FFL answer to what's going on

So in Final Fantasy Legend there is seemingly nothing happening but behind the scenes there is a shit load. Here's a small breakdown of why you do the things you do.

- The game has set encounters based upon what system you are playing on. It will be set from a power off/power on scenario and can be consistent. So yes, this means encounters are different on SGB / SGB2 / GBP / GB

- The transformation of your characters is done by eating meat. There is a meat table the game looks up to determine what to turn into. Each monster has a target level and a meat level. The meat level determines where they are on the table, the target level determines what monster you'll transform into. So if you eat a monster that is a reptile and you are an insect the game will combine those two and say okay you are transforming into a skeleton. It then takes the highest out of those two's target levels and looks at the equivalent of that value in the "skeleton" section of the table and that's what you become.

- Meat drops are affected by what you do in battle. Every time you defeat or run from an enemy it will affect the meat drop counter. So every single battle must be handled correctly or the meat drop RNG will be wrong and the run is dead. This also is true with your steps if you misstep and land on the wrong tile you can possibly get into the incorrect encounter and the run is dead.

- The SGB2 was routed with the same meat progression that Poxnor used in his GBP run, with save and quit's used for a safer route. Not only does this make it slower but the encounters on the SGB2 are far less optimal for the current meat route. That being said I don't think the SGB2 run in it's current stat will ever get close to the 1:07 that Poxnor got on GBP.

- The JP route is far different due to a meat storage glitch. The games keeps a meat stored in memory that you can access (unintended) with a character without going into battle. This is why the JP run is 51 minutes.