I was thinking about how I could make the any% run more consistent and came across an idea.

Currently, we do training fights in Zone 3 in order to grind for equipment and levels. In the best case scenario, assassins would fight Shaman of Blades for Tribal Blades and Gunslingers would fight Shaman of Life for Mender's Axes. However, this is very inconsistent as there is only a 25% chance of fighting the desired enemy each time + a 25% chance they drop the weapon, not to mention time-consuming as these enemies are difficult to kill right after Zone 2.

The idea for the assassin route is to do most of your training in the beginning of Zone 2. The training enemies all have a 5% chance of dropping Moon Shattered Horrors and are relatively easy to kill without taking too much time. If you do 5 training fights, you have a 22% chance of getting at least one MSH which will make the rest of Zone 2 much easier to finish + eliminate training in Zone 3.

The main drawback though is that the items drops in general for these fights are terrible. There's only a 30% chance that each item that's not MSH will drop, so there are plenty of fights where you get nothing from it.

I did some testing and at one point I got a 14:04 (with no recording though).

As I continue to stress over university assignments, I sometimes find myself wondering what a Sonny low% speedrun would look like, or if it would even be fun.

As far as what counts as a 'thing', I've come up with the following list:

• Levels gained (Including the percentage too? If it comes to it...)
• Attribute points used
• Abilities acquired
• Items equipped/eaten via glitch

There's also the use of teammates, where you are forced to use Veradux and Galiant in their first battles (but Veradux can be removed later). Then there's the initial equipment that Sonny has, which I guess can be removed after the first battle. We would have to discuss whether the fact that we were forced to use them once would count them in the overall total of 'things' used.

I hope this sounds interesting! :)

So as promised, I've been looking into Sonny's code for the past few days and have some things to report (and to not report).

The first is as to how the game determines what items drop after a battle. As I feared, it uses Math.random() as the powerhouse behind its 'randomness'. The reason this is a problem is because you can't seed Math.random(). Seeding basically means that if you input the same 'seed' into the random number generator, it would output the same results. So because of that, at the moment I have no idea how to consistently get the drops that we desire (MSH plz).

The second thing, and this didn't really have to with speedrunning but my inner code geek came out, was that I found out how the game creates items and enemies/allies. Nothing much here that's useful for routing, but it was fun to mess around with item stats and flavour text. Here's an example of what I did: https://twitter.com/AzureStarPlayer/status/1339138161872576512?s=20

And finally, the formulas for how the game calculates damage. The good news is that I'm pretty sure I found them. The bad news is that I'm going to have to do some debugging in order to find out how it works. The issue is mainly due to me not really understanding the structure of actionscript. There are variables in the formulas that are declared somewhere that I can't see, and therefore I don't know what they are or what possible values they should have. My plan right now is to have the program spit out the values for those variables as I play the game, and hopefully from that I can deduce what they're meant to represent.

So that's what I've got so far. Nothing too impressive, but hopefully I'll have something in the coming weeks.