Hey all! I've been experimenting with various manipulations for Lufia: The Legend Returns on GBC. As you can see, it's going pretty well:

But there's a LOT that does not seem to have been ever explored. I would appreciate any help at all, notably:

• Is there a list of enemy drops or enemy zones?
• What's the earliest / non-detoury place to find a Zombie?
• Would getting the Alum Blade be actually worth it, considering the Ear Cleaners that will come soon after that?
• Would winning the first two Gades battles be worth it? I'm enclined to think the first one might be, if only for the added attack power, especially if eventually coupled with the Alum Blade.

Thoughts welcome! Thank you.

Well done guys!!!

It is done!

http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22941&start=0

Greetings! Time for a new TAS WIP! I think I'm getting the hang of this. Please let me know if you see any possible improvement or if you have any question.

i am like 85% sure the manual is wrong about what the reels that you hit are supposed to do. a lot of the time red seems to benefit you. because of this i dont know about the weapons being totally accurate either. some stuff checks out but some doesnt. the information in the manual and in the game feels like it's very much in the air.

I agree! That, along with the fact that weapons' animations don't all have exactly the same duration, implies that I have to test most weapons everytime anyway. But the difference is somewhere between 10-20 frames for each battle, which is pretty much negligible given the importance of RNG in this run.

I have completed the 3rd scenario, and in this one too, I managed to finish before the last monster appears (in this case, Mothra). Hopefully the trends keeps up with the next scenarios :)

Never mind my question about the weapons - I read the game manual and unless it's wrong, it has all the info I need about the weapons :)

Hello again! I have done the 2nd scenario (sorry for the lack of sound):

I might have to do it again though, notably because I didn't realize one can speed up exiting the battle by pressing buttons (or am I crazy?). I also want to test a few more things.

I have a question you might be able to answer which would help me a lot: how do you choose which weapons to use? So far, it seems like the bottom one always does the most damage.

Also, I can pretty much confirm that map movement has absolutely no impact on the battle RNG... but of course, it does influence enemy map movement. For instance, in my test TAS, I move the Attacker just one tile because if I don't, Baragon will disappear instead of attacking the Fighter. One of the things I have to check is if it still works by just selecting the Attacker and having it stand by (or selecting another unit altogether).

I do not believe so. I've written a Lua script that checks how many frames it takes to get a jackpot for each of the possible "items", and selects the shortest one. In the two fights in this scenario, it was not the same item which was the fastest, and it was not the same number of presses between items for both battles.

The most "interesting" I have found so far is simply that the game seems to ignore any kind of single-frame input. To actually do anything, one has to press a button for at least two frames. I'm not sure how common this is for NES games, but the only other I've TASed wasn't like this.

Oh, and I may be wrong about the following because I didn't keep the input, but I think the battle RNG is independent of the map movements. I tried fighting Godzilla with both types of planes, and if I remember correctly, both battle jackpots were the same, and I believe with the same input, despite the map movement being different, the fighting unit being different, and the framecount at the start of the battle being different. So if the RNG does not depend on uninitialized RAM and someone trains himself or herself at pressing the buttons at the exact same frames for the first battle, and the right set of frames for the second battle, and so on, then that could work. But obviously, that is very hard and quite unlikely possible, except for the simplest of the scenarios.

Greetings!

I intend on TASing it game as it is a fairly simple one to manipulate RNG for (at the very least, for the battles). I have made a test for the first scenario which you can look at here:

Any comment or suggestion would be very much welcome. Thank you!

Semi-related: for funsies, I checked if anything particular happened when all players die at the same time. Nope!

Unfortunately no, I haven't been able to get it from any enemy. The very first enemy of the first level, for instance, wants nothing to do with it.

And I'm sorry for the late reply! I thought I had email notifications set up for this, but apparently I messed up.

So if you're reading this, you're probably aware of the superspeed glitch. See it happen twice in this clip from WhiteHat94:

Our current knowledge / suspicitions:

• It's possible to do at the very least with a single enemy or two enemies next to each other;

• It seems easier (?) to do when the player is on the ground;

• Releasing the control pad from the running direction will cancel the glitch, as does dashing for more than 10 frames;

• There seems to be a six frames window to make it happen on the second set of two enemies in 1-3.

Some possibly involved memory addresses are 00C9, 00CA, 00CB, 03B5, 03F1 and 03F2. Notably, every time I've had the glitch happen, 00C9-00CB had to be equal to 32 when releasing B.