Forbidden Memories Any% (Disc Swaps) FAQ

Q - What in the world is this?
A - This is a "glitched run" of Yu-Gi-Oh Forbidden Memories where the goal is to beat the game as quickly as possible.  No modded versions like 15-card are used, and no RNG manipulation is used either (although it is allowed).

Q - Okay but how are you even glitching?
A - There is a "card" in this game known as #000.  To obtain this card, the game needs to be unable to find a valid card drop when a duel ends.  To ensure this happens, as the duel ends, I will be swapping out my Forbidden Memories game disc for a copy of Big League Slugger Baseball, which has a very small filesize, so that absolutely nothing is found where drop tables normally are (I think).  After #000 is obtained, I can swap back to my Forbidden Memories disc and continue playing as normal.

Q - What glitch effects happen from #000?
A - When you obtain a card normally, it adds 1 to the card quantity in your chest.  For example, if you win Blue-eyes White Dragon (#001), there will be 1 extra copy of it in the space for ID #001 in your chest.  It seems the layout of the current deck is immediately before the chest in memory, so card ID #000 in your chest is actually the card in slot #40 of your deck instead, and by adding 1 to the card quantity in the chest, it instead adds 256 to the card ID of the card in slot #40 of your deck.  So for example, if you had Ushi Oni (#401) at the bottom of your deck, after winning #000, Ushi Oni will be replaced with Megamorph (#657).  In addition, as an unrelated side-effect of the disc swap, the game can't calculate our duel rank properly, and it gives us 5 star chips no matter what the duel stats actually were.

Q - How do you force a card onto the bottom of your deck?
A - This is based on the sort order of the deck before the duel starts.  Some cards like magics are easy to get on the bottom, but for most other cards, we have to rely on the random sort option since we don't have enough filler to throw in.  At worst, this means we have a 1/40 chance on each random sort for the card we want to appear on the bottom of our deck.  The odds can improve if we have multiple cards we are interested in converting at the same time.

Q - What are the glitched cards you are using?
A - When you use #000 to obtain a card with ID above #722, the game is using whatever is after the list of cards in memory to create a glitched card.  These all have abnormal data including their stats, and some of the cards are very powerful.  They also do not seem to take any equips, including Megamorph, but this has not been exhaustively tested.  Not all of them are useful though, as some of them have very low stats (as low as 10 ATK/10 DEF), and others crash the game when you view them.  If the card on the bottom of your deck has an ID of #467 or greater, you will obtain one of these after the duel.

Q - What are some good cards to obtain for this run?
A - There are probably many more, but these are just some of the ones I've found that are either common in your starting deck, or very cheap to buy.

#823 - Pegasus (4880/2560) <- Darkworld Thorns <- Black Pendant
#846 - Nitemare (4710/2560) <- Beaked Snake <- Umi
#862 - Pharaoh's Palace (4890/1280) <- Twin Long Rods #2
#921 - Dragon (4690/0) <- Curse of Millennium Shield
#922 - Dragon (4730/1280) <- Yamadron Ritual

There are also many more cards above 3000 ATK that can be made from monsters you can have in your starting deck.  Typically I will be resetting for a deck with at least 3 of these monsters to make the run more consistent.  I will not be farming, so most of this run's variance will be in how World Tournament goes while I don't have many powerful cards in my deck yet.

Q - Are there any other rules or restrictions for this category?
A - Short answer, not currently.

For now we are still not sure on how to regulate this run, but it will never be an official category on the leaderboards, so it doesn't matter much.  In theory, you could use RNG manipulation along with this run's strategies, saving lots of time, but that would need to be routed, and with how consistent the run is compared to the normal vanilla run, it's likely not worth the effort.

There may be other potential discs you could swap to that could change the route and potentially make the run faster.  I considered only allowing swapping to discs for officially released games, but it would be impossible to regulate what someone is swapping to (for example, a modded version of Forbidden Memories with guaranteed chance at overpowered drops in campaign).  But there would be no reason to disallow that either since the same strategies would have to be used to obtain arguably worse drops.

Finally, using emulator does allow for faster disc swaps than on console, due to swapping ISOs rather than physical parts, and not having to wait for the disc to start spinning.  However, (at least on ePSXe which I use) it has the downside of pausing emulation while menus are open performing the swap.  In the end, we aren't taking this too seriously, so the potential minute or two saved via faster swaps isn't that big of a deal at the moment.