Cool, good work Jiseed. I'll have to check out your video when I next get a chunk of time, and I really liked the rom dump site you linked. Very useful.
Got a new sub 4 pb yesterday, and it actually uploaded to youtube surprisingly enough. I'll post it below for people who would prefer to see the run on youtube instead.
Haha just got my internet back today and was just able to watch your 3:56 on twitch The run is quite pleasant to watch for single segment there's not so much mistakes made and suspens until the end (there could have been some run killers between the triple bladeshine in the str tower or the legeon you took on the edge ^^) Grinding parts are not too boring to watch because they went quite well and were not too long... I think the main improvement could come from better menu manipulation (and it's not so easy to keep a good rythm and not get lost in the item menu in single-segment!!) perhaps adding a guard rod + gisar macro in courage tower
Just a little question why at the beginning just before passageway with rune in you party do you run away from 2 fights with 2 sand newt and 1 crawler but keep fighting 4 crawler just after that? And in the weapon plant I would rather avoid the fights with Sivalt-type robots (the one with claw attacks) they worth only 500Xp I think and they're quite annoying to kill The biggest mistake was perhaps to forget to equip Wren with the photoneraser in the str tower? Or healing Alys in the Juza fight when you wanted her dead
Thanks for the effort you put into this run and good luck for the next one you'll eventually post on SDA!
Congratulations on the new time! I'm sure you'll go even lower.
Spent some of my weekend re-routing for segmented. I'll publish the full route some time soon, don't expect a video though lol, it would take many months of weekends to put together.
Wow, cool to see a lot of people doing single segment runs. I lost interest beacuse it was boring when I was the only one doing it. 3:56 is a pretty decent time. I want to pick it up again now next time I have a day off.
edit: ill watch your run sometime jiseed, did you make any improvements to the motovia route or did u find it optimized enough as it was?
I'm going to mess around with Jiseed's 1.0 route on stream at http://www.twitch.tv/squidfeatures for an hour or two maybe. Nothing fancy like an actual run, just fleshing out the notes a bit.
Motavia is more or less the same as the route you put forward for it Adgey. Has some small changes like getting the Titanium Crown instead of the ceramic one, using a two shield Rika for Zio and some small quality of life changes such as using Alys' place to rest if low on Meseta. Additionally I try to kill off Gryz in most fights, which is something I think you didn't do. Overall though Motavia's route was already really solid.
I streamed some more last night and got to Dezolis. I think if Gryz had died a bit more often Rika might have gotten Deban after the Juza fight, but the boss battles were very straight forward, it almost felt like cheating, but I imagine RNG has a lot to do with that, especially the Zio fight.
I'll be streaming some tonight as well. I am still working on filling out the little details about how I want to format stuff like boss battles, but as you said, Motavia is pretty solid.
So I managed a new time of 3:44:04 the other night, which was much better than I expected. I made a couple of changes that seemed to help speed things up. First of all, immediately when you get Gryz, you can give Chaz his titanium armor and helmet to greatly increase his odds of survival in both the basement and the bio-plant, allowing for a higher chance of some bonus xp in both these areas. Additionally, I was made to investigate whether or not using blizzard in the wreckage would be helpful, and it turns out it actually is... but only when fighting the Whistler (grey) robots. This should help to avoid additional visits to the wreckage in order to level up Hahn. A blizzard macro can also help speed up the Sandworm fight, as Alys should have enough TP to cast Zan twice after all of the triblasters. Another change that seemed acceptable was simply finishing up Rykros immediately after Chaz got to level 32. There is a little risk in this, as the high damage variance Megids from DF3 got him pretty close to death - I'm not sure if top end damage would be enough to kill him outright though.
I'll link the video(s) below for people who are interested.
Nice time! When I was first fighting sandworm I thought about Blizzard, but I only tried using only Blizzard, which Alys obviously doesn't have enough TP for. I've been slow rolling your old guide for now, and have gotten through the Lassic fight without too much trouble. I'll probably check out your new video tonight.
I watched your run through to just before Dark Force III, it looked really good, even though you had some crummy RNG here and there. Also, I liked your macros for the Silver Soldier quest. A small side note: when entering Molcrum you can simply hold up, and the way the game handles edges will steer you directly to Rune.
Yeah so I was watching your video now too, finally. Damn all these encounters and ambushes, really unlucky. 2 really really minor things that I noticed you do is
1) When changing battlespeed there is no need to "accept" right away, just leave it at 1 and press back and go to message speed, to 1 and then accept. That way you don't have to bring up that menu twice. 2) you can ignore krup right after you met rune the first time. It is useless to activate it as you get to the town anyways after Zio 1. I am a scrub.
other than some menuing jitters and bad rng with the ambushes, the run was very well done. The Air Castle had me sweating just watching it though.
The only other thing I can think of to save a few seconds (maybe) is when you're ready to Nurvus, Ryuka to Mile instead of Kadary. Use the LandRover to get to Zio's Fort. Not sure how much it would save, but it might be a second or two (which in an RPG speedrun like this, may not make much difference overall)
Now the question remains, since you hold the records of Phantasy Star II, III, and IV, will you attempt Phantasy Star so that you can get the record on all four of the original games?
Thanks for all the suggestions, I'll have to give them a try. We unfortunately do have to enter Krup with Rune because otherwise we can't Ryuka out after Alys becomes bedridden, I think this was noted on the TAS as well. As far as Phantasy Star 1 is concerned, I might do a run of the Master System version for the novelty of having runs of all the games. However, I'm far more interested in running the Phantasy Star Generation 1 version due to how simply dated PS1 is these days.
I recently booted up the Japanese version of PS4 in order to test a macro glitch I had found a while back, and to see if I could make something work on that version (I couldn't find anything in the English one unfortunately). While I couldn't get any results for the glitch (I have no idea how it actually triggers, its mostly mashing and luck), I did notice that the beginning went a lot faster than usual...20 seconds faster to be exact. This got me interested in testing out how big of a difference there was timing-wise between the English and Japanese versions. I did a Motavia test run in the Japanese version that ended up being a 1:02 Zio death. This had admittedly better than average luck, but a lot of hesitation in the menus at times. I strongly believe that sub hour Zio is possible here. The text is noticeably faster in pretty much every case, from dialogue all the way to simple things like healing popups. Additionally, I've heard that some cutscenes (such as Chaz holding up the Eclipse Torch to burn down the forest) aren't in the game which would speed things up too. I'm not really advocating using the Japanese version, but I thought it'd be worth it to share my findings here.
Heh, I'd be surprised if things got extreme enough in the PSIV speed run scene that we'd switch to Japanese version. I am not surprised the run is faster though.
I've got another small change. Since the route now gives Gryz's TITN-HELM and TITN-MAIL to Chaz before Tonoe Basement, you can get away with only equipping one CRBNSHIELD on Chaz which means you can save some money, and it also means you can use a Crash/Earth Macro for the Zema Igglanova fight, making it potentially smother. If Crash misses and Earth paralyzes Iggy till end of turn, you can just try the macro again. If Crash misses and Earth hits and Iggy stays paralyzed to start of next turn, you can run. If both miss, you have to fight it out, but that's no worse than now.
This macro can helps increase odds of successfully killing Guilgenovas in the Bio Plant, since if Earth hits you get an extra chance at Crash.
I ran through the Basement and Bio Plant a few times with this, and didn't notice any significant reduction of Chaz survivability, but it certainly is a possibility.
I almost forgot: Jiseed, I'm having trouble with a couple of things. After fights and you need to get through the level up messages, are you just mashing the buttons alternately? I remember reading that up-thread, but either you've got a more successfully strat, or I just suck and button mashing.
The second thing is have you got a good method for getting Alys killed off in the Sand Worm fight? Gryz usually goes down ok, but Alys just hangs on to the bitter end. Do you ever just attempt to run to skip a turn?
gonna steam some attempts at http://www.twitch.tv/adgey10 in the next few days if anyone wants to watch. I got a 2:35 dark force 2 kill the other day but unfortunately died at dark force 3, I think that time may have been on pace for maybe 3:45 or better. Your route for Dezolis and the last part of the game is very good jiseed, thanks for the work you put into the game. The only thing I think is more optimal so far is to grind a few battles on the way to Dark Force 1 with Raja dead. I tried doing flamesword strats with Chaz for lassic but that means I'm short of cash for the other stuff so it's probably not optimal.
SF have you uneqipped everything from alys? I unequip all her stuff and normally alys survives long enough to cast a saner/shift/couple of triblasters as she can survive a normal sandworm attack with probably 1/4 hp left if she doesn't dodge it. Then Rika usually heals her back with the wood cane.
Jiseed I was watching your japanese test run a little bit. Didn't have much time and I only watched the part in Tonoe but you are right, the texts wrapped up faster. I can see japanese version being a separate category. Because I probably wouldn't run japanese version. Just thinking of screwing up the item menu with a random item drop gives me nightmares...
I also got a new Zio% PB of 1:07:35 which was amazing considering that my run before that one was 7-8 minutes behind PB pace thanks to ridiculously awful rng everywhere. My sum of best is down to 1:04:32 now and that even is with all the best segment times resetted wherever I changed the route. (TITN-CRWN instead of CRMC-CRWN, for example). So my total possible Time Save is 3:03.73 which would mean no ambushes, no menuscrewups, bestcasescenario grinding/bossfights etc. and we all know when this is going to happen.
When I'm going through the level up dialogues I just alternate between A B C. It's the exact same as going through dialogue in Phantasy Star 2, so I've gotten quite used to it. As far as Alys dying, it seems like you're just having some bad luck - as long as shes in one of the first two slots she'll generally die quite easily. I'd probably not try to run to skip a turn, as defending makes everyone (except Chaz maybe?) only take 1 damage, and allows for Alys to heal the others with the wood cane while we're waiting for her to get killed. It's faster to just hit run though, so I guess its a judgement call.
I had never really considered getting some EXP from Kuran, but I guess things there die pretty easily to Airslash and Hewn - maybe the cave grind macro would work as well. I'll have to look into it for sure, although it might put Kyra at risk of not learning Warla in time depending on how effective it is. Would you unequip Raja or simply not give him the shields until DF1's room in order to kill him off faster?
I would also consider the Japanese version a separate category, especially if it does lack some cutscenes. I don't think its really much of an issue though, as I would assume if someone was doing the Japanese version they'd probably use JRTA timing, which would be slower in the end I think.
Ok, it's just me being crummy at mashing buttons then. The good news is that means there is room for improvement!
I'm going to be practicing Sand Worm a bit tonight, but when I was testing yesterday, I ran for about 5 turns just to see what would happen. Worm killed everyone EXCEPT Alys, even with spot healing from Rika/Alys. Hilarious.