I found an exploit to mash really quickly. PMniac got a 2′02″ with it. I guess he’s gonna go for sub, he got a sick 1 cycle Dragon.

Regardless of whether or not Syena even knows the exploit and is using it, his run still looks terribly odd. It all happens in the Dragon fight (2′05″ run). The Dragon’s movements are much slower than the movement I’ve seen in other videos (I guess that’s what he meant with “lag”), and at the end of the fight he is able to shoot something like 10 Shuriken in a row, when the game has a maximum of 3 Shuriken on screen at a time. I tested whether that count for bounced-backed Shuriken, and at least in the original version it does, so the amount of mashing Syena does is impossible unless DX was changed to allow for throwing more Shuriken when they’re bounced back.

I can’t really do more than that without even owning the game. PMniac or someone else needs to figure shit out.

Edit: The exploit probably only works on PC btw, also PMniac got the quick Tanuki kill on DX with the exploit, I haven’t been able to do it in the original game. Can’t say whether it’s possible or not unless he tries it.

Edit: Nevermind PMniac is an idiot his run was 2 players. Not legit but it still proves the things it proved I guess.

^1 cycle dragon with shots to spare? What the fuck? lol

What’s his technique to mash?

Edit: His 2′05″ video shows that his previous best time was a 2′26″… I don’t know man, it’s hard to see any semblance of legitimacy in this guy. lol

First of all, why does it say his best time is 2′05 yet he only submitted a 2′13?

Anyway regardless of that, watch the second boss fight. Tanuki with penis. He kills the boss in like 10 less shots than anybody else in the world does, and everybody else always kills the boss at the same time consistently (to the point that makes me think the boss has some sort of “timer” that you can’t kill him before). Compare it for example to AwesomeNick94’s run:

He kills with the single shuriken after the 3rd jump, which is what happens every time I’ve ever seen that boss being killed. You can watch any of my runs or PMniac’s (although we do play on the original version rather than DX…) to confirm that.

Everything else looks like he could just be a really fast masher, but his mashing in that boss fight doesn’t look any better than anybody else’s and yet he kills an hour sooner than everybody else.

I’m not saying that he definitely cheated but his second boss fight looks really weird and I wanted to point that out. Maybe someone good at video editing can make a frame-by-frame comparison with other kills and show whether or not his quick kill makes sense.

“It only skips the Romun Fleet and obtaining the medallion afterwards, so 10-15 minutes is my estimate. I think an optimized Steam run would probably still be faster than an optimized Japanese run using the skip. Not sure by how much, though.”

Ravi just got 1:34′ a few days ago without the skip, so if your estimate is correct the Japanese version is definitely faster. :p

Back on the turbo issue… Can we add back the rules we had? Ban on Steam and allowed on Japanese. In Ravi’s latest PB he says he makes use of turbo.

Edit: I’m just watching Ravi’s run… he found a new route in Ud-Meiyu’s level which seems slightly faster! :O He goes on the upper path to get the Capla, then falls into the hole directly from that platform from above instead of taking the lower path. // I’m testing it and it seems to only save like 2 seconds… I don’t know if it’s worth doing. You get 2 kills less so that’s less experience and Emel. // His Limewater Cave grind looks good as well but it’s made less good by the early Limewater Cave route… finding the perfect strategy there would require so much testing…

Hmm… I don’t know, if all it’s doing is allow for slower double clicks I can’t see how it could be an advantage at high level.

Maybe that’s where some of the variance is coming from but there’s definitely difference to forcing 60fps rather than 61fps, I’ve never gotten anywhere near 2′15″50 with 61fps.

From the sound of it changing it would just make your run slower anyway so I wouldn’t be totally against it, but if there’s an actual time saving advantage to it I would be against it.

Huh, surprising. Your 60fps timing is more in line with my forced 61fps timing than the forced 60fps timing it seems. You got a sub 2′15″, ≈ 2′14″80 I’d say which is on the slow side but not on the forced 60fps slow side. I think I only really tested 60fps once and it gave me ≈ 2′15″50 (I get 2′14″20–70 with 61fps) and also by calculating it, 2′14″60 61fps would convert to 2′16″843… 60fps which seems extremely slow so maybe for whatever reason forcing 61fps is giving me normal 60fps speed.

Edit: So anyway my conclusion is that I’ll keep playing at forced 61fps. I may test more intro timings at forced 60fps but since it’s kind of a bother to do I don’t know if I will.

Edit: Wow in this old WR it actually took me 2′15″ and that was with uncapped fps so it should’ve been going at like 400fps:

^Just make a video of it with the timer please I’ll compare them myself. Run the timer until you can move around.

Could someone time their intro while only holding down Jump without mashing? I noticed Kiniamaro’s game runs at 60fps and his intro with mashing was pretty slow, but it still could’ve been just slow mashing so I need a comparison with just holding down Jump.

Edit: Calculated a 61fps 1:20′00″ run to convert to 1:21′20″ in 60fps so I would only be saving 1′20″ which is actually less than I thought. This doesn’t really prove anything one way or the other… so I still need somebody else to time their intro.

Considering it looks hand-drawn that map could be improvable. The 3rd from bottom square in the first image seems wrong, what looks like a left path really is just a straight path in the game, I didn’t even know there was a biforcation to the right there. Can still be helpful though.

With a quick Google search I found this: (starts from the midpoint). Comes from the North American Ys VI strategy guide.

@Korzic: and be faster than the Steam version. Ravi has an unsubmitted 1′38″ and his goal was a 1′35″ IIRC and I play much better than him. Edit: I forgot if you skip the Romun Fleet that means you’re skipping the Starlight Medal too, though. Which either means you’ll make the endgame extremely hard or a lot slower to grind more. Edit again: Ah, I think you meant you don’t skip all the cutscenes to start the Romun Fleet… only the last one? Then it doesn’t save that much… (and you actually do get the Lucky Silver Coin). If your estimate is right it’s still faster than the Steam version, though.

@Kiniamaro: Awesome to see more runners! What are you running it on? I saw you post the Vita maps. On PC, what I do is use the keyboard (dashjumps are super hard on pad) and this series of inputs: Up, Attack means press right after), mash Attack while holding Up. You can test out doing it anywhere in the game, you kinda have to press Attack with a quick timing after the dashjump but it’s not actually that quick, you could even manually time it if you wanted but I prefer mashing. I’m planning on eventually doing a commentary over my WR to explain all of the strategies and such, but first I need to hit a good WR (maybe sub 1:20′…).

Oh yeah and to stay on topic, seeing as the consensus is to ban turbo I’ll try more speedruns without it and see how it goes. If you actually have the time + will to grind it out you may be able to get used to the pain (happens for everyone with snaking in Mario Kart DS), but I don’t think I’ll be able to reach that point…

“hopefully with a Kishgal early entry included”

That would be amazing to see! I wonder if that route would be faster than the Steam version… how much of the game does it skip? I guess you can’t obtain the Lucky Silver Coin with it?

“For the Steam version, I kinda thought cancel + mash would be common knowledge?” It’s something Ys speedrunners are used to doing, but Matty has told me that he didn’t know it was faster for Ark (even though he did it out of habit). Also, I’m not an Ys speedrunner… I’m a lone Ark runner with nobody to share tech with. Edit: Oh and do you know why the mashing makes the text faster? I can easily gain a second in the intro, but when I compared my WR to my previous one I didn’t gain anything on 2 other cutscenes that are 2+ minutes.

I’m 99.99% certain Ravi used turbo, yes (should be easy to tell if we look at his item-get menus, I never did).

I didn’t know that about cutscenes for the Japanese version. Sounds like an iffy subject… if it’s too closely relatable to hacking the ROM, then it should be banned, but I have no idea how it actually works.

So did your run have constant mashing? (Dialogues, movement.) I don’t remember whether you used the mouse as much as I do (pretty much the whole game except battles), but if so, how did you cope with the pain of mashing for 2 straight hours?

Edit: Also why haven’t you submitted your run, Korzic?

lol I was playing devil’s advocate why did you give up so quickly.

Are you seriously saying to not do a time saving trick in a speedrun?

My best segments are quite optimized. A sub 1′20″ would be very optimal given the current strats. I’ve been thinking maybe not getting the Lucky Silver Coin could be faster since it takes so long to get it, but it’d make the run harder, is all up to RNG anyway, and is hard to test.

Try speedrunning this game, then say that again. Before, you could rest your arm during cutscenes, now, the run is 1h30′ of non-stopping mashing. I don’t want to go to the hospital for playing a game. I feel physically in pain speedrunning this game now. My WR run was affected by this and I dropped inputs because of the pain. Why should anybody be forced to go through that?

I could easily do multiple runs in a row before, now, after one run, I have to stop playing. There’s no reason to allow this. It’s just poisonous to the community at this point.

Edit: It might be dialogue-dependent. Really hard to tell… needs proper testing. Boring.

News, people: I’ve recently found out that the best way to skip dialogue is not only holding down Jump, but mashing Attack at the same time. I’ve done a few speedruns with this new knowledge, and almost injured my arm. The mouse-clicking mashing was retarded enough, but cutscene mashing brings the speedrun to a whole new level. I am now in favor of using turbo for the Attack button. I probably won’t bother speedrunning the game again if it won’t be allowed. On that note, does anybody know what program I should use or whatever in order to set a button (say, R2 on my gamepad) to turbo Attack?

Little more in-depth: by manually mashing, I’ve been able to make the intro cutscene 2 seconds faster (from ≈ 2′14″90 to ≈ 2′12″90). I haven’t actually done any other precise tests like that, so there is the small chance that it only helps for the intro (lol I wish). It should probably be confirmed first (I just finished a WR run with mashing cutscenes, can probably do rough comparisons with it soon), but if it’s confirmed that mashing through dialogues speeds them all up, then yeah, fuck that. Turbo should be allowed.

I don’t know about other games but this one works like I’ve said. You’re welcome to try and find a value that my calculator gets wrong.

http://alaktorn.wrvids.com/Ys_VI_Experience_Calculator.php (Thanks a lot to my friend Julian who helped me reverse-engineer the formula and code the calculator.)

First of all, I’m still working on collecting the data and I have no idea how to call the enemies. Can we come up with names for all of them? I don’t think there are official ones except for bosses, right?

Here’s how Experience works: enemies have a base level and base experience value (this is in red in my calculator), and a formula is applied to the value to determine your experience. Base experience is usually base level with a 5 stuck at the end (ferret enemies base lvl = 1, base exp = 15), with a few special enemies having a × 4 multiplier (Geis, bombs) and oddly the bugs/spiders give slightly lower exp than expected (base lvl = 8, exp = 79). “bonus” is the Starlight Medal, if equipped = 1.5, otherwise 1.0 (no change). The formula (in pseudocode) is this: if Adol’s lvl ≤ base lvl then floor(base EXP × bonus × 1.2 ^ min(base lvl − Adol’s lvl, 3)) else floor(base EXP × bonus ÷ 2 ^ (Adol’s lvl − base lvl)) end min() is a PHP function that picks the smallest number within the parenthesis, basically what this means is that the number can’t be bigger than 3, you’ll notice that after incrementing 3 times the number is unchanging in the calculator. If your level is higher than the enemy’s base level the second formula is used and heavy experience scaling begins (basically the value halves with each higher level).

I started grabbing the “to next level” values too but idk about a formula for them yet: lvl1 150 lvl2 455 lvl3 760 lvl4 1065 lvl5 1370 lvl6 1676 lvl7 1980 = + 305 lvl8 2286 = + 306 lvl9 2591 = + 305 lvl10 2895 = + 304 lvl11 3201 = + 306 lvl12 3506 lvl13 3811 lvl14 4116 lvl15 4421 = + 305

lvl44 13269 lvl45 13573 = + 304 lvl46 13879 = + 306 lvl47 14184 lvl48 14489 lvl49 14794 lvl50 15099 = + 305