8/27/18

As has been the case the past 2 years, going to pass on AGDQ submissions due to all of the games I'm feeling like speedrunning having been in too recently, having better runners submitting them, or just not being good fits for GDQ to begin with.  GL to everyone submitting cool games, and I'll of course be going to see my friends, help with the tech station, and maybe commentate a run or two.

Almost done with my Chaos Mode FF5 Four Job Fiesta - just have the Cleft of Dimension and whatever grinding/farming I end up needing to beat Neo Exdeath (which probably won't be much due to the power of Chemistry).  My team this year was Beastmaster/Beastmaster/Dragoon/Chemist, which was my first time having to use Freelancers past Wing Raptor and my first time doing a pseudo-No750 run (pseudo because I believe Chemist counts as a 'magical' class).

After FJF is done, I think I'm going to dedicate the next few weeks/months to finally finishing off my goals for a few more casual speedgames, so I can move on to some new projects:

Donkey Kong Country 2 Any% (PB 44:13, Goal 42:2x) - previous goal was 43:2x, dropped by a minute due to new Castle Crush wrong warp.
 This should be pretty free if I can just finish a run with no deaths or wrong warp failures.  There's a lot of advanced tech which I want nothing to do with (ie Rattly/Rambi double jumping, vine clipping, Kleever lava fly), so after getting a decent deathless run with my preferred strats (which should result in a low-to-mid 42) I think it'll be time to be done with this game once and for all and move on to a new non-RPG speedgame.

Crystalis Any% Warpless (PB: 1:10:27, Goal 1:07:4x) - pretty sure the main time saves for me are in better optimized XP grinding segments and menuing, though I'll need to do some research to see which ones specifically, and if there's anything else like boss fights or costly safeties.

Final Fantasy Legend III Glitchless Any% (PB: 2:42:10, Goal TBD) - before running this game again I'd like to at least look into doing some encounter manipulation to smooth over a bit of this category's dumb RNG (like avoiding unrunnable encounters in Ashura's Tower & Chaos' Castle and forcing encounters I need at specific points for stuff like meat/XP).


Also, recently did some work on updating my notes/practice saves for FF4 (playing Free Enterprise lately has given me an itch to improve my time at the normal game), though with how difficult the endgame is under the new Rosa levelling route, I don't think I'm going to start doing actual runs until I'm feeling ready to go in on a more serious speedrun project.  Do also want to do some more work on the RNG manipulation routing before doing more Chrono Trigger runs.  Still feeling a bit burned out on FF6 after playing it every day between RPGLB and SGDQ; but will probably still submit JP Any% No Sketch/Wrong Warps to Questing for Glory II (online RPG marathon in November).  If someone else submits US Any% No Sketch though, I probably won't bother since the new Thamasa Skip definitely deserves to be seen.