Glad you picked up Invincible Moon on Rinoa. I'm guessing your plan is to use it to skip the 2nd boss in Ultim's Castle? Would shave a few minutes for sure. I picked it up in Esther but sadly I was forgetful and forgot to make her learn it. The vids are very impressive and continue to make for some great watching.
Final time will be between 7:50 and 7:58 depending on how the final time is calculated and if the extra time for the card glitch is removed. Either way I'm just glad it's under 8 hours! Now to start looking into sending it to people for checking.
Glad you picked up Invincible Moon on Rinoa. I'm guessing your plan is to use it to skip the 2nd boss in Ultim's Castle? Would shave a few minutes for sure. I picked it up in Esther but sadly I was forgetful and forgot to make her learn it. The vids are very impressive and continue to make for some great watching.
Thanks - FYI, there is (probably) no way to learn it if you wait till Esthar to pick it up. It takes 140 step counters (like the encounter mechanism) (not 912, or whatever that FAQ says). It starts at 140 and counts down, only when Rinoa is actually in the Party. At the end of Disc 2, even with all the time spent running around the Missile Base, Balamb Town, and Galbadia Garden, The step counter is still at 48. Since Rinoa is out of commission for almost all of Disc 3, It is going to be close to get her to learn it before the final Battle. Also, I'm able to skip all the junctions other than HP and Str, since the only time I think I will be attacked is the 2nd form of Ultimecia.
Not at all. The PC version cuts quite a bit of time on loading screens so if I did the exact same run on the PSX version it would be quite a bit behind that TAS (which was amazing).
I had some new thoughts about the SS route. Because of the 1/10 odds of getting the Zell card, there's no getting Str+60%s by refining that card, realistically. So I was just using Str+20% and Str+40%, which was only an issue in a few places. The most significant place was during the final boss -- because of the longer time it takes to kill the various forms, they usually start blowing away junctioned magic, which can be a run-ender. To compensate, I was drawing junk magic throughout the run, to reduce the odds of something useful being blown away.
Yesterday, I played in a charity marathon, and someone donated for me to kill Bahamut. This got me thinking: you get two Str+60%s from killing Bahamut. I'm starting to think that you could remove all the magic drawing (and the huge amount of time that it takes to move the magic around to all three of your characters), and instead kill Bahamut. It doesn't take a huge amount of time, you save the time from drawing and distributing (especially distributing!) all those magics, and you can kill all the bosses after the Ragnarok faster with those two Str+60%s. Kill the two Red Dragons before Bahamut with Card (they give way too much experience), and you're set...
Without the Str+60%s, some of your spells are getting blown away, almost 100% certainty. I don't think that's something that you can just dismiss... That said, a third character with Triples wouldn't be much use without the Str+% bonuses -- I don't think you'd gain any time from that (not to mention, having to learn Mug). My intuition is that you're further ahead not doing any of this, as opposed to trying to make a third Str-based hero.
I could look more into a Meteor Wing approach, for comparison.
Your odds of getting two things blown away and both of them being triple aren't high.
Meteor wing would be worse, since losing either meteor or triple would shut rinoa down. And it'd be harder filling her inventory with spells she wouldn't cast instead of meteor.
Does the pandora timer still countdown while in menu? You would have plenty of time to refine filled magic inventories then???
There is AP for mug, encounter.5/0 and refines only take 190.
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a third character with Triples wouldn't be much use without the Str+% bonuses
You seem to be planning for a situation where both your stacks of triple get blown away and you can't finish with base str stats. I was suggesting a backup plan that doesn't take you totally off the reservation.
Even without a backup plan you can still deal damage without triple. Definitely slower, but you're looking into sidequesting a lot of time to prevent a situation that only has a couple percent chance of happening, and is possibly not autoloss even if it happens.
I had some new thoughts about the SS route. Because of the 1/10 odds of getting the Zell card, there's no getting Str+60%s by refining that card, realistically. So I was just using Str+20% and Str+40%, which was only an issue in a few places. The most significant place was during the final boss -- because of the longer time it takes to kill the various forms, they usually start blowing away junctioned magic, which can be a run-ender. To compensate, I was drawing junk magic throughout the run, to reduce the odds of something useful being blown away.
I had a thought about this - there are only two forms that can blow away magic, iirc, 2 and 4. The RNG has 256 positions, and they have to 'roll' a blow away attack - in that case, the roll & blow away will be together, and therefore fixed.
It would be an interesting test, to see if you test all 256 RNG positions for phases 2 & 4, and figure out where the blow aways happen (is it based on page? Spell number?) if it is based on page, you could easily arrange your spells so triple can never be rolled to be blown away.
It would be an interesting test, to see if you test all 256 RNG positions for phases 2 & 4, and figure out where the blow aways happen (is it based on page? Spell number?) if it is based on page, you could easily arrange your spells so triple can never be rolled to be blown away.
Slick thought!
My intuition is that it isn't based on the page / absolute position in the spell list (because any given position could be empty). I know that the number of copies of the spell that you have doesn't play into it (I tried on console going into the battle with one spell with 100 copies and one spell with 1 copy, and either was as likely as the other to be blown away).
I could probably write you a lua script so you could change spell counts, numbers, and location on the fly, if you were interested in testing this.
I could program the script (unless you really want to do it, heh ). What I'm lacking is (a) the memory addresses of the spells in the characters' inventories (I could figure these out; but, if you know them, that could save me some time); (b) the memory address of the battle PRNG; and (c) a save file at the end boss (this is the big one -- I normally play on console, and don't have an emulator save anywhere near the end of the game). Do you have such a save file?
I could program the script (unless you really want to do it, heh ). What I'm lacking is (a) the memory addresses of the spells in the characters' inventories (I could figure these out; but, if you know them, that could save me some time); (b) the memory address of the battle PRNG; and (c) a save file at the end boss (this is the big one -- I normally play on console, and don't have an emulator save anywhere near the end of the game). Do you have such a save file?
Thanks for all your help, DarkKobold!
#1: I don't, but those are really easy to find (unless the ones used for battle are different than the ones for the stats page)
#2: I have that info (obviously!)
#3: Load up my TAS, put it in fast forward - wait ~2 hours (gotta deal with the swaps, they pop the menu for you)- create a save before the final boss - there you go
#4: I'm good at creating a lua gui, so I could, if nothing else, give you good sample code to work from.