8 years for me. Finished in 2013. I estimate the Temple of Fiends took somewhere around 75-100 runs, only beating Chaos on the 6th time reaching the fight.
I played this game so much growing up. The anxiety of you skipping all them treasure chests and not reviving your teammates was off the charts. Great playthrough every boss you got too i had no clue how you were going to beat them
There is actually a really cool new method for human-played RNG manip where you use B cancels to control how much the RNG advances. Much more limited than what a TAS can do but totally played by a human and very neat to see.
@@alfasilverblade I'm not sure of the actual probability. It's extremely low. You can see how they are timing button presses in fights. That's one clue. There is a video of this run from Games Done Quick with a full explanation actually. If you're curious you should watch it. They really broke this game.
There are only 256 states in the "RNG" table. TheAxeMan built tools to automate searching, so it probably didn't take as much time as you might have thought, at least when ignoring the time writing the tools.
White Mages needs significantly heavier RNG manip for success against bosses, and sometimes that means eating more RNs with randoms and other things in the field
The lava floor deals one damage per step to each party member, but it can't kill anyone. There are also no encounters on the lava so the runner used it to avoid fights while not being worried about losing their last hp. The BANE sword casts the BANE spell when used in battle which has a very low % chance to instant kill the boss and most enemies. The runner manipulates the RNG by waiting for specific frames during battle
BANE is an instant death spell, it does exactly what its supposed to, and RNG manipulation ensured it hit The rest is because this is a TAS, a work of art displaying a hypothetical pinnacle of speed, crafted using rewind, save states, memory viewing, and myriad in-game tricks made easy through this knowledge of time and RNG, and capability of perfect control, they record step by step the inputs they do, and what we see is final playback The whole feat is physically possible to do on a console, just humanly implausible
@@syrelian i started a playthrough with 4 white mages on the original nes game cartridge. i couldnt make it past the ice cave to get my air ship. then eventually got bored and quit trying. ive played thru the game 4 times with diffrent combos one being all knight another was 1 knight 2 ninja and a black mage i didnt think it was possible with the game mechanics to instant death kill a boss though. could be wrong.
@@Fufiout KARI aka Marilith is actually very vulnerable to BANE, dumping tries with the Bane Sword on her is a very viable means to pass the fight, and even enemies that are technically immune have a very small chance of being killed by the spell anyway (3/256)
Did anyone else get the indication in the past that White Mages are female? Or is that just a product of played FFIV? Does the manual explicitly state they are female or maybe those old Nintendo Power guides say it?
The White Mage is androgynous, though the Wizard transformation is more masculine. I think fan canon eventually won out and the White Mage became female because that's what people wanted, which is reflected in the later releases.
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 I do remember always naming my FFI White mages with female names; I had thought maybe Nintendo Power gave people the hint but, I haven't gone back to read the guides to see. With Rosa and Palom in FFIV I feel like that's what cemented Full white mages as female for most people
The white mage always was a male in all J releases. The US manual for the original release, I believe, made the white mage a female. That's probably where all this confusion started.
@@AstroTibs I DO still have my original Final Fantasy manual and I can confirm it does not use pronouns to describe the different classes, so, the mystery continues? I just checked the Nintendo Power strat guide too and they named their white mage with a male name, too. I still blame FFIV even though Cecil learns white magic as a paladin and Tellah as a red mage, that's when they started gendering white mages to female (Rosa, Porom)
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 i saw some commentary on the video about rng manipulation but missed or didn't understand how it was done exactly. I'd guess thats how the bane sword procs each time too
@@robertsaget9697 Yes, that's correct. Bane isn't supposed to work against creatures who are immune but due to a programming oversight it works 3/256 of the time. In those cases the TAS waits for one of those outcomes.
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 so what do you mean by manipulating the rng with waiting? its purely timing like from a rng created by a clock? Or can certain actions or menu selections affect the rng? i remember something mentioned about how it traverses a list of numbers between 0 and 200 for its rng. or something like that
Eh, having played the original FF, this is some kind of joke… Running away never failing (supposedly the only use of the thief class)? Always being first in initiative? Enemy skills always failing? Enemies missing a ridiculous amount of times? Weapon and armor powers always working? Landing melee hits on monsters 20 levels above you? Has anyone bothered trying to reproduce this? There are HARD mechanisms in the rules of the game that made this impossible, without very loaded dice. In the Kraken fight, the Kraken did nothing but use ink, even after the mage was blinded. The white mage also landed nothing but critical hits, even AFTER she was blinded… Would someone like to explain this to me? This is some kind of hack joke right?
It's rng manipulation and the timing isn't physically possible. Think about it like a dice. If a one is miss, two is critical, etc up to 6, and the dice spins in order then the program can hit 2 every time. Same for every action in game, just timing to achieve the desired result. Including manipulation of enemy patterns and flawless success running. It's nuts
TAS runs are know to rely heavily on manipulated RNG; That's why they are called tool assisted. The process might be simple, like using an emulator and trying different timings/sequence of actions until you get a "good roll"... You save after every single little action and only keep the good rolls. In the end you play all the states in sequence to get the full playthrough. More sophisticated TAS might study the game memory variables that decides the "dice roll" and only act when it's value is the desired one, there are games that they even take action to influence these variable states...
Item powers always work in FF1 as far as I recall, but some are ineffective if used repeatedly or on the wrong target because of the spell they cast, the rest is vigorous RNG manipulation, as the other comment mentions, TASes make heavy use of save states and things like memory viewers to perceive the future and find the best path, to create a run that is hypothetically Perfect, usually in terms of speed, this is neither hard fact, TAS runs get invalidated by superior work constantly, nor is it intended to compete with human effort, TASing is its own category of work, though the lessons learned between them and human speedrunning often crossover, many Super Metroid tricks used to be considered TAS only but are now commonly used in top end human runs Also the missing constantly is partially the blame of the RUSE spell and WHITE shirt, as they grant huge amounts of bonus evasion
CHAOS: You fools! Did you not see how she was bleeding, barely able to walk, and couldn't even stand up straight?? You could have SNEEZED on her and she would have died! And yet you let her kill you all! I expected Lich to die, bu-SILENCE FOOL-but I expected better of the rest of you! CHAOS: Oh god she became the worst possible thing: Tater tots! Run away!! You can have this infernal planet!
![[TAS] SNES Final Fantasy IV "warp glitch" by pirohiko in 1:42:03.71](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/HM_Px_vepQE/mqdefault.jpg)
![[TAS] SNES Final Fantasy IV "warp glitch" by pirohiko in 1:42:03.71](/img/tr.png)
![[TAS] NES Final Fantasy by TheAxeMan in 1:09:57.70](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LTQUNnsJ4Ww/mqdefault.jpg)
![[TAS] NES Dragon Warrior by RationalMonkey in 16:59.57](/img/n.gif)
Black Mage, reading Nintendo Power's Final Fantasy strategy guide: "Four white mages? It'll never work."
TheAxeMan: "Do you know who I am?"
Ah, ye olde 8-bit Theatre. Good times, good times
I mean, it's doable with a solo white mage.
These are so much better with annotations - lucky for me the fighter run is enough to carry me through this one. Love the good work.
And lo: Legend spoke of a White Mage so powerful that Fiends fell in a single strike and Chaos himself ran in fear.
That Mage's name? Was TheW.
Nice, a new encode for my other TAS! Happy new year and thanks for all the love for this game.
In this run, a healer refuses to heal their comrades, and an eldritch god of chaos gets spooked.
Can't get enough of these tas speedruns. Keep up the amazing work.
Damn, amazing run! Also loved how Chaos just ran away from battle because TheW is simply too OP. Can’t blame him honestly lol
This run never gets old. Just amazing really even if it is a TAS.
Originally published 2012.
Put on CC for some "Musica, 1's, y's, a más, Ah's, and No's" in the first 5 minutes XD
This was one of the hardest challenges I ever did... And watching a tas of it again blows my mind again
8 years for me. Finished in 2013. I estimate the Temple of Fiends took somewhere around 75-100 runs, only beating Chaos on the 6th time reaching the fight.
4 White Mages / White Wizards
The World is Square
"Four white mages? That'll never work!"
Curious to see if anyone gets the reference, but I'm not that hopeful.
Are you talking about those four guys that Killed Chaos as white mages?
_glances at Nintendo Power_
"Oh goddammit."
8-bit theater via NuklearPower has it in one of the issues but that itself could be referencing something else.
Maximum versatility!
I knew this was going to be a TAS, but menu navigation being that fast still caught me completely off-guard.
Jack: I'm gonna kill Chaos!
TheW: I'm gonna scare Chaos!
I played this game so much growing up. The anxiety of you skipping all them treasure chests and not reviving your teammates was off the charts. Great playthrough every boss you got too i had no clue how you were going to beat them
The final boss got so scared that a single white mage came that far the he just ran away
How many load state did it took for your white mage to do only critical hit and monsters to miss all their attacks?
It's actually determined by RNG. They are gaming the RNG in the game. Video says they rerecorded about 70,000 times.
@@zosxavius soo the ods of doing this well in a legit run without save state would be 1/2(to the power of 70 000)
There is actually a really cool new method for human-played RNG manip where you use B cancels to control how much the RNG advances. Much more limited than what a TAS can do but totally played by a human and very neat to see.
@@alfasilverblade I'm not sure of the actual probability. It's extremely low. You can see how they are timing button presses in fights. That's one clue. There is a video of this run from Games Done Quick with a full explanation actually. If you're curious you should watch it. They really broke this game.
There are only 256 states in the "RNG" table. TheAxeMan built tools to automate searching, so it probably didn't take as much time as you might have thought, at least when ignoring the time writing the tools.
Now this I gotta see. And not just passively, while I'm playing some other game. So it'll be a while
The W gets a W
This run took me 8 years! Oh, this isn't a real white mage run. You used more than one. I feel better now.
buenas maniobras maga owlette white
Seems like a lot more random encounters than the other TAS I just watched with the fighters
White Mages needs significantly heavier RNG manip for success against bosses, and sometimes that means eating more RNs with randoms and other things in the field
I love how the other three are dead the whole time so I'm just imagining that TheW is lugging their bodies around just so they can keep the full name
am i missing something like is 1 w mage with 1 hp a hack or glitch g
how did he defeat the fire imp with one hit of bane wtf am i missing
The lava floor deals one damage per step to each party member, but it can't kill anyone. There are also no encounters on the lava so the runner used it to avoid fights while not being worried about losing their last hp. The BANE sword casts the BANE spell when used in battle which has a very low % chance to instant kill the boss and most enemies. The runner manipulates the RNG by waiting for specific frames during battle
BANE is an instant death spell, it does exactly what its supposed to, and RNG manipulation ensured it hit
The rest is because this is a TAS, a work of art displaying a hypothetical pinnacle of speed, crafted using rewind, save states, memory viewing, and myriad in-game tricks made easy through this knowledge of time and RNG, and capability of perfect control, they record step by step the inputs they do, and what we see is final playback
The whole feat is physically possible to do on a console, just humanly implausible
@@syrelian i started a playthrough with 4 white mages on the original nes game cartridge. i couldnt make it past the ice cave to get my air ship. then eventually got bored and quit trying. ive played thru the game 4 times with diffrent combos one being all knight another was 1 knight 2 ninja and a black mage i didnt think it was possible with the game mechanics to instant death kill a boss though. could be wrong.
@@Fufiout KARI aka Marilith is actually very vulnerable to BANE, dumping tries with the Bane Sword on her is a very viable means to pass the fight, and even enemies that are technically immune have a very small chance of being killed by the spell anyway (3/256)
Did anyone else get the indication in the past that White Mages are female? Or is that just a product of played FFIV? Does the manual explicitly state they are female or maybe those old Nintendo Power guides say it?
The White Mage is androgynous, though the Wizard transformation is more masculine. I think fan canon eventually won out and the White Mage became female because that's what people wanted, which is reflected in the later releases.
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 I do remember always naming my FFI White mages with female names; I had thought maybe Nintendo Power gave people the hint but, I haven't gone back to read the guides to see. With Rosa and Palom in FFIV I feel like that's what cemented Full white mages as female for most people
The white mage always was a male in all J releases. The US manual for the original release, I believe, made the white mage a female. That's probably where all this confusion started.
@@AstroTibs I DO still have my original Final Fantasy manual and I can confirm it does not use pronouns to describe the different classes, so, the mystery continues? I just checked the Nintendo Power strat guide too and they named their white mage with a male name, too. I still blame FFIV even though Cecil learns white magic as a paladin and Tellah as a red mage, that's when they started gendering white mages to female (Rosa, Porom)
@@jojojoma3026 I would not consider Tellah to be a red mage because he has no weapon proficiency. He's more of a safe to me. But point taken.
Whats with the Kraken never attacking except with ink attack? hacks?
RNG manipulation. Each action is calculated based on the exact frame when you commit your last action in battle.
Kraken has a 32/128 chance of using Ink. By manipulating the RNG table through waiting, it's possible to make him use Ink every round.
@@dycedargselderbrother5353
i saw some commentary on the video about rng manipulation but missed or didn't understand how it was done exactly.
I'd guess thats how the bane sword procs each time too
@@robertsaget9697 Yes, that's correct. Bane isn't supposed to work against creatures who are immune but due to a programming oversight it works 3/256 of the time. In those cases the TAS waits for one of those outcomes.
@@dycedargselderbrother5353
so what do you mean by manipulating the rng with waiting? its purely timing like from a rng created by a clock? Or can certain actions or menu selections affect the rng? i remember something mentioned about how it traverses a list of numbers between 0 and 200 for its rng. or something like that
THE WORLD IS SQUARE!
oops all white mages
Chaos! You're too big!
What kind of nut tries to get through FF1 with just one Klansman eh, I mean White Mage?
大トロ倶楽部でコナミちゃんが使ってたパーティだなｗ
Eh, having played the original FF, this is some kind of joke…
Running away never failing (supposedly the only use of the thief class)? Always being first in initiative? Enemy skills always failing? Enemies missing a ridiculous amount of times? Weapon and armor powers always working? Landing melee hits on monsters 20 levels above you?
Has anyone bothered trying to reproduce this? There are HARD mechanisms in the rules of the game that made this impossible, without very loaded dice.
In the Kraken fight, the Kraken did nothing but use ink, even after the mage was blinded. The white mage also landed nothing but critical hits, even AFTER she was blinded… Would someone like to explain this to me? This is some kind of hack joke right?
It's rng manipulation and the timing isn't physically possible. Think about it like a dice. If a one is miss, two is critical, etc up to 6, and the dice spins in order then the program can hit 2 every time. Same for every action in game, just timing to achieve the desired result. Including manipulation of enemy patterns and flawless success running. It's nuts
TAS runs are know to rely heavily on manipulated RNG; That's why they are called tool assisted.
The process might be simple, like using an emulator and trying different timings/sequence of actions until you get a "good roll"... You save after every single little action and only keep the good rolls. In the end you play all the states in sequence to get the full playthrough.
More sophisticated TAS might study the game memory variables that decides the "dice roll" and only act when it's value is the desired one, there are games that they even take action to influence these variable states...
@@marcelo55869 ok, thanks for the verification. Now I know what tool-assisted means.
Item powers always work in FF1 as far as I recall, but some are ineffective if used repeatedly or on the wrong target because of the spell they cast, the rest is vigorous RNG manipulation, as the other comment mentions, TASes make heavy use of save states and things like memory viewers to perceive the future and find the best path, to create a run that is hypothetically Perfect, usually in terms of speed, this is neither hard fact, TAS runs get invalidated by superior work constantly, nor is it intended to compete with human effort, TASing is its own category of work, though the lessons learned between them and human speedrunning often crossover, many Super Metroid tricks used to be considered TAS only but are now commonly used in top end human runs
Also the missing constantly is partially the blame of the RUSE spell and WHITE shirt, as they grant huge amounts of bonus evasion
CHAOS: You fools! Did you not see how she was bleeding, barely able to walk, and couldn't even stand up straight?? You could have SNEEZED on her and she would have died! And yet you let her kill you all! I expected Lich to die, bu-SILENCE FOOL-but I expected better of the rest of you!
CHAOS: Oh god she became the worst possible thing: Tater tots! Run away!! You can have this infernal planet!
lmao Chaos was like: Whoa whoa whoa Nuh-uh I'm out of here.
TheW: Look at my sword
Kary: ☠
Proof you're evil: you don't heal teammates and chaos apparently runs.
Wait a sec.........
dude what the actual fuck.
I like 2 ninja, 1 warrior, and 1 white mage, but ninja is a final form and white mage/warrior are basic
Go underwater temple before volcano, that’s how I roll
@@TeddyBelcher4kultrawide Do you do Earth, Water, Wind, Fire in that order, for the fiends?
@@DJIncendration never did wind last, normal order 1 3 2 4
I prefer to class change before Fire, lol
@@gigaslave rush heal rod, only warrior need class change for more heals, the 4 warrior story