So, disclaimer that I'm very new to speedrunning in general, but eventually I do want to try one and FFVI is my favorite game. When I look on the leaderboard for Any% Glitchless, I see everything is either on SNES or a SNES leaderboard. Personally, I have the GBA version (trying to see about getting a DS with internal capture card to record with). Is there a reason nobody is using Advance? Is it just harder to record, or is there a gameplay-related reason?
Advance isn't really harder to record cause you can screen capture bizhawk or whatever the allowed emulator in obs.
There just hasn't been any community interest in running the GBA version. Either due to the evasion fix, not having a step route, first river manip, fish manip, and kefka's tower possibly clobbering your run.
The graphics and audio quality is another issue for some of us. Since the GBA didn't have a brightness toggle on the console the greens were spiked way to high to increase brightness, the audio got quite a big decrease.
I have done a GBA All Characters and Espers Glitchless run and also on Steam. Unpopular opinion I found the steam version to be more enjoyable but your mileage may vary of course.
Maybe my turn for an unpopular opinion but I like the GBA audio. But then, I don't have anything to compare against. Can you explain more about things like evasion fix, river manip, etc? I've only ever played casually; was planning to start with Kefka at Narshe runs to build up familiarity. But if there's that many gameplay differences between Advance and SNES that can handicap me, I may need to see about getting an emulator.
In the Snes version physical evasion doesn't work and everything is governed by magic evasion, it is easier to stack magic evasion than it is physical evasion.
The first time you go down the lete river you can get anywhere between 1 - 9 encounters, we manip the river to consistently give us 2. Same with the cid and the fishing if you have one set up, we can guarantee a 4 cycle healing to get him out of bed where on gba/steam you are just hoping for the best
The run uses a step route so we know where all encounters are and what they will be. The snes increments the seed value depending on how many resets and where you reset, where the gba is frame based so it makes it quite a bit difficult to always be on the same seed which is needed for most manipulations. It especially helps us in Kefka's Tower to avoid any unrunnable encounters
Ohhh that makes sense now. So it's not that the gameplay is slower or anything, but it's less reliable to run Advance because we can't manipulate as well? (Also: thanks so much for taking the time to explain all this to a noob like me. I really appreciate it).
Well gameplay will be slower cause the gba runs slower than the snes (60.0988 for snes vs 59.7154 for the gba)
With something like the WIIVC which runs at 59.97 vs the snes 60.0988 you lose 2.8 seconds per 20 minutes. so with the gba it would be slightly more time but not much more. WIIVC also has the possibility to be faster due to it not emulating lag properly but we are kind of getting off course at that point.
Even if there isn't a board and you want to do a run cause you enjoy it you should go for it.
nodnod I see! Yeah, I did notice there were no Advance runs on any of the boards. I think I will at least try one, see how it goes. At least do Kefka at Narshe.
There are some GBA notes floating around. As far as I know the only one who has put some effort into it is Satarack : (see old resource site: https://sites.google.com/site/ff6speedruns/speedruns/english-gba-route), so if you want a potential starting point, you might be able to use that!
But for the most part it's fairly similar to the SNES with some glitches fixed, and some things not doable (there are some GBA unique glitches though). I think it has the potential to be interesting, but I think most people see it being a little too similar to the SNES version with some things removed via the things Dyne suggested.
I'm with you - I do enjoy the GBA version casually - and while the audio is objectively worse than the SNES version (GBA had a 8-bit audio channel and likely added compression on top of that), I think it's not as big of a deal as people tend to make it out to be. I only noticed it when playing on emulator - when I played on an actual GBA on crappy headphones when it came out - not like I could tell the difference.
