Wild ARMS 4 Speedrun topic

[Tide]

Shameless self promotion plug.

Now that that's out of the way, let me just quickly note down what this is. As most of you know (or don't), I've been working on speedrunning Wild ARMS 4 for almost 4 years now, if not more. Since I am aiming for a SDA worthy level submission, I've been revisiting tactics along with other things to get a good quality run. SDA also requires me to have comments ready if the run is accepted. So, this is my text dump, thought process and other crap that would be associated with that. I figure some of you may also be interested in reading this though (dn, if you browse the boards! Other WA4 players) so yeah.

Segment 1 -
First let me explain what some of the key goals were going into this run. I am aiming for mainly three things:

1) Better menu speed. I don't know how much time I lose on adjusting my abilities and equipment, but I figure if the FE10 run optimized for it, I should at least try for this as well. As such, later segments tend to have better menu set up time, as that is when I decided to aim for a SDA level run. This also means I try to do some setting up in advance or for several fights in a row to avoid going back and forth into the menu.

2) Fewer segments. While this increases the random variance (and requires more and more retries on certain segments), saves take time. Each load is approximately 10 seconds long. Therefore, I aim to cut down on fewer segments to reduce the loading time. I also only keep 1 active save so saving time is reduced. In case you don't know, WA4's saving time takes longer if you have more WA4 data on the memory card. Only if its absolutely necessary for a save due to some very specific things needing to happen or the level of random variance is absolutely too high, do I make a save/second save.

3) Refine better strats and routes. Some items I think should be skippable (Elder Record), but others may be actually worthwhile to get (Fighter Badge). Certain boss strats were also completely reworked or being in the process of reworking as the original strat was something I was either not satisfied with, or we discovered something new along the way.

I save time on other things (mainly better execution on some action segments) but for the most part, these were the three main things I originally aimed for. Therefore, right off the bat, segment 1 took around 20+ tries. I set up a few things in the Configurations in order to optimize time. Speech text for NPCs is reduced to 0 as some of them have very long death quotes (Earthbound Dead). Battle movies are also turned off so summons and other combo skills are reduced in animation length. Finally, the battle camera is set to Simple and Fixed. This allows me to view the whole field at all times and avoids the close ups the game sometimes likes doing when characters use Originals/Items. The actual segment itself isn't too bad, but does require a bit of practice. The hardest part is avoiding the guard when Jude first sneaks inside the camp. All it takes though is decent timing to sneak past him right when his back is turned. Save right before going back to Ciel Village.

Segment 2 -
Accelerator isn't available yet so the only form of random monster control I have is by Double Jumping. One of the mechanics of WA4 is that random battles cannot occur if Jude is in midair or if Accelerator is active. Therefore, by combining these two things together, it is actually possible to reduce random battles to nearly 0. There are three forced fights along the way, and the best way to take care of each of these is to hit enemy HEXes if they are grouped together (you do more overall damage). Arnaud is key here though as he is the only one capable of one shotting the enemies as long as he is on the Water HEX. About only 1 in 15 tries will I manage to get a run that is random free. The 3 screen area after the boss fight isn't as bad though as I finally do get Accelerator at that point. A forced fight with a bunch of jelly blobs occur shortly after our escape. While the game suggests that you use Material to kill all of them, you don't have the FP for it. This means it is actually faster to have Arnaud cast Blast and then kill the rest with Gems. I do manage to end up with a few gems extra, which turned out for the best. Once I get Raquel, I move out back on to the map immediately (the shop doesn't get goodies until after the first dungeon) and save before starting Culane Temple.

The boss fight is fairly simple. Again, the main goal is to target groups. Arnaud stays on a non-elemental HEX as everything in the boss fight resists elemental damage. Tony's position is randomized, so I eventually settle on this run, which is pretty good. Note that it is important to keep Arnaud and Jude on separate HEXes as Tony occasionally counters. This run is notable for a few things, mainly Arnaud managing to get a max boosted elemental hit on Tony (this requires a lot of set up). This, along with a counter from Jude, pushes the fight to end quicker than normal.

Segment 3 -
This was originally a two segment dungeon. I've reduced it down to one since getting from Turasque to Tony 2 can be controlled relatively well. There aren't any particular notable problems other than the fact that holding onto a tool in WA4 means you can't Jump. So I use a lot of Accelerator metre during the parts where I am forced to carry the Sword. Speaking of Accelerator, you'll notice that I often run into the little floating coins as well while it's active. This is very important because cash is very tight and without gella runs in the early parts of the game, you can't buy weapons for Raquel (critical for damage) or armor for the rest of the party (critical to not dying in a hit). As WA4 defense and magic defense are *very* notable stats, it is key to hit as many gella runs as possible so you can build up cash without needing to fight enemies or getting items to sell. I have a separate item route in the situation where I don't have enough cash saved by the end of Wunderwaltrum but it takes like a minute to complete so this is far more efficient and less time consuming.

Neither Tony or Turasque are particular problems, but I do end up settling for a lesser segment when everything else has gone right and Tony decides to *dodge* Jude's phantom line. This resulted in an extra attack being needed from Arnaud, which costs about 4 seconds. For Turasque, there is a key decision here as passing the kill to Yulie and having her live through Tony 2 gives you access to Sanctify, which helps a ton against Earthbound Dead. However, this decision takes around 12 seconds longer and the benefit is only for a single fight. I decided at the time that it wasn't worth it, but it had other repercussions later down the line (see later segments). On the whole, I'm not sure if this move is "wrong" however. I do end up with another fringe benefit that I otherwise might not have, so it may not have been a bad decision overall.


Segment 4 -
I skip a whole bunch of chests since most of them don't contain anything of value. This entire segment is mainly due to Earthbound Dead who is random as far as random bosses can go. Normally, having Sanctify here helps as it allows Yulie to damage it without needing her to move or putting her at risk of dying. However, seeing as I don't have that here, I am forced to keep her beside Earthbound Dead unless I want one PC not doing anything at all.

It is absolutely crucial that Earthbound Dead move into the Water HEX without Sanctify. Otherwise, it is not possible for Yulie to deal much damage at all and you'll be more or less short a PC. It's pretty hard to avoid eating Slow Down counters as his counter rate is about 56%. When you need to take multiple actions in order to kill him, he's very likely to sling one. I do however, counter Slow Down him as this limits the number of turns that he gets. When my team gets to move, everyone attacks with their best damage at all times (Jude - Phantom Line, Raquel - Attack, Arnaud/Yulie - Boosted Fire gems) and hope he doesn't counter. Keeping everyone alive makes this doubly hard as it means he has to spread his attacks out over your characters instead of focus firing. Oh and just to spite you, when he dies, he may still launch into his death quote which takes about 5 seconds. Aren't you glad that I adjusted the NPC speech text at the very beginning?

I have to make another save here, as Jeremy 1 is insane and is one of the hardest fights in the game. As a side note, the fight in this segment ended up being a few seconds faster than my previous run time, so I was quite happy with it despite several counters going off.


Segment 5 -
There is a hole in the side of wall which is where your first bomb throw should go. It's a blind toss, but not hard to hit. Doing so avoids having to walk all the way around with the bomb, which slows you down considerably. I avoid the Break point as carrying a second bomb to hit the switch is pretty self defeating in terms of saving time. In the room with the statues, I further save a few seconds by tossing the bomb instead of planting it. The biggest screw up is the Great Wall where I fell off from doing jumps on the stairs. I make up for this by using an increased stair climbing speed (by holding down X), but it looks sloppy and I lose around 5 seconds here. Doing the Great Wall in the same segment as Jeremy 1 does save 10 seconds though via Saving. I also lose a couple of seconds here on bad menu set up but I do end up keeping the segment because the boss fight went really well.

Speaking of, here's Jeremy 1. So to give you a rough approximation of how badass he is, Jeremy is about 388% average speed (in a game where your fastest PC is 139% so he's triple turning the fastest character), can take a hit, and he 2HKOs everyone, including the physical tanks in your team. This basically translates to massive overkill on you if you can't down him in a hurry. There is no real strategy as it all comes down to how Jeremy decides to distribute his damage (hence the extra save). If he decides to split his attacks up between the whole team, then the fight is pretty quick as it doesn't drop your damage output. However, if he focus fires on Raquel and she dies, the entire fight is an uphill climb and very often a loss as the rest of the team doesn't have the damage to down him. Only Arnaud really has a chance then, but the fight would take ages to finish (we're talking about 3 minutes instead of approximately 1). In this run, he does split up his damage and no one ends up dying (a very rare occurrence). As a result, I save about 6-8 seconds compared to my previous run and keep it.

Oh, I do grab my first treasure chest item so far in this run during this segment. The Gunstar Sign boosts crit rate (Tal estimates it's 2.5x crit chances), which may seem like a weird pick up. But as there are a few strategies later down the line which are completely dependent on crits, getting the Gunstar Sign improves the chances of them happening and it doesn't take very long anyway.

Segment 6 -
And here is where the insanity takes off (and you thought the last two segments were bad). Thanks to living through all the fights so far, I am able to get Jude Joint Struggle. You'll be seeing this move a lot in this run as it is not only his strongest damaging move, but also the team's strongest damaging move for a while. It beats out Raquel in terms of damage per turn and it doesn't burn FP. The big problem with this thing is that you need to group 2 other allies or more with Jude before the damage starts becoming good, so it needs a lot of set up. Also, since everyone is grouped together, the defense of the team is reduced, especially since you won't be casting defensive spells a lot. Arnaud also gets Jump and Act a fight earlier (he normally doesn't get it until Jeremy 2) thanks to him getting the kills on the last few bosses.

The dungeon itself, again isn't too bad (Double Jump Accelerator to the rescue), but the boss fight is really where shit starts getting real. So what's the problem? Stone Bullet Counters. They trigger about 45% of the time (probably actually 50%) and because Miscreation is on top of that Wind HEX, it deals massive amounts of damage. We're talking about near OHKO level, so on any run where it goes off, it pretty much means someone will die. The strategy itself is simple: Attack as few times as possible while causing the maximum amount of damage. This pretty much means Joint Struggle abuse. Following this plan means we reduce the procs on his counters and kill it relatively quick. The actual segment itself took more than 70 tries before I eventually got this gem. No counters! I do end up taking an extra second longer since I thought Raq would have enough power to kill it (she didn't), so instead I defend and pass the turn to Jude instead. I save overall about another 6-10 seconds here compared to my previous run.

Segment 7 -
Another save here before tackling Jeremy 2 as Miscreation is huge headache and the Jeremy 2 strat isn't much better. We're still going for a Joint Struggle approach, but this time, it is made harder because of Jeremy's innate ability to double act. Slow Down is once again key because without it, Jeremy will likely kill team members before you get anywhere near close to grouping together. We do have another problem in terms of FP, but it is solvable. Just that your odds aren't very good. The big problem I kept running into was that I never have enough FP to pull off Jump and Intrude back to back. This is a huge because it gives Jeremy a turn to hit my PCs twice. And given his level of damage, this means people die when it happens. In my original attempts, I took this to mean that a Joint Struggle approach wasn't possible.

Revisiting this again, I come up with this new plan, which is pretty insane, but also hilarious when it works. There are two ways in which you can get that FP. Either Defender kicks in and Jeremy attacks the 3 man HEX again OR Jeremy attacks the 3 man HEX once and Raquel crits on her first hit during the Intrude chain. The odds themselves are pretty bad, but at least there are two possibilities. When one of them happens, you'll get enough FP to Intrude again and then Jump with the 3 man group of Arnaud, Jude and Yulie into Raquel's HEX. This allows you to unleash holy hell on Jeremy with a boosted gem hit and a 4 man Joint Struggle right after, killing him off. Save after this of course. The next segment is also heavily luck dependent.

Segment 8-
Due to not giving Yulie kills in the run thus far, she ends up being one level short of getting FP Advantage. This is an immediate problem as the strat for the boss requires FP Advantage. Without it, it's not possible to get everyone together into the centre in the first two moves, which becomes quite crucial for not only finishing that battle quickly but also safely. As such, I am forced to fight a random battle to get Yulie to level 9. Ideally, you shouldn't have to wander around aimlessly to force a fight. However, because action heavy rooms are random-free, I often end up having to run around searching for randoms, wasting even more time. This doesn't happen on this segment, which is very ideal!

Second problem: Yulie has to receive the kill multiplier, otherwise she won't get enough EXP to get to level 9 in one fight. There are also only certain enemies that will get Yulie the needed experience to reach level 9. The formation with the 3 Inspectors never generates enough EXP for example unless there are crates. Naturally, trying to kill them all one by one is horribly slow. Yet at the same time, without FP, it's not possible to MT wipe the randoms. So after countless segments, I eventually find one where I am able to finish it quickly and give Yulie the kill. The trick is to find ways to gain FP quickly (often done by KOing enemy groups) and then defending and waiting for Yulie to cast material. On a very rare chance, gems are also possible. However, it's worthwhile to kill it with Material because the gem you get can help speed up fights later on. I get a Wind gem out of this, which sees use immediately against Incubator. 

Third, this segment is heavily action orientated, which means that there is always the chance of execution errors. The worst spots being in the third room with the poles and the room with the 1900-2200 gella run. In fact, I only manage to hit 1700 this time, but thankfully, this turned out to be enough cash, so it didn't end up mattering too much. This gella run is huge, but also very easy to screw up and is typically a segment killer. The poles along with the Accelerator segments require practice and are also always viable to screw ups.

Finally, we get Incubator himself. Jude has to move into the centre to bait physicals from Incubator. If he decides to use Stone Bullet on the group at the beginning and not Jude, it is typically a reset because Yulie will not have enough HP left to take another hit. If he decides to Stone Bullet Jude/attack Jude, then the rest of the plan unfolds itself like such (with Yulie either defending or Healing). And don't tell me that healing wasn't necessary! In this case, Jude survives with just 17 HP. It is important to note that Incubator has an AI script that forces him to summon his cronies if there isn't one on the field. With Joint Struggle + Raq offense, it's possible to take them out as they are summoned. Slow Down keeps the battle in place, otherwise the drones may get turns and rip me apart. The Wind gem from the random battle lets Arnaud kill Incubator safely instead of missing it with Blast and saves a few seconds as a result.

The other forced fight with the soldiers can also be problematic depending on the behavior of the sword soldier. If he decides to move into another HEX (and not the top right), it ends up taking longer because Yulie doesn't have enough FP to summon material and one shot the shield soldier. 

Note that I don't buy anything from the shop other than a new sword for Raquel; the armor upgrades here are too short lived to waste precious money on.

Note: I'll get more details on this segment once I review this part. There are so many various factors that needed to be considered. It was the segment of hell.

Segment 9-
You get initiative in this battle before Scythe gets to move once. I started digging around for a way to take better advantage of this. In the past, I always just settled for 5 attacks on Scythe to win. But I decided, this wasn't good enough because using 5 attacks to win means Scythe will get a turn, which also gives us a cut scene. So no, can't go that route. However, I can't Joint Struggle in one maneuver and Yulie is pretty much dead weight.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the second crit strategy of this run. With a max powered variance crit, Raquel hits 4500 damage, which is enough combined with hits from Jude and Arnaud. Technically, its possible for Arnaud to not attack at all and still hit 9k damage. However, this requires a two max variance hits from Raq (one on the crit) and a high variance hit from Jude, which is a whole lot more effort for very little gain. Arnaud attacking basically removes the variance involved. So all together, we need 4 attacks to hit of which Raq must crit once. The total chance of this happening is (67%)^4 * 8% or roughly 1.6% chance altogether. I do eventually get it after much resetting, saving a little over a minute from this.

Segment 10
A one minute clip that takes about 2 to 3 hours. Thanks to Snow for this tip, which is what really set into motion the later runs. A Tiny Flower can be picked up as a drop in Wunderwaltrum, which sets up many many fights to come in the run. The chances of getting this is not high and as it is a drop, I do have to kill enemies in order to find out whether or not I'll get one. Combining multiple PCs into the same HEX raises my chances, so it's just a matter of going through the grind. An important note is that depending on the gems you have at the end of this segment, it will vastly change up your strategy in the next one.

[Tide]

10 Segment page split.

Segment 11-
Wunderwaltrum is super important for racking up gella as there are LOTS of gella runs all over the place (around 4.7k). So it's important to hit all of them to make sure there is enough cash at the next shop. I do a lot of fancy platform hoping. Each of these jumps require Jude to be right near the tip before taking off. More often than not, I fall and kill a segment. I do eventually get them all with enough practice though. The forced fight here is a joke and more to show off the power of the Tiny Flower. Initiative Yulie, MT summon to instantly kill everything in 4 seconds flat. Make a save here because the two Belial fights are going to be tricky.

Segment 12-
The former Belial 1 strategy used Turn Shift due to a lack of Freeze gems. With two of them, I remodify the strategy to pull out something similar to my Belial 2 strat. This ends up speeding up the run by about 30 seconds, so it's pretty significant. The key contention of course, is whether Belial decides to use 4D Pocket. The activation of this move means that it will typically be slower as someone who needs to take an action won't be there and it screws up the CTB order (which has to go exactly as shown).

Belial 2 strat isn't new, but how frustrating this is really depends on what gems you have. If you have a Break gem, Arnaud can kill the Distortion by himself without Yulie needing to act and without any high variance hits. Without...you will need two hits and Jude pretty much needs to deal 3500 minimum. If he doesn't, it's a reset. If he does, you still need to luck out on variance with both Arnaud and Yulie. Belial 2 isn't as trigger happy regarding 4D Pocket, so as long as you can bring down the Distortion as planned, she dies pretty quick with this CTB order.

Segment 13-
Only shopping needs to be done here. I'm not 100% satisfied with how everything went, but it's a decent enough segment, albeit with around a 2 second improvement or so (namely with the shop buying and the field cursor movement.

Segment 14-
Crits actually don't speed this up. Raquel doesn't deal anywhere near as much damage as Arnaud. Arnaud is once again, the man. Between Slow Down and hitting 4x weakness on Grabboid, he wipes out Grabboid really quick. Stone Bullet counters here hurt, but they are much rarer (around 16%), which means most of the time, its possible to get a counter free segment. Illusion on the centre HEX is usually a reset, although this depends on how much damage has been done and whether or not gems can finish it off. Boss Kresnik is uh...boss Kresnik. No strategy required.

Segment 15 -
This is a really frustrating segment. I've had lots of good runs that ended up being lost due to mistakes either by myself or bad luck. The most annoying part about this segment is the forced fight after lighting the switch. The ideal strategy is as follows:

1) Tiny Flower Yulie, Material. Ideally no counters go off to save a few seconds
2) Jude Phantom Lines down the middle, kills one soldier
3) Enemy Incendiary goes, hits Raquel. Must trigger Red Zone
4) Raquel goes, kills 2 soldiers
5) Arnaud goes, boosted Fire gem to kill the last 2.

The laundry list of problems are as such:

1) Yulie must hit high variance on the enemies to be killed by Arnaud and Jude. She must deal somewhere between 2700 to 3000 at least.
2) Jude must hit high variance on Phantom Line (1900+). The lower Yulie deals, the higher he must hit.
3) Red Zone doesn't always trigger. To force it to occur more frequently, I have to downgrade Raquel's armor to her initial armor, not get a Class level and adjust her HP to 2000
4) Arnaud must hit high variance on his gem hit. He has to do it *twice* as their are two soldiers beside him.

Needless to say, there were about 100 resets if not more, trying to align all the pieces together. This isn't even getting into the room with the two lava-launched platforms or the room where you have to get the Fire into the pot. Both of these room have increased encounter rates, which I am forced to spam Accelerator to avoid randoms. Even then, I've lost multiple segments to them occurring. In the same room where I have to get the fire, sometimes, my timing doesn't always line up and I am forced to wait for the flames to jump back up. I've also lost segments by getting hit by the fire as I am running back with the pot.

So eventually, I settled with this. I hit the required variance, but Jude decides to be an ass and misses his kill by about 75 HP (damnation). Thankfully, that soldier acted pretty retarded and decided not to attack, which would've used more time and instead just walked right beside everyone on my team. So I even got to use the fast option of shooting him right afterwards for only a small loss in seconds.

The 3 screen field map after this is a bit of a joke and has never really been a problem (gee can you tell?). This segment is pretty good overall. Everything else went perfect except for the fight, which could be faster by around 4 seconds is my guess.  Current run time is faster than prior run by 8 minutes and 45 seconds.

Segment 16-
The Marcus Garb is picked up to pump up Arnaud's MAG, which will be needed for several parts in the game.

This segment should really just be called Segment Kraken because this entire segment is pretty much about him.  The parts with the switches and the clockwise switches aren't problems at all. So what makes Kraken such a huge headache? The combination of unevadable Isolate physicals and Slumber Fog. Slumber Fog's chance of success is 37.5% or so, but it has a widespread effect. So any adjacent HEX occupied by a PC also gets hit. And when you need it to not hit 4 characters bunched up together multiple times, it becomes a huge issue because even one person getting temporarily slept leads to issues. The Isolate physicals randomly displaces the targeted PC to another HEX which I have absolutely no control over. These two factors combined together creates tons of randomness as it is literally impossible to determine which PCs will be available at any time and where they will be.

It's an interesting fight however, because over the hundreds of resets I've had on him, I've developed multiple different counter tactics to differing situations. Some not as fast as others obviously. It does depend on who is awake. Ultimately, there are two scenarios which is pretty much a guaranteed reset: Arnaud being slept before getting a single turn or Raquel being slept/KO'd anytime after Slow Down is cast. Every other situation is usually doable, but may end up being slower. Ultimately, you want to try and utilize Joint Struggle as it deals tons of damage (almost 5k if everyone is together). But due to the variety of factors PLUS everyone being spread out at the beginning of the fight, it is incredibly difficult to capitalize on this or holding a 4 man formation for long. I eventually settled on this segment, where no one gets slept and all the moves are pretty much ideal given the situation. It features largely 3 man Joint Struggles from Jude, a couple of Wind Blasts from Arnaud and about 4 hits or so from Raquel. Turn Shift sees use to preempt Kraken from trying to screw us over. Entire segment compared to the prior run is about 13 seconds faster. Not a whole lot, but I'll take what I can. It's a hard segment to improve upon since the entirety pretty much rests with how well Kraken's AI and the RNG decides to behave.

FYI for those of you that are curious, this is pretty much the optimal solution to the fight. The only way it can be faster is if you can hold a 4 man Joint Struggle over 2 Kraken turns and Raquel manages to crit back to back on her initial Intrude turns. This will end the fight before the last series of actions (namely the extra turns taken by Yulie and Raquel) and will save about an extra 12 seconds. 

Full transcript for those of you that can't watch it:

Tiny Flower Arnaud because Slow Down immediately cuts Krakken's turns and reduces the chances of things going wrong. Initial turn order looks like this:

Kraken -> Arnaud -> Jude -> Kraken -> Arnaud -> Kraken -> Yulie -> Arnaud -> Jude

Kraken's first turn cannot put Arnaud to sleep. In this case, he uses Hydro Pressure, so we're in the clear. Arnaud goes, and casts Slow Down. New turn order looks like this:

Jude -> Kraken -> Yulie -> Arnaud -> Jude -> Raquel -> Kraken -> Jude -> Arnaud

Jude Phantom Lines. Kraken's next turn casts Hydro Pressure on Arnaud. On Yulie's turn, she casts Turn Shift to help build FP. Without it, Arnaud cannot Jump without using up FP for Raquel to Intrude. Arnaud then Jumps to where Jude is and casts Blast. Turn order at this point:

Yulie -> Jude -> Raquel -> Kraken -> Yulie -> Arnaud -> Jude -> Kraken -> Yulie

Yulie moves to where Jude/Arnaud are, returning the turn order to approximately what it was from above. Now Jude can perform 3 man Joint Struggles. Raq gets her turn (finally!) and Intrudes, attacks twice (moving to the Water HEX to reduce incoming damage). Kraken's subsequent turns are physicals on Raq, which is good since it doesn't disrupt where the 3 man HEX is. Arnaud gets his third turn with the turn order now looking like this:

Arnaud -> Jude -> Kraken -> Yulie -> Raquel -> Jude -> Arnaud

Arnaud casts Blasts, Jude Joint Struggles. Kraken does something, and at around this point Slow Down wears off. So new turn order features Yulie -> Kraken -> Raquel. Yulie turn shifts, gives Raquel a turn which is spent on Intrude/Attack. At the end of all of this here's the damage so far:

Jude's Phantom Line: 1900
Jude's 3 Man Joint Struggle x2: 3500
Arnaud's Blasts x 2: 2200
Raquel Physical x4: 3000

Barring variance, total damage of the above is 25300. Kraken has approximately 24000 HP, so this kills.

FUN FACT: The optimal solution I previously thought of uses 4 man Joint Struggle to increase Jude's damage to 5000 but no double crit. This still doesn't matter because all it ends up saving is possibly a single turn from Raquel (via non-Intrude). So basically, I accidently stumbled upon the second best possible solution, which works because optimal conditions require inane amounts of luck and effort for not a whole lot of gain.

Segment 17 -
Pretty simple segment, which means of course, everything that can go wrong can while recording. I had about 8% counter chances come up like three times in a row. The actual recording doesn't seem to have evident flaws off hand. Possible faster menu speed, but it is fine as is.

I do finally max the HP tweaking for all PCs here as Hugo is just way too damaging. With completely maxed HP, a full HP Arnaud can take 2 Magic Bow Gandivas and be in critical range, allowing crisis evade to kick in. Whereas without, there's a good chance he gets 2HKO'd by it. Similar cases apply to other PCs (Jude can take an extra physical hit with this, same with Raquel). Raq's HP will likely need to be tweaked as needed for Red Zone though.

I make an effort to grab the Fighter Badge here. I've been playing with some ideas in my head and hopefully, this will pay off or at least remove the random variance on some attacks as it has been a huge cause of resets in recent segments. My modified Divine Weapon strat will likely require it too as it needs to set PCs to specific speed ranges. I am short 13 seconds from this as a result but again, I get the feeling the modified may make this up. Currently faster by 8 minutes 48 seconds

Segment 18 -
I somehow manage to gain a 27-30 second lead on this segment. I actually don't really know how that happened. The basic gist is to steal a Full Carrot from a Ranunculus. This enemy only appears about 20% of the time and steal is a tier 1 steal, meaning that its rare. Maybe about a 10-15% chance of getting it on a successful steal. Ultimately, you want to steal then leave immediately. However, because the enemies will act, it helps to have the other characters (namely Arnaud and Raquel) to kill off all the enemies other than the frogs so that they don't keep getting turns and slowing things down. In this run, I still only get the steal on the second frog, but placing greater priority on running away instead of killing enemies with my better positioning helps quite a bit.

Segment 19 -
This is a massive segment because of my decision to combine 4 segments into 1. The good news is that most of the segment is relatively straightforward and doesn't have a lot of variation (which is why 4 in 1 is possible). The bad news is that its long and one of the boss fights I don't have a whole lot of control over. Let's go over the route changes from previous run;

Based on my discussion with NEB in chat, I need 3 Gella cards. From Autumn River and before hitting Port Rosalia again, there are only 3 Gella Cards that can be used on bosses freely. This in turn, means I have to grab every one and one of them is here. Luckily, the card is directly on the way, so this isn't a big issue. Second, I learn a couple of extra short cuts from precision jumping which allows you to avoid grabbing the mesh wires at certain points. This is advantageous because the mesh wires are a) slow and b) sometimes weird because Jude needs to take a second after grabbing them before being able to pull himself up. Smash square too early and he'll fail and you'll lose a second or two. Finally, I take the exit at the back of Buckeye instead of heading back out to the front as this exit is actually shorter.

Boss fight changes; first I sorted this out in chat one night. You basically want Tiny Flower Jude because Tiny Flower Raquel doesn't have enough FP to work with on her first turn. If you delay that turn and let Jude do some work, he'll gather more FP and more people taking damage = more FP gain. This means the opening round in the chain fight is always Jude Phantom Line, Arnaud Jump and Fire Blast and then Jude finishes with Phantom Line. As a result of this, Raquel is shy 924 EXP to reach level 20 before fighting the dolls. And this level is very important. It helps stabilize the damage she needs to do against them per swing (4500 per). Without this extra level, you'll be leaving completely at variance's mercy and more often than not, she'll fail. To get Raquel to level 20 then, she needs a 0.4 EXP mult bonus plus the killing blow. This is best done by giving her all the kills as it is easier to plan around then having to rely on her dodging or scoring crits.

This leads to the following situation. Raquel has a 2 turn around but much slower speed. Jude has a 3 turn turnaround, but much faster. When the turn finally comes for them to appear in the fight, TF Jude leads the turn order looking like this:

Jude --> Spriggan A --> Jude --> Yulie --> Mini Spriggans

Jude should Phantom Line as it is faster than Joint Struggle. You ultimately want Raquel to get the kill, so JS is pointless. One Phantom Line is all it takes to put the Mini Spriggans into killing range for Raq. After his TF turn, the new turn order looks like this:

Yulie -> Mini Spriggans -> Jude -> Raquel

While Yulie can turn shift to Jude, again, you want to leave the kills to Raq. So instead her action is to either Defend with Protect up or to heal herself so she can live. Arnaud joins somewhere in between, but a 6 turn turnaround time and starting at 0 CT dooms him to never seeing a turn in this fight if all goes well. Jude's second turn should be another Phantom Line, and when Raq's turn comes around, Intrude x3 + 3 physicals can end it. She should deal enough damage to off Spriggan in 2 physicals with Jude having previously used Phantom Line twice. The alternative is for Jude to defend after using JS once and Raquel to Intrude 4x + physical x4. This is more FP intensive (and not necessarily faster due to extra Intrude activation, swing and Joint struggle taking longer), so the former is usually better. You basically can't tell if you will have all that FP as it does rely on Arnaud/Raquel dodging.

Dolls go down in the usual fashion. Raq uses Power Charge + 3 Class Levels to stabilize her damage. During the initial Intrude build up, she should use her first attack on the other doll not hit by Jude's Joint Struggle (which should deal around 4800-5100) as this powered up swing should help void any remaining variance.

I went back and redid the segment and got a couple of lucky breaks in. First, Spriggan uses Isolate which moves a Mini-Spriggan into the exact position that I want. Normally, there is a good chance of Isolate sending him somewhere else and it results in a longer time. Second, Spriggan casts Isolate on one of his turns on himself and moves him into the upper corner, where Phantom Line can't hit. As a result, I just defend with Jude and have Raquel use Intrudex4 as described above. She ended up getting a decisive crit near the end and allowed me to avoid needing to use an extra attack for the kill.

Buckeye's stores features selling everything to avoid clutter in the equipment category and buying armors for Jude, Yulie and Raquel. Arnaud is going to get his final armor in the next dungeon, so don't bother buying anything for him.

Current run is 10 minutes and 24 seconds ahead of the old run.

Segment 20 -
Etemananki is always a hard segment. It's a 15 minute romp through the dungeon (more or less) with no saves in between, tricky platforming and a boss who is fairly unpredictable. I beat my old run here by a full minute by mainly utilizing a better Guardian Chimera strat, a better treasure chest strat and faster menu speed/executions.

For the most part, the platforming time is roughly the same. The chest strat got better because I save menu time from needing to de-equip Raq and then equipping Arnaud. The Guardian Chimera strat...well, it was something I had concocted after my last run and thought more about. In theory, it works out good. Does it work in practice? More or less yes. Guardian Chimera isn't always cooperative (it seems to have Move as a higher priority on its script more than other bosses), but in general, the goal is for him to attack the entire party and miss with his physical. There is no Slow Down, so if he hits and then attacks with an offensive Material, it's a reset. If he uses Material and then Material again, that's another reset. Ideally, he just uses physicals but will consistently miss because of Illusion. This in turn generates a massive amounts of FP (even without Reinforce), which helps Raq one chain him to death when she gets her first turn.

I should note, that even though in the second room with the springs, I miss once due to hitting the ceiling, I still complete this room faster than my old run by 2-3 seconds where I took the time to be safe. This room in particular is filled with lots of grief and resetting because you can't see the third to last jump you are making. You have to approximate Jude's position and yes, you have to be at the very tip of that jump. So you know, just in case this segment wasn't tough enough, you have a Kaizo-esque jump to make things harder! Up about 11 minutes and 42 seconds.

[Tide]

10 Page Segment Split -

Segment 21 -
Oh man, Enil. Enil herself remains more or less the same. It's a little better actually if you can pass the kill to Arnaud because he'll need it for the next segment. I get "unlucky" in the sense that Raquel actually crits (twice) and finishes this fight in record time. This took about 150+ resets even though nothing ever changes from the general battle because you have to learn right here, on the spot, Genocide Edge. Genocide Edge is absolutely needed on the train and since this is the last battle before it...well, have fun.

The first battle on the train got grouped together as well. I'm taking a risk with that Genocide Edge casting because the ID rate isn't perfect, and it can miss the Dreadnaught. Doing so means you have to take even longer to kill him. Luckily, he got killed, which made for a pretty quick segment altogether.

Up around a full 12 minutes now.

Segment 22 -
Fun segment. The entire thing is just a string of battles. Thanks to the Full Carrot and Tiny Flower, I get to pull some wacky hi-jinx on the enemies. The segment I kept pretty much has everything on the train dying before getting an actual turn.

When I first got to this portion, I wanted Arnaud to get to level 25 before fighting Balgaine. This alters the turn order after Balgaine's first turn from Yulie -> Arnaud -> Raq to Yulie -> Raq -> Arnaud. This alteration effects the cumulative damage dealt on Balgaine and often requires Raq to Intrude four times instead of three and consumes more FP in general. As a result, I started cooking up lots of crackpot ways of trying to get him to level 25, which included everything from needing things like instant death to fail to hyping the almighty Mystic Gems. After around 20-30 attempts that actually make it to Balgaine, I realized that it didn't matter too much and that I could adjust Raquel's turns to give Arnaud the kill anyway (he needs the EXP because he's behind from Raquel taking all the kills).

Thanks to all that work before hand, I ended up adjusting multiple fights along the way, the major changes are as follows:

Fight 1 - No longer has Raquel move to the middle. She instead moves down and to where Arnaud and Jude are, then uses Genocide Edge. This saves time as Raquel no longer needs an extra attack (3 actions as opposed to 4) and reduces the chances of crits, which cause minor slow downs (the game readjusts the enemies are aligned when the number of soldiers changes inside a HEX). On the off chance ID is not perfect, Arnaud gets a follow up turn after the enemies to wipe them out.

Fight 2 - Instead of Phantom Line across, changes to Mystic Hi-Break. If Genocide Edge is not perfect, Arnaud and Yulie can take care of the rest. Usually, Arnaud himself is enough as 3 of the 4 soldiers bite it to Genocide Edge like 95% of the time.

Fight 3 - The biggest change. The old strat had a menu swap and gave Jude Tiny Flower (TF) and changed the attacks to Jude -> boosted 4 man JS, followed by Arnaud with Jump and boosted Hi-Break to kill both soldiers. The problem? Well Arnaud being lower leveled means his MAG is lower by 11 points, which means he needs to hit max variance to kill both in a single shot. Horrible horrible pain at trying to get this to happen. So instead, I go with Genocide Edge Raquel on the second move, with 2 Intrudes before hand, saving them in case ID fails. There's no other way around this. Even with the former method, more than 80% of the time, Arnaud will fail at either killing one or both and you eat two counters anyway. Genocide Edge Raquel at least has a chance to kill everything in one attack. You save menu time (from setting up for the fight, then resetting back to the way it originally was for the remaining train battles) but lose on the actual battle.

I tried an alternative where Jude uses the Fighter Badge into a Joint Struggle. If that worked, Arnaud could jump and cast something like Fragile to give Raquel slightly increased damage to push her into kill range, which would prevent counters altogether. This failed pretty badly (we're talking about the damage variance nowhere near close), so Genocide Raquel it is.

I originally intended to get into the Forbidden City at just under 3:03; I do better by saving an entire minute thanks to Raquel getting perfect ID rates across 5/6 battles. Assuming my math is correct, the chances of this happening (getting ID to hit on 17 of the necessary targets perfectly at a 75% chance) is about 0.75% chance. Also a crit on Tank Vehicle to save a turn. It's faster if she counters, but between getting the counter to go off versus perfect ID rates, I would take the latter, since the current Tank Vehicle battle isn't slower by much anyway (6 seconds or so). Improved menu handling across the fights (and no menu handling for fight 3) speeds things up too.

Total time saved: 13 minutes and 12 seconds.

Segment 23 -
This is a battle free segment; doesn't mean that there aren't problems or things to watch out for though. You can't bypass the first Light staff room. No amount of Jump timing or changing the jumping again lets Jude make the jump. However, all the traps the game throws at you can be completely bypassed with tricky platforming. Skipping the flame jet traps is pretty cool, but the biggest time saver of the segment is completely ignoring the second Light staff, which shaves a cool 17-18 seconds. It is extremely hard because the jump in the room right next door requires exact precision without said staff. With practice though, I can get it maybe 50% of the time. There's also no real way to get around the room with the fan. Using jump-accelerator lets me manipulate the location of the fan slightly when I get there, but you still have to wait for it to swing in the proper place to not get hit by it as you slide under. Rest of the segment is pretty self explanatory. I take the back exit in this segment instead of the side exit since of course, its faster.

Total time saved: 13 minutes and 51 seconds.

Segment 24 -
I do this segment often enough to learn how to get past the first laser grid room without accelerator. The second laser grid room is best handled with occasional accelerator because it gets the final spinning grid into positional without needing to wait too long. This applies to the room with the spring and pole as well. In theory, it is possible to double jump up, but the laser spins again don't always line up properly, so sometimes its just faster to move up the pole and around the laser beam. Rest of the segment is handled with Accelerator.

Oh and the reason why I learned to do the first laser grid room that often? The Tony 3 fight. Reviewing my old run, I ran a quick calculation and confirmed that it is entirely possible to OHKO him. However, this requires Raq to score a counter crit and the chances of that are slim. In theory, the counter should come out at around 34% due to the Macha Brand and Tiny Flower boost. However, in practice, this rate was much much lower. I did this segment about 70+ times, and in all those attempts, Raquel only triggered a counter on three runs. That's less than 5%. The crit rate of 60%+ on a counter (after factoring in all the boosts) is pretty accurate though! Anyway, enjoy the 6 second boss battle. This is the fastest fight in the entire run.

Total time saved: 14 minutes and 5 seconds.

Segment 25 -
Raquel takes about 1300 damage from Super Soldier's elemental Blasts. So, if we adjust her HP to about 2900-3000, she'll always enter Red Zone after getting hit twice by it. This lets her move to the centre very quickly, which is key to ending this fight in under a minute. You do not want Tiny Flower on her though, because Raquel getting a turn before everyone is hit twice means she has less FP to work with, and you can't one round Super Soldier. So Tiny Flower Jude. This works out perfectly because it stops Jude from having to make a survival roll and he gets to hit Super Soldier with a boosted Phantom Line, allowing Raquel to spend her last attack on Evil Blossom instead of another Dragon Edge. That Evil Blossom bleeds over into the remaining soldier, who becomes easy pickings for Arnaud (who normally doesn't have enough power without a leypoint to score a OHKO).

Nothing else is remarkable about this segment. However, I made an extra save for this due to Red Zone twinkery and needing things like Magic Blocker to not kick in. Another save afterwards because oh god Prototype Gear. Not much time saved here; although I'm not surprised since the entire segment is a) unchanged and b) the strategy is also unchanged.

Total time saved: 14 minutes and 7 seconds.

Segment 26 -
Pretty easy segment sans Prototype Gear, who is of course a bastard. No reason otherwise for this segment to exist on its own. There are a handful of problems, and I only get to pick and choose which ones I want to eliminate. For starters, Prototype Gear carries the first instant death attack in the game. The odds aren't great (about 37.5%), but when he's double turning you, hitting more than one character at a time, those odds work against you quickly. Next, this boss is durable. Raquel only deals about 3300 damage a swing. Arnaud's Hi-Blast doesn't fare much better due to Prototype Gear resisting all elements and thanks to the above risk of instant death, Joint Struggle is usually a bad idea. Finally, he also hits like a train. His regular physical is a 2 hit attack that 2HKOs even Jude and Raquel if it hits *clean*. Guess what this does to the mages.

Thankfully though, there is a save point beside him, which lets us do the following. As much of a pain as he is, Prototype Gear's raw HP isn't that great. This means, that if we get past his defenses, he can actually be killed without too much trouble. Unfortunately, there is only one character who can do this and I don't have the unique sword. So instead, we have to rely on crits. Why crits? Because other than the unique sword line, the only other way to blow past enemy defenses is via Penetrator. Penetrator only ignores target defense (ITD) IF the attack in question is a crit. Of course, relying on *one* swing to crit would be horrible given all the above problems, so to optimize this, we need to give her more swings, which means more FP. Well, the only real reliable way for this is Reinforce. By delaying Raquel's turn and having Arnaud cast Reinforce first thing, I can build up to 75 FP pretty quick, which gives Raq 4 swings to score a crit at about a 33% chance. She manages to do this on the first swing of the Intrude swing, which greatly helps. Of course, it would help even more if that Counter was a crit, but can't win 'em all. This is faster than the old strategy of isolating everyone and ganging up on Prototype Gear by about 20%. The original fight took 56 seconds; this refined strat kills him in about 46 secs. Better menu handling time provides some other time saves to boot.

Total time saved: 14 minutes and 28 seconds.

Segment 27 -
Long segment. One that has seen many resets, not because of the difficulty, but the sheer BS randomness that I needed to work out and make the segment free from RNG crap. There's a lot going on, yet at the same time, there isn't. What do I mean? Well, I clear Garra De Leon and make it all the way to the entrance of Forbidden Valley. This means, going through both Augst fights, passing Dragon Fossil Mine and finishing plot related stuff in Halim. Seems like a long laundry list, but the actual difficulty is really getting out of the two Augst fights with good set up time and getting out of the Mine without running into encounters, something which has killed many good runs.

Augst really doesn't deserve a terribly huge mention in terms of actual strategy on killing him. This is because Augst has a 0% chance to actually kill you. I am dead serious regarding this. However, because he poses absolutely *no threat* at all, he's a good chance to rack up extra money AND extra experience. To do this, I need to manipulate the turn order and damage a bit because otherwise, that random BS crap kicks in. This includes everything from the expected turn order not working out to Augst not getting OHKO and living literally off 20 HP.

To understand a bit more regarding what I ended up doing, you need to understand WA4's natural turn order. There are essentially four scales, and each PC occupies one part of the scale: Fast (Jude), Above Average (Arnaud), Below Average (Yulie) and Slow (Raquel). A typical turn order assuming 0 starting CT looks like this: Jude -> Arnaud -> Yulie -> Jude -> Raquel. With the Fighter Badge, I am able to manipulate a PC down a tier of speed. So by equipping it on Jude, I am able to get him to around Arnaud's speed tier. With manipulation of class levels then, I can control who goes first. Everyone starts off in the same HEX in the first Augst fight, so the optimal solution of getting two actions before Jude OHKOs, is to make Jude slower than Arnaud and have either Raquel or Yulie take the Tiny Flower for a boosted first turn speed. This is the easy part.

The second fight is trickier. Now everyone is spread out and Jude doesn't have a clean OHKO. To secure the KO, I need to have him boost one of Assault Buster's variables. In this case, Speed is perfect since he stands on a Wind HEX. The question then is how to give everyone the Lucky Card boost. This took a while, but I eventually did find one. Tiny Flowering Arnaud alone doesn't solve the problem as Jude becomes faster after Wind Ley Boost and acts again before Arnaud does. However, by manipulating his speed down a tier, I am able to get the situation where Tiny Flower Arnaud has enough residual speed to outrace Jude. Thereby giving me a turn order that looks like this: Arnaud -> Jude -> Yulie -> Arnaud -> Jude.

Dragon Fossil Mine features and important pick up as does Halim. I now have a Cat's Paw, an extra Tiny Flower and Jude's armor for the final dungeon. I almost panicked when buying the armor since I saw the cursor went up to 2 and immediately canceled the purchase. This used up an extra second, but I can live as this is otherwise a pretty clean segment.

Total time saved: 14 minutes and 33 seconds.

Segment 28 -
I make the decision to take the segment from Valley of Oblivion all the way until just before Jeremy. This makes it a very  long segment, with more than a few areas for easy mistakes. But I manage through pretty well. The puzzles in Valley  of Oblivion went pretty much spotlessly. You may be able to do the puzzles on the right hand side a little faster; I'm not sure. But this is fast as I know in terms of finishing it. Boss strategy is still the same as the prior run. Slow Down > Hyper and Goldrake eating boosted Wind gems is faster than trying to pull out random critical hits out of thin air for Raq. There's unfortunately no way to actually OHKO Goldrake though (it will require 3 Tiny Flowers or some other combinations), but the fight is still one of the fastest. When we get back to Frontier Halim, I forge a Hi-Freeze gem with the 2 basic Freeze gems we have on hand. This may come in handy later during the last boss fight.

In the three map screen, there's a set of chests I grab at the end, which contain a Goat Doll and 4x Mega Berries. Those Berries are all we need to finish the game in terms of healing. The Goat Doll will be used at least once and also serves as a safety shield in the last fight as it requires everyone alive. Since I have no Revive Fruits, and we're grabbing the berries anyway, might as well take it. Finally, in the store in Port Rosalia, I grab the Great Sword and Raq and Yulie's final armors. The combined cost, I mapped out earlier and is the reason for using all those Gella cards before hand. You'll see my ending balance is barely enough to cover for it (+1500 gella or so). Doing this on the first go prevents us from having to backtrack and grab them after the Jeremy fights, which will save about a whole minute. Worth going slightly out of the way in other segments for sure.

Total time saved: 14 minutes and 59 seconds.

Segment 29 -
Bog-standard Jeremy strat. Which is to say, set up Raquel for massive first turn damage, then just hope Jeremy waltzes in beside one of the  HEXes next to her. He does even better on this recording because he manages to trigger Hi-Counter on his first attack action, wiping him out in record time. Second fight is more or less the same. Raq with initiative and metre so Jeremy gets massacred. No crit though, which would've saved some time.

Three screen map segment afterwards, with nothing to be picked up this time. I do manage to save over a minute in this segment though do to better planning and having enough Gella before hand to grab everything we need to finish the game (so no backtracking)

Total time saved: 16 minutes and 1 second.

Segment 30
The real obstacle of this segment is Gawn. The 17000 EXP he leaves behind is important due to us wanting the levels for more options/stats and the like. Without randoms, that's a ton of EXP so its worth gearing up and working this battle through. Sadly, the only way to do this is pure luck along with the Goat Doll. Gawn's first action is always a 1/2 MHP attack. However, after that, every actual turn he takes, he will 99.9% of the time kill a PC. If he's attacking as a counter (which he always does when attacked), then he hits back with fairly weak damage but also cancels your action. The important thing to note is that because the action hasn't resolved, Tiny Flower's boost doesn't go away. But because the attack has occurred, the game flags attack actions so Rapid Attack's effect will kick in.  This results in this neat little set up which lets Gawn only get off 1-2 attacks. The success rate of this strategy is about 31.25%. Not very high odds, but certainly not as low as some of the other stuff I've gotten to occur in this entire speedrun. As long as he hits Raquel with one of his actual turns, we're in the clear. If he hits Jude/Yulie though, it's a reset.

Jane Does don't deserve a mention because they suck. I should've reset until they didn't say their death quote, but everything else was what I imagined, so I'm satisfied. Pretty much ALL the time saved is from better menu handling.

Total time saved: 16 minutes and 37 seconds.

[Tide]

Bumping this up because I'm currently working on it.

Segment 31

Farmel - modified strat with Arnaud getting Hyper. Tiny Flower him and Yulie. Hyper Raquel OHKOs, so it's just a matter of all the cards lining up properly (i.e. Farmel doesn't Counter Replace and enters the right stance afterwards before Raquel picks up her first turn). This is sadly taking a while

Reclaimer - playing around here for a bit. I think the best idea is to use the standard Jump/Gather opening. Arnaud casts Illusion to generate FP and hopefully a Raq counter crit. The odds are really low though, so I'm not banking on this. Instead, the expected actions are then Jude JS and Arnaud Hyper after Illusion. Raq mops up on her turn with a 2 hit Intrude Chain (possibly single attack too if she either crits or both Jude and her go high variance - not sure here though). I have to tank through 3 Reclaimer actions. If Slumber Fog connects at any time on key people before their turn, it's a reset. So, odds aren't very good.

[Tide]

Run is completed (well about as complete as I can do without further burning out myself). Expect the comments for the other segments in the actual write up itself. Or at a later point in time. Stuff got edited basically since these are just draft notes (and will be further edited).