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Drakkhen (Any %) (Single Segment)
Verifier Responses
Decision: Accept
Congratulations to Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody!
Drakkhen (Any %) (Single Segment)
Verifier Responses
Quote:
Decision: Accept
Reason: Having personally played through most of Drakkhen without the aid of glitches, it's nice to see a game that seems packed to the gills with way of trolling the player get trolled itself. This is primarily done by Dragondarch counteracting some of them or even using them to his advantage (such as drowning half of his party.) This run has a solid route that still manages to show off a lot of the batshit insane things that are contained within the game world while still completing it in a very fast time. As Dragondarch said himself, there is very little he can do to improve this run outside of having absolutely perfect luck and it shows. A great run for a bad game. Accept.
THE THRASH METAL!!
Reason: Having personally played through most of Drakkhen without the aid of glitches, it's nice to see a game that seems packed to the gills with way of trolling the player get trolled itself. This is primarily done by Dragondarch counteracting some of them or even using them to his advantage (such as drowning half of his party.) This run has a solid route that still manages to show off a lot of the batshit insane things that are contained within the game world while still completing it in a very fast time. As Dragondarch said himself, there is very little he can do to improve this run outside of having absolutely perfect luck and it shows. A great run for a bad game. Accept.
THE THRASH METAL!!
Quote:
This game is one of the instances where a game's cover and title screen look much cooler than the game itself is. This game is awful, but I still have to give props to the story; you don't see much of it in this run, but I thought and still think that the plot of this game is really well done, and the music is pretty nice, it'll never get old for me.
Moving on, A/V is perfectly fine to me, except for one spot. At 15:13, the video skips for me just a second or so ahead - I tried redownloading the video file, but it was still there. If it's there for others, is it on the initial recording of the runner as well? I hope there's a fix to that.
There's not much to say about the gameplay itself. The route is as perfect as it can get, everything else is entirely dependent on the RNG to be merciful; and it was pretty much so in this run, even though there's still some mishaps happening. I've seen some of the streamed attempts for this game and there's been runs where killing one of the bosses takes a whole 15 minutes or more, partly due to MP regeneration.
This is an easy Accept, but I hope that skipping issue on the video is fixable.
Last tidbit from me here, this game had a whole team of 12 debuggers. Let that sink in for a minute.
Coming Soon
Drakkhen II!!
Moving on, A/V is perfectly fine to me, except for one spot. At 15:13, the video skips for me just a second or so ahead - I tried redownloading the video file, but it was still there. If it's there for others, is it on the initial recording of the runner as well? I hope there's a fix to that.
There's not much to say about the gameplay itself. The route is as perfect as it can get, everything else is entirely dependent on the RNG to be merciful; and it was pretty much so in this run, even though there's still some mishaps happening. I've seen some of the streamed attempts for this game and there's been runs where killing one of the bosses takes a whole 15 minutes or more, partly due to MP regeneration.
This is an easy Accept, but I hope that skipping issue on the video is fixable.
Last tidbit from me here, this game had a whole team of 12 debuggers. Let that sink in for a minute.
Coming Soon
Drakkhen II!!
Quote:
A/V: One spot both video and audio skip. Another spot, the video artifacts. It's not too bad, and no obvious cheating since everything matches before and after.
The run is well planned and executed, the majority of time lost while outside prior to castle of Dawn seems inconsequential in the grand scheme since you need to wait outside for the doors to open about half way through the run. That's quite the leveling exploit, and you can exploit it without even knowing you're doing it.
Accept!
The run is well planned and executed, the majority of time lost while outside prior to castle of Dawn seems inconsequential in the grand scheme since you need to wait outside for the doors to open about half way through the run. That's quite the leveling exploit, and you can exploit it without even knowing you're doing it.
Accept!
Quote from PJ:
As always, I'll being by saying this is PJ.
A/V quality is good, except for that one blip that was already mentioned by the other verifiers. No signs of cheating....maybe? Hard to tell with this game.
So Drakkhen has a strong tradition of passing the torch along to someone else to do the run. I first heard of this game from Scott Kessler who mentioned he was somewhat considering doing a run. Then I heard that ZenicReverie might be interested in doing a run. Then I learned the game and did some routing. Then a lot more routing. And THEN DragonDarch took his turn but accidentally finished a run instead of passing it along. Fortunately he did, because the rest of the world has been saved.
This game is pretty shit to run because it is like 100% RNG. The encounters are random, the frequency of encounters are random, if you hit and how much damage you do in combat is extremely random (I've done 1 damage with one hit and then immediately followed it with a 232 damage hit), what items are dropped is random and extremely varied, shop merchandise is random, etc etc etc. It is a logistical nightmare. DragonDarch has a few instances where he is depending on certain item drops and buying items in the store at the beginning of the game, which is just awful. In this run things actually went pretty well, but that is just an awful way to begin a run.
I'd go through each section of the game and comment on the good/bad luck or whatever, but there's really no point. His route is very strong. We ultimately decided that Priestess + Magician would be the ideal team because it lets us enter swamp castle fastest and gives us the speed spell. I toyed around with a lot of other team ideas (solo scout, solo priestess, solo magician, scout + magician) and this one seemed to be the best. I considered the solo scout again recently, since DragonDarch gets to Dawn Castle super early with the speed spell. I was considering cutting down on early-game grinding for enemies outside and trying to make it to early Dawn Castle with solo scout, but there's a lot of in-castle navigation and post-Dawn Castle navigation that would suffer immensely from the lack of speed spell, even if I could get the same day cycle as this run.
The bosses in this game are a huge pain in the ass to kill. Whenever I fight them, I basically just run into them and hope I hit him before I get hit. It is a completely crap shot. DragonDarch goes for the much smarter SS strat which is to stand perfectly still in the corner and fire Anti-Matter until it hits them. This is definitely a safe strat but can cost a big amount of time if the game doesn't want you to hit. The melee alternative ends the battles in <3 seconds almost every time, but rarely with success. Hahaha. So yea, I believe that his strat is the best until we understand how the melee works or something. The other *possible* option would be to use the Zombie Arthur glitch I found to kill the boss from a distance. We have no idea how this works still, but if there is a way to make the dead character attack with more accuracy it would combine the best of both strats (melee damage/accuracy + safety of long-range offense).
So yea, there isn't much else to say. His map navigation is really good, his menuing is strong, the route is very well prepared and well executed, and his luck is quite good. This is a really good run of a game that never deserved one and will very probably be uncontested for a really long time unless we find a majorly game-breaking glitch (not unlikely). This is a definite accept in my book. Well done, DragonDarch!
A/V quality is good, except for that one blip that was already mentioned by the other verifiers. No signs of cheating....maybe? Hard to tell with this game.
So Drakkhen has a strong tradition of passing the torch along to someone else to do the run. I first heard of this game from Scott Kessler who mentioned he was somewhat considering doing a run. Then I heard that ZenicReverie might be interested in doing a run. Then I learned the game and did some routing. Then a lot more routing. And THEN DragonDarch took his turn but accidentally finished a run instead of passing it along. Fortunately he did, because the rest of the world has been saved.
This game is pretty shit to run because it is like 100% RNG. The encounters are random, the frequency of encounters are random, if you hit and how much damage you do in combat is extremely random (I've done 1 damage with one hit and then immediately followed it with a 232 damage hit), what items are dropped is random and extremely varied, shop merchandise is random, etc etc etc. It is a logistical nightmare. DragonDarch has a few instances where he is depending on certain item drops and buying items in the store at the beginning of the game, which is just awful. In this run things actually went pretty well, but that is just an awful way to begin a run.
I'd go through each section of the game and comment on the good/bad luck or whatever, but there's really no point. His route is very strong. We ultimately decided that Priestess + Magician would be the ideal team because it lets us enter swamp castle fastest and gives us the speed spell. I toyed around with a lot of other team ideas (solo scout, solo priestess, solo magician, scout + magician) and this one seemed to be the best. I considered the solo scout again recently, since DragonDarch gets to Dawn Castle super early with the speed spell. I was considering cutting down on early-game grinding for enemies outside and trying to make it to early Dawn Castle with solo scout, but there's a lot of in-castle navigation and post-Dawn Castle navigation that would suffer immensely from the lack of speed spell, even if I could get the same day cycle as this run.
The bosses in this game are a huge pain in the ass to kill. Whenever I fight them, I basically just run into them and hope I hit him before I get hit. It is a completely crap shot. DragonDarch goes for the much smarter SS strat which is to stand perfectly still in the corner and fire Anti-Matter until it hits them. This is definitely a safe strat but can cost a big amount of time if the game doesn't want you to hit. The melee alternative ends the battles in <3 seconds almost every time, but rarely with success. Hahaha. So yea, I believe that his strat is the best until we understand how the melee works or something. The other *possible* option would be to use the Zombie Arthur glitch I found to kill the boss from a distance. We have no idea how this works still, but if there is a way to make the dead character attack with more accuracy it would combine the best of both strats (melee damage/accuracy + safety of long-range offense).
So yea, there isn't much else to say. His map navigation is really good, his menuing is strong, the route is very well prepared and well executed, and his luck is quite good. This is a really good run of a game that never deserved one and will very probably be uncontested for a really long time unless we find a majorly game-breaking glitch (not unlikely). This is a definite accept in my book. Well done, DragonDarch!
Decision: Accept
Congratulations to Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody!
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