metal Slimes - 3105
I think ideally you get 2 Metal Slimes before Kandar 2 (for a faster fight), and it just leaves 1 left to kill after the 4 Metal Babbles. There is a little wiggle room in there too, if you want to take a few extra fights.
The only problem left here is the Metal Babble fights themselves, as they have a 5/8 chance to run every turn. I did some playing around and I've found something to help with this as well, the Spider Web. The Spider Web works on Metal Babbles and removes all of their agility in 1 turn, thus guaranteeing that you will get all 4 of your attacks in first from the 2nd Turn on. I haven't had time to really test how much faster of a grind is possible, but I think this will tip it well in our favor. My thoughts on strategy is both Fighters+Wizard attack and Hero Spider Web on Turn 1, and then everyone attack after that.
Any thoughts? I might get into this game eventually, but the required upfront planning is so massive for the manipulation.
Hello. About a month ago, vaxherd completed his Dragon Warrior III TAS, which uses new tricks to stun the RNG and turn it into an incrementing counter. You create a file in a specific save slot with a specific name, gender, and message speed, then reset the game. When you continue your main file, first Change Message Speed on the manipulation file to the same message speed, then your RNG is locked when you continue your main file. The RNG manipulation doesn't require any precise timing, and can be done on real consoles easily enough. If you try out the glitch in casual play, you can see that you get almost no encounters for a long while, then when you move around enough, you will periodically get the exact same encounter, and exact same chance of running away. If you memorize where the encounters happen, you can cast Heal or use herbs to bypass encounters. You also get consistently high numbers for damage, consistent enemy AI, and always get 1 added to your stats at level ups. Townspeople will move around in patterns, often in circles. The game also occasionally crashes when starting a battle, depending on where the RNG counter is at the time the battle starts. Saving the game sets the RNG back to normal. You can lock the RNG again by resetting the game, and changing the message speed on the manipulation file again. The glitch is described in excruciating detail in a pastebin file posted in the thread.
In addition to RNG stunning, there's another trick where you create a save file with a specific character name, gender, and message speed, then get a favorable RNG if you immediately cast Return before any townspeople move. This was used in the TAS to force a battle against 3 metal babbles. This doesn't require any precise timing either, just quickly cast Return, and move around the overworld, and you get that same battle.
The TAS also uses a glitch where your entire party is dead, and the game screws up at the routine responsible for dealing poison swamp damage to your party. Stats that aren't HP will be decremented by 2, giving you end game items, end game spells, and the ability to Return to end game towns. It might be tricky to set this glitch up in real time play, but it's possible.
The only issue is that there is a persistent so-called "Battle RNG" byte that lives in save ram, when a battle generates a random number, it discards that many numbers. This byte is never initialized or cleared at any time. Is it against site rules to use a Game Genie to clear that byte to zero (or the entire save ram for that matter), then play without the Game Genie?
So is anyone interested in running this game using a route similar to the TAS?
We essentially do that with metal slime manipulation and metal babble encounters should we find it. In real time, we set up for metal slime encounters. Been doing so for a couple years now.
I found in practice the battle seed gives about 16 different scenarios and if you act the same in the first round, you can find your seed based on the prior results and get what you want. Just takes a lot of trial and error. We also do do the battle skips.
The problem is it is not fun. At least for me and I know a couple of others. All you do is experiment to find the next skip. In real time right now, on file start we know there are about 16 different starting scenarios, so we save, restart file, find which seed it's on, and then reset and follow that pattern. It's tedious, and no where near the reason I find the Dragon Warrior series fun, so my limit was manipulating metal encounters and most of the encounters in the Pyramid. Others have gone to skipping Necrogond and the entirety of Alefgard. I find my time better spent having fun with games.
As for the old "Dream Ruby" glitch and what's become of expanding it, it has not been done in real time. It would be a different category first (like 64 stairs in FFIV), and I'm firstly afraid of damaging the cart (I would guess unlikely, but the fear is there), and I don't have any interest in most corruption speedruns, so I wouldn't do it. Not sure why others wouldn't have looked into it.
So is anyone interested in running this game using a route similar to the TAS?
I was thinking this over and I have the feeling realtime item glitching is feasible, so I may give it a shot.
Quote from Dwedit:
Is it against site rules to use a Game Genie to clear that byte to zero (or the entire save ram for that matter), then play without the Game Genie?
I obviously can't speak authoritatively (heck, I don't even speedrun that often) but even if it was against the rules, you could achieve the same end result by starting a dummy game, getting an encounter, manipulating that byte to zero, then resetting and starting the run. There are only 16 possible seeds, so it shouldn't be hard to just make a list of "how to get back to seed 0" for each one.
Quote from Darkwing Duck:
I'm firstly afraid of damaging the cart
Just to be clear, the item glitch is a pure software bug so there's no possibility of hardware damage. If anything could cause damage, it would be the Stick Slime bug (where you use the glitched Stick Slime item and the game can crash or do other crazy things); that causes the code to jump to an essentially random address, so in theory it could result in bad register writes or what have you. I actually looked into using that for arbitrary code execution, but even if it was possible it would require microsecond-accurate timing.
It's neat to see people learning more about the game! That being said, I wouldn't (in the hypothetical scenario in which I can actually resume speedrunning) use this trick, either. I would, however, be very interested in seeing these recent developments consolidated somewhere, in a guide explaining DW3 RNG manipulation... not just a list of specific glitches, but something that explains why such patterns occur in the RNG, so that we runners can better understand the game.
And for those curious, still lots of time to be saved! And still a lot of factors that can change a time [grinds, how many slimes killed per grind, boss damage]. So LOTS of human interaction improvement and luck still needed, which still makes this a very competitive game!
So NESCardinality just beat pjplustwo's record by two minutes, the new record stands at 1:53:05. Really excellent run and I believe the first run that NESC finished with the new route. I guess it says something that NESC's time on this run is faster than the Baramos split in his previous PB by 30 seconds.