Hi everyone, recent fan that found this site from AGDQ.
While I see the original Summon Night: Swordcraft Story on SDA, I can't find a proper speedrun of Swordcraft Story 2 on here, Youtube, or even Twitch.tv (not even a TAS)! I found just one deathless race on Twitch.tv. Perhaps it's because this game didn't sell too well? It's not ridiculously expensive on eBay if you want a physical copy (about $30). Well anyway, here's the merits of running this game:
- The game has a very high replay value, due partly to a large amount of dialogue changed by picking a different starting Guardian Beast, and partly due to how the game encourages you to focus on just one or two out of 5 different weapon types, and the even larger amount of dialogue that changes between the initial picking of Boy or Girl; as well as New Game+ mode.
- It's absolutely hilarious. Not "it's so bad it's good" hilarious, but genuinely funny. I'd say it's one of the funniest series Atlus has published, which may be saying something.
- The game is genuinely a lot of fun, has awesome sound, and real-time combat very reminiscent of a "Tales" J-RPG.
- The game itself even seems to be made for speedrunning, through holding R+B to quickly skip text (now each dialogue box just appears for ~100ms at most), and pressing START to skip longer in-game animations (including the initial panning at the start of a battle). You can also hold down L to hide the dialogue box altogether (to see what's behind it), though I don't think you can do both at once.
- The game also rewards you for being underleveled.
- New to Swordcraft 2 specifically: early on you get a consumable which lets you save anywhere, which should make segmenting a breeze.
- And finally, the game is pretty damn easy up until postgame.
If interested, I'd first check out the great speedrun on this site of the original Swordcraft, which briefly explains some important mechanics, and is an all-around decent run: http://speeddemosarchive.com/SummonNightSCS.html
Most of the mechanics are the same --- most importantly "Just Guard" for negating ALL damage --- but there are some additional things I think may help out any potential speedrunners:
- For timing your blocks just right to negate damage, it seems the weapons block at about the rate at which they swing, which makes faster weapons block faster and slower weapons block slower. For instance, I have a hard time "Just Guarding" with the spear, but an easy time getting it with the drill, which is a faster weapon (despite the drill's lag-time after attacking with it).
- All weapon types have different attacks when you press DOWN+Attack, and some have different attacks if you're able to do UP+Attack without jumping. Only the spear has a special attack in the air. In addition to this, there are two hidden charging attacks: one with the Fist, and one with the Drill. With the Fist you do an uppercut if you do DOWN+Attack, and holding the Attack button charges the uppercut to do more damage and can knockdown vulnerable enemies, while the Drill you simply hold down ATTACK without a direction and you start charging an attack that launches you forward with distance depending on how much you charged, doing increased damage to enemies you strike. Most importantly with the Drill's charging attack, if you position yourself and time the level of charge right, you can hit enemies multiple times, as you spend about 1 extra second standing with the drill extended when you finish moving after being launched, at which time the enemy can be hit up to 4-5 times if they're in contact with the drill.
For the above two reasons, I recommend concentrating on the Drill just like the original game, as it can clear the random encounters you will face much, much quicker, as well as make some boss fights quicker. But to really make most boss fights trivial...
- While the new "Monoshift" looks awesome, the way to really make boss fights trivial is to craft a Sword with the "Beast King Crest" to get one with the "Spin Attack" special attack; yet another new feature to Swordcraft 2 is weapons with special attacks that take DURability to use. What's important about the "Spin Attack" is that not only can you get it relatively early on by grabbing Rare Medals (or later by Fishing), but that the attack either knocks down a lot of bosses or does a ridiculous amount of damage as they then don't have extra invincibility for being knocked down. And if you can corner a boss vulnerable to knockdown, then you can get into a totally cheesy cycle where they're always knocked down or about to be knocked down, unable to do anything! Note: You can also get "Spin Attack" on a Fist weapon the same way, but the Fist Weapon has lower Attack, the only stat that matters for special attacks.
Now for the big caveat: much like the original, the encounter rate in Swordcraft Story 2 is pretty bad, and the item you get to lower it isn't available until later AND isn't very effective. Furthermore, same as the original, how quickly you can run away from an encounter depends on your level and the level of the encounter; however, not noted there is that "dashing" (double-tap Left or Right) also increases the rate at which the bar fills for a successful escape.
It's been suggested that this bit of RNG (the encounter rate) is on a timer which can be partially exposed through an emulator and save states --- stop somewhere in the field, save state, run around until you get a random encounter, load up the save state, run around again in any direction and you'll get another random encounter at around the same time as before; but if you load the state and then wait 1 second before moving, you may not get a random encounter. I'd love to see this explored some more.
Also note that this is probably the only RNG you really need to worry about, as while which encounter you get is randomized, all enemies (including bosses) follow extremely predictable patterns with very abusable (but not necessarily "bad") AI.
Now I wish I had some glitches and in-depth tricks to give out, but while having worked professionally in gaming QA for 5 years and experience debugging games, I'd rather be playing or coding games than breaking them
That said, I absolutely love seeing games broken, and part of why I put this out there is to see this game analyzed and then broken; the other reason being I think this is a genuinely fun game that would also be genuinely fun to speedrun (at least until it gets to the point of optimizing the encounter rate!).
While I see the original Summon Night: Swordcraft Story on SDA, I can't find a proper speedrun of Swordcraft Story 2 on here, Youtube, or even Twitch.tv (not even a TAS)! I found just one deathless race on Twitch.tv. Perhaps it's because this game didn't sell too well? It's not ridiculously expensive on eBay if you want a physical copy (about $30). Well anyway, here's the merits of running this game:
- The game has a very high replay value, due partly to a large amount of dialogue changed by picking a different starting Guardian Beast, and partly due to how the game encourages you to focus on just one or two out of 5 different weapon types, and the even larger amount of dialogue that changes between the initial picking of Boy or Girl; as well as New Game+ mode.
- It's absolutely hilarious. Not "it's so bad it's good" hilarious, but genuinely funny. I'd say it's one of the funniest series Atlus has published, which may be saying something.
- The game is genuinely a lot of fun, has awesome sound, and real-time combat very reminiscent of a "Tales" J-RPG.
- The game itself even seems to be made for speedrunning, through holding R+B to quickly skip text (now each dialogue box just appears for ~100ms at most), and pressing START to skip longer in-game animations (including the initial panning at the start of a battle). You can also hold down L to hide the dialogue box altogether (to see what's behind it), though I don't think you can do both at once.
- The game also rewards you for being underleveled.
- New to Swordcraft 2 specifically: early on you get a consumable which lets you save anywhere, which should make segmenting a breeze.
- And finally, the game is pretty damn easy up until postgame.
If interested, I'd first check out the great speedrun on this site of the original Swordcraft, which briefly explains some important mechanics, and is an all-around decent run: http://speeddemosarchive.com/SummonNightSCS.html
Most of the mechanics are the same --- most importantly "Just Guard" for negating ALL damage --- but there are some additional things I think may help out any potential speedrunners:
- For timing your blocks just right to negate damage, it seems the weapons block at about the rate at which they swing, which makes faster weapons block faster and slower weapons block slower. For instance, I have a hard time "Just Guarding" with the spear, but an easy time getting it with the drill, which is a faster weapon (despite the drill's lag-time after attacking with it).
- All weapon types have different attacks when you press DOWN+Attack, and some have different attacks if you're able to do UP+Attack without jumping. Only the spear has a special attack in the air. In addition to this, there are two hidden charging attacks: one with the Fist, and one with the Drill. With the Fist you do an uppercut if you do DOWN+Attack, and holding the Attack button charges the uppercut to do more damage and can knockdown vulnerable enemies, while the Drill you simply hold down ATTACK without a direction and you start charging an attack that launches you forward with distance depending on how much you charged, doing increased damage to enemies you strike. Most importantly with the Drill's charging attack, if you position yourself and time the level of charge right, you can hit enemies multiple times, as you spend about 1 extra second standing with the drill extended when you finish moving after being launched, at which time the enemy can be hit up to 4-5 times if they're in contact with the drill.
For the above two reasons, I recommend concentrating on the Drill just like the original game, as it can clear the random encounters you will face much, much quicker, as well as make some boss fights quicker. But to really make most boss fights trivial...
- While the new "Monoshift" looks awesome, the way to really make boss fights trivial is to craft a Sword with the "Beast King Crest" to get one with the "Spin Attack" special attack; yet another new feature to Swordcraft 2 is weapons with special attacks that take DURability to use. What's important about the "Spin Attack" is that not only can you get it relatively early on by grabbing Rare Medals (or later by Fishing), but that the attack either knocks down a lot of bosses or does a ridiculous amount of damage as they then don't have extra invincibility for being knocked down. And if you can corner a boss vulnerable to knockdown, then you can get into a totally cheesy cycle where they're always knocked down or about to be knocked down, unable to do anything! Note: You can also get "Spin Attack" on a Fist weapon the same way, but the Fist Weapon has lower Attack, the only stat that matters for special attacks.
Now for the big caveat: much like the original, the encounter rate in Swordcraft Story 2 is pretty bad, and the item you get to lower it isn't available until later AND isn't very effective. Furthermore, same as the original, how quickly you can run away from an encounter depends on your level and the level of the encounter; however, not noted there is that "dashing" (double-tap Left or Right) also increases the rate at which the bar fills for a successful escape.
It's been suggested that this bit of RNG (the encounter rate) is on a timer which can be partially exposed through an emulator and save states --- stop somewhere in the field, save state, run around until you get a random encounter, load up the save state, run around again in any direction and you'll get another random encounter at around the same time as before; but if you load the state and then wait 1 second before moving, you may not get a random encounter. I'd love to see this explored some more.
Also note that this is probably the only RNG you really need to worry about, as while which encounter you get is randomized, all enemies (including bosses) follow extremely predictable patterns with very abusable (but not necessarily "bad") AI.
Now I wish I had some glitches and in-depth tricks to give out, but while having worked professionally in gaming QA for 5 years and experience debugging games, I'd rather be playing or coding games than breaking them
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