#PastebinMonday 12/30/2019

My Longest Speedrun Ever Edition

Hey guys, how’s it goin?

This past week of Azumanga Daioh Advance has been quite the adventure. It may be a simple card game, but the RNG has been maddening enough that it has stayed an interesting game. There are some New Game+ runs I still have left to prepare. I may end up playing this through the next two weeks until AGDQ is over in order to fill in all of the possible categories.

I am really not looking forward to having to go back to work this week. I am only slightly looking more forward to the Azumanga Daioh Advance speedrun I will be attempting tomorrow. I have no idea if I have the time to pull this off, but I will do as much as I can. It is the 100% Omake (Extras) category. This is the most diabolical thing I have ever concocted. The omake has 1. an album of the character cards you have collected across all characters; 2. a sound test of all of the BGM and voice clips in the game; and 3. a list of graphics that appear upon beating each character’s story or sudden death mode (and a bonus image). The 100% Omake category unlocks EVERYTHING in the Omake. To do this, you must beat Sudden Death mode with every character, beat Story mode on Normal AND Hard difficulties with every character, AND collect every different card in the entire game. Since every card has to be won over the course of the run, I have required the Story mode runs to be done from a New Game.

Allow me to try to break down what this means in terms of the possible time this will take. Sudden Death is a gauntlet of 32 matches in a row. One loss and you have to restart. The lone run I did of this previously took 50 minutes without a restart for ONE character. I will have to do this for EIGHT characters. When it comes to Story mode, my last New Game Hard run took 30 minutes. The first one took almost an hour. FOR ONE CHARACTER. Again, multiply that by EIGHT. What are we up to now? 12-16 hours? That’s too long even for YouTube. Oh God why do I do this to myself? As for all of the character cards, each character has 1 one-star card, 1 two-star card, 1 three-star card, 1 four-star card, 1 five-star card, and THREE six-star cards. Each player’s starting deck includes the two- to four-star cards, thus the run has to win the less common one, five, and six-star cards. The six-star cards are so rare that there is pretty much no way I will have them all for a single character once I’ve beaten their Hard mode once. I could (and have) go through several more Hard mode runs afterwards without getting a single six-star card. Could I see myself needing another 2-3 hours to get the final cards? Absolutely.

TL;DR This 100% Omake category could take anywhere from 12-20 hours to complete. I’m usually mentally drained from a stream after 6. How the hell am I gonna do this tomorrow? I will be spending today trying to figure that out. I am aiming for a bright and early 9am ET start Tuesday. Whether I’m done before the new year is anyone’s guess.

That’s my life story for the week. Until next time, everyone, thanks for reading!

--Cards