Sorry if I'm doing a forum no-no, it's my first time using one. Anyways, like the title says, has anyone really considered doing a glitchless run of this game? I've been working on a proof of concept run over the past couple of days for Dark Wizard, mostly for easy routing (demon breath and intelligence are a vile cocktail), and I think it's certainly doable, though quite risky. Taking emulator assistance into account (reloaded a couple states to retry bosses quickly and sped up non-mashable text), I'm looking at about 3 hrs 10 min (3 hr real time) going into Demon's Tower. If anyone's around to hear, I'd like to route/run glitchless for all the classes, so if that interests you, maybe give me a holler.

Glitchless priestess is gonna give me conniptions, but it's my favorite class, haha.

Glitchless is a neat idea. With the easy Power Wine and duping accessible, every class basically gets boiled down to "Do SOMETHING to get to boat, dupe wine, melee everything til win". The main reason I didn't do much with it myself is just how much money and consumable farming matters in a glitchless playthrough. I dupe healing items even when I play casually now. It just smooths the game over so much.

Off the top of my head I'd say a glitchless run would forbid duping, Camille dialogue skip (not that that's RTA viable...), and clone herb glitch.

My DW run on the board dupes SP items but otherwise is glitchless. Course the SP items would account for a lot of time :)

Anyway if you put down a run I'll put together a category for it. Would be neat to see more people experiment with SS2.

I'm also interested to see what folks could do with glitchless runs. It's definitely just a matter of getting runs submitted, as none of us that have runs up have done fully glitchless ones with intent to have them put up on a leaderboard. I put my full support behind getting a category up if you pull it off! Finances/healing items can be kinda brutal to keep stocked in this game without dupes so I would love to see what kind of tricks and routes can be made to mitigate that as much as possible.

Groovy, and thanks, y'all! Didn't notice earlier about that DW run, Trysdyn. Just got through watching it. Looks like we ran into a lot of the same issues (dmg fell off, Volcano boss is mean, super squishy character)... only you smoked me, haha!

Alrighty, the prototype glitchless run's been submitted. It's under any% right now, since there's no category for it at the moment. There's definitely lots of room for improvement here. I was way overleveled in trying to make sure I could get Demon's Breath Lv6, and although being able to snipe archers in Chaos Castle from off-screen made me smile, it might be better to just bite the bullet and stick with Lv5 Breath and some Meditation. Also, for this run, I copied Trysdyn's 90hp vs my original 75. I like the squishier build, but I'm not sure the extra intelligence is worth it, since spell damage seems to mostly be based on spell lv and enemy resistances.

As for more general aspects of glitchless, I noticed that treasure chests could be a good option for money and gear, and the rpgclassics site has the location for them, which I didn't know until this afternoon. Doing Ipa's palace shop is probably worth it, too. I had thought to take advantage of the cheaper candy SP items, but not having cheap HP items is agony later, really not worth it unless you never get hit. That brings me to Angel Wings. I know they're slow, but not only are they a roughly 15 second full heal, they only cost 80 g. Not only that, but apparently Angela can "throw" you if you move as you come back (or you can charge an attack on the way down). For rooms with really nasty mobs, but no special enemy to take out, it could let us jump over things like golems that wall you out. Also, I completely bork inventory management during the run, but I think it might be slightly better to place healing items toward the bottom and let loot fill the top, that way loot doesn't immediately sit in between your heals and make things difficult when shopping. Speaking of shopping, Valuing Scrolls should probably be saved to prioritize armor in the late game (Demon Tower and onward). If there's no mod, the armor should be worth significantly more than a weapon. Lastly, I think (for now), I'll list out guaranteed sources of money to reduce reliance on drops. Shoe from Goblin Fort (500 g), Princess Robe from Camille's cell in Wizari's Palace (20x g), Parasol from Fairy Spring (3rd stolen Hobbit item) and tell Elder Rich Girl 'No' (3000 g), apples sometimes found in the shop (random?) or in the field (random) can be given to the blue-robed dogman left of the throne room repeatedly (300 g, 150 g net gain if bought). Minus the apples, that comes to about 3700 g, enough to clear a few stages on that alone while building up finances.

Sorry for the novel. I realize most of this is probably old news to current runners of this game, but who knows?

A lot of this is news to me. I use wings for the power wine quest and that's it. Using them for a cheap heal is probably worth it. I cannot understate how much healing items and money seems like a barrier in glitchless.

Definitely save scrolls for later stuff. You'll probably need more gear checkpoints than a duping run though. We ignore most gear checkpoints by getting drunk-- then again you're using magic almost exclusively. I suspect in a DW run the play will be to never get hit. Not easy though.

FourthHorn uses the shoe in Goblin Fort and I use the robe in Wizari for cash influxes if we need them. I think you've got most of the good guaranteed cash sources here.

I set up the Glitchless category. Hopefully I didn't bust anything in the process of doing so (:

Thanks! As far as I know, the category setup was just fine. For now, I'm just doing a little route practice (seeing what rooms can be run through, and what to bonk for the ones that need a little clearing. Rpgclassics has been a godsend for that.), as well as going through each class (normal and advanced) to get the shop inventories into a spreadsheet. So far, got the archer, brawler, and bits of everything else but ninja (would be formulaic progression if it weren't for the stinkin' armor :P). Honestly, I think the money route is more intimidating than it is dangerous (thus far). Having an effective budget does wonders to mitigating that, hence the spreadsheet. My run has a little better than average drop luck and is overleveled, but I waste double-cost healing items constantly and still pull through with a couple thousand g left over, I think. Still, I can see how melee classes would be harried (wpn and armor bills, lots of heals, Ipa's palace is pretty much necessary). They do have the advantage of only worrying about atk and dex checkpoints for damage (from both gear and levels, where mages require story checkpoints) and making consistent use of the after-charge attack should ease a lot of mob pressure.

Ah, right, I think I've got that quick charge bug/intended feature down now, too. So, it looks like if you swap items/hit R while charging an attack/spell, your charge level resets, but the recharge (if just holding A) goes a little faster. This can be done several times until you charge up to level 7 pretty much instantly. Honestly, I think this is an intentional feature so you can heal yourself or toss an item to a friend but not waste as much time charging again afterwards. I can say with some certainty, though, that it doesn't have much application for a speedrun. You just have to reset the charge too many times to get a really good speed, may as well just charge once, especially since using the L/R buttons lags the game (from Fon kun's Advanced RpgLb submission, tried it myself and seems to be the case). This makes me sad. I love spamming the little item menus :( (Probably not the right thread for this, but...)

Oh, this is a bit relevant, as well. Did some spell damage testing at different stat and skill lv combos. I determined the following against normal mode goblin fort enemies using Demon Breath (45-50 RES across the board):

• Spell damage is mostly determined by charge level
• Meditate does Not affect spell damage at all
• Increasing spell skill lv Does increase damage for the same charge (lv1 in this case)
• Book lv does Not affect the spell damage at all, only access to charge levels
• Spells seem to have a wonky "base damage" when accounting for resistances. Demon Breath did 178-189 damage to Dark enemies (90 res) and 455-530 dmg to Light enemies (10 res). Needs more testing, but maybe 100 res isn't immunity? Would open up options.

Slightly less relevant, but this game has "sour spot" xp, like the Diablo series. If you're too low level for certain dungeons, you get reduced (capped) xp. This cap increases when you level up, presumably until the enemy's base xp is reached. So, I guess it's possible that if we kill too few mobs it might hurt the level route. Still, boss xp alone should have us at Lv11, I think, by Chaos Castle (not sure if this applies to boss xp, but that would suck). This mostly applied to Advance mode, it seems.