The conclusion of defeating Ultimate difficulty without major glitches such as weapon stacking or duplication. Lots of route optimizations save several hours over the run from the year before. Catch live speedruns and more at twitch.tv/AKDylie
Very Hard is the chillest part of the run where nothing is terribly threatening, though there is still over an hour of telepiping for the God/HP units required to survive Ultimate Difficulty. Thankfully the new route only requires getting 3 most of the time, down from 4 for last time. The luck this year was a bit nicer, too.
Throughout the run, a lot of attention was given to mag feeding to be able to evolve the mag into Nidra, one of the most useful mags in the game, thankfully available to FOnewm. It can grant 30 seconds of invulnerability on any of its mag triggers fairly often: entering a boss area, charging a photon blast, and most helpfully: falling below 10% HP. That last trigger is milked for all its worth to trivialize a lot of waves. Nidra also grows the MIND stat very quickly, allowing it to perform similarly to other Mags in MST boosts. The mag finished at level 143, with 65 MIND.
Even with Nidra, Ultimate mode is still a long slog where dying should not be surprising. I got some okay Ruins maps but some tough Mines maps. The final boss fight had some fumbles once I got out of Phase 1 it was mostly smooth sailing. Invincibility frames are abused once again, this time ironically by getting hit by Grants, to avoid dying to the big swipe, saving the need for 697 HP. Scape Dolls are invaluable insurance items and I burned a total of 5 out of the 7 I found.
Thanks to blooiskoo for finding most of the route improvements.
For most other speedruns of this game, I would play the original GameCube version. For this run, I play Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II Plus which doesn't change much other than fixing bugs with some monster behaviors. Dark Belra is bugged in the original GC version by always launching its arm straight at a player instead of slightly to their sides, and this is a true hell in Ultimate difficulty where Indi Belra launch their arms constantly. This was fixed in Plus. The tradeoff is that Grass Assassins were also bugged to be largely nonthreatening by having no initial movement speed, and this was also fixed in Plus.
03:54:31 - End of the Lily grind
05:11:29 - Very Hard Dark Falz
08:19:00 - Ultimate Ruins
09:54:15 - Ultimate Dark Falz
Real-time-attack time is 17:07:50. In-game-time was 16:36:09. There is some consensus that the game's timer makes sense for such a long category that should not be attempted without taking breaks, though breaks are limited to preserve the time attack urgency. The in-game-timer runs starting from starting character creation, is paused when quitting the game or entering the Epilogue teleporter, and starts again when selecting "Single Mode". This video is broken up into two segments to accommodate TH-cam.
#PhantasyStarOnline #Speedrun #GameCube