Nightmare:

Start of fight 2 possibilities:

1. go to Adol and punch, 2. stay up (rarer); this is RNG so any mixture of the two is possible.

When ≤ 1536HP:

1. fly away and do the pollen attack, 2. go to Adol and punch (rare), 3. stay up (even rarer). All these behaviors are RNG so you might get 2 pollens in a row or 2 punches in a row, I’ve had 5 or 6 punches in a row happen, but only 2 pollen in a row strangely enough, but I’ve had a sequence of pollen ×2 → stay up → pollen again, which would lose a ton of time if it’s not hittable.

When ≤ 1152HP:

Same stuff but pollen becomes spawning minions; it can still do it but it’s fairly rare. At this point the lower its HP the more minions it will spawn at once.

Each pollen attack loses like 12″ if it’s not hittable. So the strategy is get it to 1537HP, wait for it to lock in the punch action, then deal as much damage as you can and if it goes perfectly I think you can skip the pollen phase entirely. Then you just keep dealing as much dmg as you can while killing fireflies on dead time, if you still need Emel it’s best to drop Zonplas to like 20HP so it spawns the maximum amount of minions at once.

Edit: Actually after rewatching our PBs I don’t think manipulation is even necessary. You always just get 1 pollen attack anyway even with bad manipulation… you just need the RNG to be able to hit. If manipulation could skip it entirely reliable it would be good, but I haven’t even gotten it once; maybe on Hard it would work. Edit: Of course as soon as I say that I get a run where manipulation would’ve helped me.

For Normal the HP threshold is 640HP and you can actually skip the pollen attack entirely with perfect execution. I think it would be too hard to do in a run though, so I don’t think it’s useful.

I wrote an autosplitter and something like “split when audio goes mute” is too hard for me to program so I made it split the moment the Ark dies. Which, to be honest, makes a lot more sense to me I don’t even know why we were waiting for the game to go mute.

I hope people have no issue with this change? I can go and personally edit all the current submissions to correct their timing if people agree.

Clearly my WR is a billion years old and tons of new tricks and such have been found since. I just tried a route where you forgo killing spiders after Demi-Galba and just go for the flowers until you’re high enough to kill bombs, turns out getting to that level (9) takes 1′05″ on a good run which is technically slightly faster than grinding/farming spiders, but the lv1 Livart is ass for killing the moles so it probably loses time in the end, also it’s harder than pulling off Nightmare 100% deathless so I sure hope it’s not faster, I don’t wanna do it.

I looked at my Normal/Hard/NM runs and calculated more or less if the starting NM route would save time for Normal too, it seems to be very slightly worse but it’s hard to say. Stuff: 11′14″ v. 14′51″ Geis black screen 14′02″ v. 16′25″ exit Port = 2′48″ v. 1′34″ = −1′14″ 23′49″ v. 27′36″ exit peak = 9′47″ v. 11′11″ ≈ +13″ 13′40″ hard 25′25″ with 50″ death = 10′55″ so skipping spiders and lv2 Livart saves ≈ 1′14″ but then you lose too much going for the Wing and teleporting I guess… Note that my Normal run gets the Limewater mid teleport and picks up both the armor and shield at Grana-Vallis I think, and the other two runs don’t.

Night63 and I found out like yesterday that the Emelas Crown has a secret + 4 Luck bonus, and an all-Luck equipment might be best for the speedruns, you get a lot of crits. Rehdan Shield +3, Emelas Crown +4, Lucky Silver Coin +6. For Zonplas Galba Shield is a lot faster though, not sure how crit dmg calculation works. All-Luck seems good for the endgame though.

Lots of things to investigate and test, I’ll try to fill up my EXP calculation page with more minibosses and stuff to see if any grinding could be done better.

Since Steam version has the character run at a slower speed, and the ILs already accounted for that with the split, I went ahead and also split the full game runs.

So there is a pending run that uses different audio from the game one. I assume you can just swap out files in the “music” folder to achieve this… but personally, I would consider this like a kind of hacking and I wouldn’t allow it. Imagine this example: what if someone put something like a metronome into the game by swapping audio files, to aid with the frame-perfect flying glitch timing? In a game such as this where you can get very close to frame perfection (hold right for great justice), this is probably feasible. I would definitely consider that cheating.

I know of another game where people have banned WRs due to edited audio (or even textures)– Mario Kart Wii. In that community it was decided that all changes to the game, no matter how small (audio or just some textures) are considered cheating, and that’s also my stance.

I’ve been looking into autosplitters recently, and made one for Ys Origin Toal runners. I was thinking that since this game has wildly different load times depending on the PC (just compare RTA and IGT of the Hard 1.2 runs), it would be much better for everyone if we made an autosplitter that doesn’t run during load times, so that everyone is on the same page (this is a thing that’s possible and other people use it in other games).

So was just wondering, what do people think? I’m not sure what would happen to the current runs, maybe they can be retimed to remove load times. I think having an autosplitter that starts, splits, and ends the run automatically while removing load times would be the ultimate perfect goal.

I didn’t even know this run existed before Korzic told me during the relay event so I’m posting it here. Looks like Normal routing just got even more complicated…

I kinda feel like doing a speedrun on Nightmare difficulty but I’m not sure what the route should be. Probably very similar to Normal, but I don’t even remember what the differences are in Nightmare. Do enemies have more HP? I know they give the same amount of EXP at least, as I had to test that for my calculator.

Edit: OK so enemies do have significantly more HP (even in speedrun mode you can see this from boss HP). The ferrets have ≈ 40HP on Normal but ≈ 100HP on Nightmare. If bombs do as well, the Normal grinding route would be impossible unless we grind the spiders a bit more or something.

Damage taken is also significantly more. On Normal, ferrets deal 3–4HP, on Nightmare they deal 7 or 9HP. That means diving the Limewater Cave for equips would be really hard on Nightmare as you’d probably die in 2 hits, maybe 1…

Edit: Oh god, I forgot Nightmare also introduces the glowing enemies…

Oh my god Demi-Galba is literally impossible even at level 3. The arms OHKO you, the right arm seems to have a giant increased hitbox as I can almost never dodge it (or maybe I just got bad), the left arm is a lot easier to dodge. The flame attack at the start homes at you so it’s a lot harder to dodge (I think you have to run across the bottom of the map after you get 1 attack in). At least you can survive 2 hits of it if you’re not critted. I have no idea how to dodge it if he does it while you’re under him. Also the boss has 480HP instead of 200.

OMG I just got a double hit by delaying the attack to the limit. O_o Lmao just spent the whole fight trying to get the double hit and I only got it twice, but I actually survived the whole fight and killed him. XD

Double hit vid: youtube.com/watch?v=CpnhUj-U0ck

I think I remember now the trick to dodging the right arm was to not stay directly under its armpit when doing the attack.

So despite having gotten consistent at dodging the arms, beating it at level 3 still is really hard and basically RNG. I can take 2 flame attacks, but if he does 3 I die because I don’t know how to dodge it (it’s a 3HKO). What’s worse is that if you’re level 4, the flame doesn’t knock you down, so a single attack will combo you 3 times and kill you. // Decided that level 3 is the way to go. Dash attacks may be faster, but they’re much harder to handle. If you’re unlucky 1 homing flame can combo you twice or deal 37 damage instead of 35 so it’s possible to die early (you have 71HP).

Demi-Galba vid: youtube.com/watch?v=HaCw5nmL64c

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.

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

Here’s a retarded find I made today. Know why my speedruns don’t use 3 small skips? My PC literally doesn’t allow for them. I play in 800 × 600 resolution (any higher and my PC shits itself), which makes it impossible to do the Limewater Cave glitched jump up to the Capla Water and the Geis death cutscene skip. I found this out when by mistake, while trying for the umpteeth time to do the LWC glitched jump, I double clicked the game window which made it go into full screen. I then proceeded to get the jump 15 times in a row. If I play in full screen, with no other external programs going (I tested– can’t be streaming while doing it, can’t be recoding a video), I’m able to get the jump every time, easy.

I’ve been wondering for the longest of times whether my potato PC was giving me longer load times than other people (this happens to me in another speedrun I have WR in– Youyou Kengeki Musou), but finding out that resolution affects glitched game behaviours was a first. I presume this is also why Ghostking is able to easily get the skips in Ys Origin, while most other people have had troubles with them.

I was kind of thinking to switch into full screen for those few skips in my next runs, but like I said before, after testing while streaming, even at full screen the skips don’t work (not to mention the stream cuts off as soon as I go full screen, and it would only record a black screen for its duration anyway). I’m not sure why. The game does tend to slow down / start lagging for me if I’m streaming full screen, so I guess that might be why. I don’t know whether the strongest, best PC will always have the advantage or if there is some sort of in-between sweet spot where a certain PC can give you the best outcome. Just felt like sharing this.

TL;DR: PC speedrunning sucks. Especially if you have a potato like me.

Edit: If you read down you’ll find that this game’s behaviour depends on the fps, if nothing else’s working you can use DxTory (frame limiter program) to force 61fps (read below) to make the game work as intended. http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1820131

I really wish my time would be reflected as the WR that it is. Between the runners of this game versions 1.0 and 1.2 are considered separate since the AI glitch was fixed for version 1.2 and that makes it very different.

Sorry, didn’t know where to post this.

I think a week ago I submitted a Ninja Senki speedrun, but it still doesn’t appear on the charts. Should I just wait more? How does it work?