Originally recorded on June 19th, 2020. Timed from pressing start on the title screen until fade to black upon defeating Vishok. Played on a real NES with a standard NES controller, but also on a Powerpak (because the actual game costs a lot of money). A substantial improvement over my old personal best of 6:59, which I got while preparing for JRTA4.
The Japanese version of this game is slower than the North American version, but overall more fun to play. This is because multiple jumps are far easier to do on Japanese, so movement feels a lot better. However, you can't do the pause-glitch at the end of stages to skip level-fadeouts, so you lose quite a bit of time from that (20+ seconds). There's also a wall at the start of Level 6 for some reason, which loses a few more seconds. That being said, I prefer playing on this version, simply because it's easier to jump over bosses (so you're less reliant on them giving you good patterns).
This run features a pretty rough start, with a bad initial Skeleton fight + overall poor Stage 1, followed by a very bad fight versus the Knight of the Serpent in Stage 2. However, the rest of the run was pretty good, with decent or above-average luck everywhere else. The last two stages were particularly good, I feel.
I'm overall pretty satisfied with the EXP / magic routing on this version, but it can probably still be cleaned up a little bit. Shield bashing the Creeping Ghouls in Stage 2 is probably worth it, just to avoid ever having to get the slow backup flame towards the end of Stage 4. An argument could also be made for conserving magic on the Barbarian & Gold Knight in Level 7, and avoiding the pauses on Vishok instead. These are things I'll likely do when I return to the category.
Overall, a pretty fun game to speedrun, that doesn't require much effort to practice and get good at. I'm focusing on improving my NA time at the moment, but I'd definitely like to return to this version and get sub 6:20 at some point.
Live VOD: / 656670441
FAQ I made for this game: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...
My JRTA 4 marathon run: • [JRTA4] Sword Master b...
The game's manual:
www.digitpress.com/library/man...
Sword Master Forever.
- Claude
1 июл 2020
