As of right now a Summoner community does not exist but I hope that we can build one. This is a really awesome game, known for it's excellent story and character development - all of which will be completely ignored as we try to beat this game as fast as possible.
If you have any interest in getting involved, please don't hesitate to post in this thread! We want to get as many people in on the action as possible.
The game is available on steam, usually <$5 so it is very inexpensive to get started.
Coincidently I replayed this game recently and looked at speedrunning it but it's such a frustrating game to go fast in given how hit detection works and that every enemy in the game can inflict slow plus koing your party over and over to exit levels gets old fast. I put a route together. But can't see me try to run this. I also couldn't find a way to activate the boss fight in Ikaemos without using the daggers even after "glitching" into the room, the caverns of wolong can't be skipped without unlocking summon so I don't see a way to make that faster. Pretty much every boss was pyros ring + meteor scroll spam. Without a fast summon like Blackfire, Blood or Spirit of Lahara Iona is slow. BAckstab might be useful if you can get enough levels on Flece but then you'd need another person to tank.
If you want to bounce some ideas around I might be able to help.
Hey Radge,
I thought the same originally too, and I believed it would be a real mission to run this game, but I have discovered so many things and I believe there are a lot of improvements to be made. Originally I thought I was looking at a 4-5 hour run, and was surprised to get sub 3:30, and my latest route is looking closer to 2:30! I think it would be great if you decided to give it a go, and see if we can continue to improve.
I also couldn't glitch the Ikaemos boss, he just stands in the room invulnerable, but it's still a possibility.
I'm working on caverns of wolong, although it isn't a big an issue as the iona catacombs. I would love to find a skip for the catacombs, or at least a better strategy.
I tried to work with Backstab, but even with Sornehan dagger, maxed backstab, and rings of slaying to boost it, you still have to try to land a perfect hit, and even then you will not always get the maximum damage from it - plus most of the enemies you want to use it on can't be tripped.
It's a shame about not having summons at that point in the game, but summons are becoming more a part of my new route. I'm trying to find more uses for the exploit you can see in this clip:
Feel free to post in here, or private message me, or even message me on steam (Framedump), but either way thanks for the reponse :)
I'm not sure how movement speed works in this game. As far as I can tell the character speed stat determines how fast a character can move in the world and unless in solo mode the group moves at the speed of the slowest party member. Some summons are much faster than Joseph, Jekhar, Rosalind or Flece and in some situations but unless you can run into a trigger with a summon which warps the party it's useless.
Also, there seems to be an infinite money exploit at the start of the game where if your inventory is empty you can sell 3 health tonics and get them back by loading a new area, but it's not fast.
That seems to be the case, so there are very few opportunities to exploit the move speed of the summons - best case scenario you can save yourself some seconds here and there. The only real advantage is being able to summon through walls, which I'm still trying to find more uses for - the only other use currently is during the salamanka fight, you can beat his first phase, then exit the area without having to finish him, which is a strategy I'll be using in my next run. You can also use this for future visits to the sewers to use a blocked exit, but it won't save you any time.
I'm aware of this money exploit too and I wanted to use it, but as it turns out, money isn't going to be a problem anyway, unless there are some ridiculously expensive items that can give us a big improvement.
tbh my biggest issue at the moment is the first ikaemos boss fight - all I'm doing is kicking him to death, and it can really be messed up by the RNG of his paralysis.. I have to keep curing Jekhar or Flece and it really slows it down. If I could come up with a better strategy for this fight it would be great.
I was using summons to move around in areas you need to go to for items/triggers but not return to like the Iona catacombs, Ikaemos Palace and areas you just run into a trigger like returning to Iona. Their speed plus the ability to instantly KO them when they are far away from Joseph is handy though I needed to equip the ring of darkness before solving the catacombs puzzle so Blackfire Elemental had enough HP.
Yeah, I had enough money to buy everything to last until returning to Wolong at leaving Lenele after getting the Ring of Fire and Stone quests. Then in Wolong I had enough for the rest of the game from Boss drops and the Bow in the caverns. I guess you'd want to time if exploiting the health tonic trick is faster than getting amethysts in the palace.
My Ikaemos Priest King strat was the same as my strat for non multiple enemy or fire resistant bosses. Namely solo mode with highest level character and spam meteor scrolls while moving at least one party member without aggro far enough away so they can survive. It seems as though you can spam as many as needed without the game paused and even if the person using them is KO'd the damage from the scrolls they used is still counted. If you want to improve survivability pick up the Pyros Ring in the Giant Salamanka fight and there is the option to buy more when returning to Saanavarh.
About survivability, a chainmail tunic and chainmail leggings only costs 15000 and is available as early as after getting the ring of fire but faster when returning to Lenele under siege and that offers 55 protection. I don't know if a haramaki is better in any fight because I don't know which bosses use piercing, if any.
I sort of uninstalled the game and deleted my saves a week ago because going fast in this game is annoying and speedrunning in general sucks. I might be persuaded to reinstall it if you need help.
I'll have to give it a go in the catacombs with blackfire,, I'll be happy to make any improvements there.
This strategy with the meteor scrolls is what I'm using now too.. but I found that it will really only count the damage from about 10 scrolls at a time. This is more apparent on bigger bosses like the demon of light. I spam 10x Meteor scrolls, then 20x inferno, then start casting meteor again, but waiting for the visual effect to be seen, then repeat. I haven't tried meteor on the ikaemos boss yet, but ill try that out.
As far as equipment goes, I've almost done away with it entirely - the only thing I really need is the frozen club early on so that jekhar has a blunt weapon. I won't even bother farming the Debassers like I did in the run shown here. Any valuable gear that I pick up I'd rather just sell it to get more scrolls. At this point I can have 200k+ at wolong, which is more than enough for the rest of the game.
I understand how you feel about this game, and I do agree that it is a bit of a bitch to speedrun, although there are a lot of games that are far worse. For me though I kinda feel like this is payback for all my time spent trying to beat this game on PS2 years ago :D If you were to reinstall, I could give you my saves, which are at various points in the game.
At the moment I'm still working on the guide, and should have it completed by the end of the week, and I have plans to start streaming, and I'll be running this game at some point - hopefully I should have that sorted next week.
Is anyone else actively running the game at this point? I've managed to get a 2:57:19 with only minor changes to the existing route, and a 2:51 sum of best. I plan on looking into a better way of killing the first Ikaemos boss soon, the only thing I have on that so far is that any leftover Icicle scrolls you have deal some damage to him (11-18 each, so not great, but more reliable than melee)
No problem, I sort of figured that I should give it some time considering the holidays and all. I'm just glad there is actually a route for this game since it's a game I loved back on the PS2. Also had some other thoughts about changing the route, mainly buying more inferno scrolls at Iona so that there's no need to farm the merchant encounter in the late game, but haven't done any work on it lately.
Thanks for being understanding.
Your run is really amazing! and verified now. There are some nice improvements that I liked.
I've discovered some things since my last run that will improve your run by 5-10 minutes, but I would still like to find something more significant. The thing that bugs me the most is the caverns of Woolong.. however I really enjoyed your inferno trick for knocking back the minotaurs, which saves an invisibility pot :D
Yeah, that inferno trick is pretty handy in a lot of places if you think you're about to get hit :D especially against fast enemies it can buy you some time/distance. Plus I like having that last invisibility for the final run through Lenele. I tried invisibility scrolls for the same effect, but they don't really work very well.
Yeah, as far as I can tell, the invisibility potions don't work at all.
I'm going to make some attempts tomorrow, and I'll be using some of the newer strategies. One question though, when mass buying scrolls, are you clicking really fast or just using a macro?
When I'm buying scrolls, I use two fingers from my left hand on the left mouse button to click really fast.
Also, I noticed in your run that right after you kill Titus, Rosalind tries to heal herself while standing in the wall of fire, and when she heals and takes damage at the same time, the damage on her ramped up to something like 80,000 in a couple seconds. I'm wondering if there might be a way to exploit that against bosses.
I never noticed this.. I wonder what would be causing that. I'll look into it a bit :)
Are there any other things that you are looking at?
I don't know of anything else I'm looking at right now that I have any good leads on. One thing I would really like to find is a better way of dealing with Galienne than relying on Jekhar to kick her to death, but I don't even know what to try.
Yeah she is a pretty horrible boss, but that was the only thing that I found to be effective.You have to get quite lucky for that fight to go quickly.
I have no leads either, although I think there is more to the mist elemental trick as used in the trials - you can also use this trick to beat the salamanka after the first phase, which saves a bit of time - but I haven't found anywhere else for it to be effective. If you could summon in the caverns of woolong, you would be able to skip most of it by using the door which you open from the other side after being healed.
Managed a decent run - although I totally forgot where to go at some parts - it's going on youtube now and should be available in a little while:
The route changes are:
- Watch video for new combat manipulation in Mosad to save some time (stupid push chain attack)
- Don't bother with buying icicle scrolls before first Khosani, because we skip the boss.
- At the ring of fire boss (Salamanka) just go solo mode and send the party members to the exit gate. The boss should die to auto-attacks in the meantime. After the first phase cutscene, do the mist elemental trick to exit (don't forget to grab the ring he drops after first phase).
- Buy 10-20 icicle scrolls, and the rest on inferno.
- Kill everything with inferno.
- New First dagger route in Ikaemos Palace because we can abuse inferno more (see video).
- Same route as usual up to Woolong.
- On your way out of the Caverns, make sure to pick up the bow next to the switch just after the Healing Spring part. You can sell this to another vendor in Woolong for a lot, then go buy stuff. I aimed for ~700 inferno, ~200 meteor, 50+ healing pots. Also make sure you have 50+ icicle for Pyrul. I bought a little extra of everything just to be safe.
- Use a combo of meteor/inferno on Titus/Luminar/Machival to kill faster. This worked a bit better in practice, but i think the time on the video is still pretty alright.
- Meteor is also good to kill off party members if need be.
- Another thing to note is that your running speed through Lenele is slower than mine. I use Flece more often because she seems to run a bit faster, and also keep the camera in 'high' mode. If you compare the videos side-by-side you will be able to see the difference.
Honestly I thought this would save a lot more time, but i screwed up pretty bad in some places. I think there needs to be some major improvements found, otherwise this will just be a long ass run and the best time will just depend on how lucky the combat/AI RNG is.
It looks like you had some really bad luck in a lot of places during the run, and I'm still not a big fan on using Meteor although I like the idea of using it to kill off party members efficiently. I think I'll finally have some time to do a few runs this weekend and I'll probably be aiming for sub 2:40. I would love to see this run get down to around 2 hours, but I don't think that's likely to happen without some kind of new major skip or glitch.
