Speedrunning

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AliceShiki

『Ms. Tree』『Magical Girl of Love and Justice』, Female
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So... I started a run of Digimon World 1 recently... And I ought to say, it was the weirdest run ever for me.

Well, if the line above doesn't make it clear, this is definitely not my first run at this game... Might be the 7th or something. Though this was the first run I actually cleared the game in... As for why... Well... Most of my runs were back when I was still a child, knew no English and was terrible at gaming in general. I did do one run that worked very well back when I was a teenager though... Until I got stuck at one point because the walkthrough made a mistake (and I did the mistake of not googling for more sources on that specific issue) and then got frustrated, took a break, then my TV broke and I no longer had a TV that recognized the input of the PS1... Which was the end of that run.

Now I did the run in the epsxe emulator on my computer, which gave me lots of wonderful benefits, like Save State, Fast Forward and easy back and forth access to walkthroughs, guides and answers to questions and I needed them.

Okay, so... For those that never played the game, it's essentially the best Tamagotchi that has ever been created in the history of mankind. It also has a... Barely passable storyline, some surprisingly good cutscenes that make you honestly wonder how that was made in PS1 era (even if there are only like... 2 or 3 of them), a pretty unique gameplay that you'll be very hard pressed to find anything similar to, and lots of pretty engaging minigames. As well as some secrets and a lot of surprisingly deep mechanics that have far more going for them than you'd initially notice by just playing the game.

Anyways, I really liked this game and decided to finally make a run that would reach the end... The goal of the game is to get as many digimons to the game's main city (File City), there is a plot over how digimons are losing their memories and what not and how it would be important for them to live together to save the File Island and what not, so... Well, the point is, you need to go around the world and convince digimons to join File City. Also, your digimon has a limited lifespan, once they reach it, they die and are reborn as a baby... You don't lose any of your city progress when that happens though, only the progress of the Digimon.

So... The idea is to essentially go through multiple Digimons while exploring the world and slowly going through the storyline while growing your city. And once a digimon died, you'd spend less time exploring with the next one and more time training, in order to beat the tougher parts of the game with a stronger partner.

... Well, the thing is, I was not only using a walkthrough, but I was in my like... 7th playthrough or something, I knew exactly where I needed to go and when. Not to mention I didn't shy away from abusing Save States (if you don't know what that is, it's a function emulators have that allow you to instantly save the game at any point in time, so you can abuse it a lot if you want by saving in the middle of a battle or right before an RNG-heavy event in order to guarantee you'll get the result you want by loading over and over again until things go your way) at all, which gave me a big edge in the early game where you don't have basically infinite money to get as many items as you want and essentially trivialize the game.

In any case, my idea was to basically use the first digimon to advance as much as possible in the storyline and get all digimons I could get, and then use the 2nd+ digimon to clear the hard content of the game... That was not what happened. I did better than that, I got all necessary digimons, beat the final boss, beat the secret final boss and the super secret final boss all with my first digimon... By the time he faded away, I was at 92/100 City Prosperity with only 4 digimons needing to be caught for me to finish getting everyone in the city. And that was because I needed some specific things my digimon was unable to do in order to get that, otherwise I might have gotten everything with the first one.

It felt... Weird. I mean, it's not the first time I revisit a game I played when I was really young, and the difference in gaming experience + knowledge of 90% of what you need to know of the game make a crazy huge difference, I am well aware of that much... But in 26 in-game days (A digimon usually lives 15-19 btw, my first one lived 19, so the other 7 days was with my 2nd one.) I had finished everything interesting the game had to offer (I skipped some optional boring things, like getting a perfect score at curling, or winning all tournaments of the game, or maxing all the stats of your digimon, or raising all possible digimons of the game... Yeah, really boring and time consuming stuff) and that was... Pretty mindblowing to say the least? I mean... In 90 game days I'd be getting around 30/100 prosperity back when I was a child... Finishing the game in 26 was something totally out of question for me.

For reference, I started this game on Saturday, so it took me 5 days to get everything I wanted... The only time I ever remember beating a game this fast was when I spent 90h in one week while playing Mega Dimension Neptunia VII, and I definitely did not spend this much time in Digimon this time around. It's just... Well, I can't quite believe it still I guess? I really did go a LOT faster than I expected, I was thinking I'd need 3-4 digimons to beat the game, not 1. And definitely not only 1 to beat the secret and super secret bosses.

Is this a speed runner speed? Oh, definitely not, the world record (without glitches (with glitches it's like... 1/2 an hour or something) and what not) is like... 2h and 30 minutes IIRC, I'm not even close to that, I definitely took over 10h, possibly over 20h to clear it. (I doubt I reached 30h though... Even 20h might be a stretch tbh) Still, it's far faster than I could ever hope for.

I'm... Pretty happy I guess? Still a bit astonished, and I was expecting to spend longer on this game... Not like I don't have other games in my list though. Nonetheless, I'm happy to see me doing this well on a game I struggled so much back when I was younger...

And also I'm kinda surprised by how much difference it can make to do the proper research on the game... Like... I did know 90% of what I needed to know, I knew the paths, I knew the times, I knew the most mechanics, I knew what bosses I needed to beat first, I knew which were easier and which were harder, as well as what moves were better than others... But learning exactly how some of the training mechanics of the game functioned, as well as exactly how digivolution worked was definitely a game changer like no other.

Of course learning things on your own and experimenting with the game by yourself is pretty fun too though, but well... I already had long learnt everything I could learn on my own (as in, everything doable without spending tons of hours testing in-game things or datamining) about the specifics of this game, so I don't think I missed out on anything by looking around for all information I needed~

I'm not sure what the point of this blog post was to be honest, I guess I just wanted to talk about the experience? It was quite surreal to me, and I'm definitely happy with how it turned out... But I definitely didn't expect it would go like that~

Oh well, such is life, sometimes we get some really nice surprises from the things we're doing.

Comments

    1. A5G_Reaper Oct 17, 2019
      Ooh, I got a similar feels. There's this old game called dxball. Basically one of those game where you use a mobile platform to bounce a ball and try to hit all the blocks on the upper side of the screen without letting the ball drops.

      I used to play it on my grandpa's computer. It's an ancient win98 model. Spent so much time on it but I could never beat his high score, one time missing by scant 1000 points out of 50k.

      Well, the computer got scrapped eventually and with it the game. Thing is, years later in college I just randomly downloaded it for nostalgia.

      Literally finished all the stages with like 110k scores in the first try. I was a bit shocked.
      hitedo likes this.
    2. Pray Alpha Oct 17, 2019
      I remember playing this game when I was just a little girl, and at that time it was extremely difficult to play. My digimon always turns into Numemon and Sukamon, luckily as I progress I learn that my Numemon can be a Monzaemon, which is nice I guess?

      but even when I replay this when I was older, of course I'm able to digivolve into a more powerful digimon, but I never actually finish this game!!
      this game to me is both fun and frustrating, I should try to finish it next time..
      hitedo likes this.
    3. AliceShiki Oct 17, 2019
      @SpearOfLies Yeah, it was really long exactly because of the try and error aspect! xD

      It's kinda funny because like... If you make a lot of mistakes when raising your digimon, you end up getting a Numemon... Most people get only Numemons when they start playing... And then they try playing the game years later and have to make threads in gamefaqs asking "How do I get a Numemon!?" Because one is needed at a specific point in the game and they got so good at the game they don't remember how they could possibly be bad enough to the point they get a Numemon! xD

      And yeah, I totally manipulated RNG in this run too, even learned what parts of the RNG were rigged and what weren't and how to circumvent the rigginess of the rigged parts... It was honestly pretty fun to learn about it and try to understand the details of it~

      I also noticed I enjoyed the minigames a lot less than I used to in the past... And a good part of it was basically because of impatience, like... There is a fishing minigame within it... And it's honestly the most fishing-like fishing minigame I have ever played in any game... It really does feel like fishing, and I had tons of fun with it in the past.

      ... This time though? I just fished the minimum necessary to get some fishes I want and stopped touching it... And wasn't really enjoying myself while fishing... Impatience really does take some of the enjoyment out of the game... T.T
      Though at the same time, I did know exactly what I needed to do in order to have a 100% success rate at fishing though, so I didn't quite get much from playing that one minigame...

      Nowadays I'm kind of a mixed bag between wanting to play the game and learn by myself and also wanting to just do online research and learn everything others already learned about the game and made public knowledge. I do enjoy doing both, and which one I go to often depends on what point in the game I am in and rather or not I already played it before~
      Both ways can be very fun nonetheless~
      hitedo likes this.
    4. SpearOfLies Oct 17, 2019
      A lot of old games were enjoyable because there was a lot of try and error, which was part of the fun and satisfaction of playing games. Nowadays, with internet support and people being more and more impatience, it kind of vanished the enjoyment of exploration.

      Long story short, this kind of game is long only because you are supposed to try and fail. If you don't fail, you are cutting a lot of wasted time. People even learn how to manipulate rng.
      hitedo and AliceShiki like this.