Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards FAQ

--Heyyy, this doesn't follow the TCG rules!

This game is a spiritual successor of the Game Boy Color game Dark Duel Stories. The TCG wasn't around when that game was made. The card game itself was barely a thing in Japan at that time.

Personally, I find this ruleset to be very interesting as it allows for a lot of flexibility. Some of the better plays you see in this run wouldn't be possible in the actual card game. It's a different experience.

--Will you ever speedrun Dark Duel Stories?

Probably not. Acquiring cards in that game is a REALLY SLOW process.

--Why Japanese?

Text. The game is laggy enough as it is (about 1/4 of the run is lag)--English text would make it worse. It should be noted that this RNG manipulation should still work on the English version.

--RNG?

Random Number Generator, a device used by many games to determine "random" events. In most games, the RNG advances every frame (roughly 1/60th of a second), making it difficult to manipulate.

--This is different?

This game is not like most games.  In this game, the RNG is advanced through NPC movement (outside of cutscenes) and changing cards in your deck. Exactly how the RNG is affected will need to be thoroughly researched at some point.

What's important now is that consistent movement and changing cards at the same place every time can give you and your opponent the same cards every time.

I will apologize right now to any TCG veterans offended by some of the plays that will be made. When you know what's coming at you and you're trying to get through it as fast as you can, you'll be doing things that would look moronic in an actual card game setting. Gotta save them frames, though.

--So what kind of time do you think is possible?

I have done a theory TAS (basically a regular tool-assisted speedrun without using frame advance) with this route and the absolute limit I am capable of is around 43:56. You can watch a video of the TAS here:

http://youtu.be/92MzRA8_ThU

or, you can get the BizHawk emulator at TASVideos, a Japanese ROM, and the BizHawk movie file linked below:

Note: I used BizHawk 1.9.0 to record this movie. I cannot guarantee that the movie will not desync with later versions.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4almnl6d79672wa/Yu-Gi-Oh%21%20Duel%20Monsters%207%20-%20Kettou%20Toshi%20Densetsu%20%28Japan%29.bk2?dl=0