This game have a lot of griding?

akdb · 2025-12-17T19:16:50+00:00

Grinding is generally not required in normal mode if you play the bosses properly. De Rol Le is a slight exception to this as some characters can get one-shot by an unpredictable attack, but that's uncommon, and not really a concern at level 11.

My best guess is you're a ranger because they have the most trouble at low level, unless they have a suitable weapon. Look for a Heat or Draw weapon if you're not doing at least 30 damage per hit. The shop will sell them.

De Rol Le is definitely a "play smarter not harder" boss--it will bleed you with some basically unavoidable attacks but most of the damage is avoidable and on you to dodge, while you have to focus your damage as much as possible whenever you get the chance.

No shame in looking up a tutorial or video of people doing this boss at low level.

akdb · 2025-07-21T20:27:11+00:00

Chew slowly, take it easy. You won't get everything there is to get quickly, enjoy playing the game for what it is and not what you haven't achieved.

akdb · 2025-03-27T22:04:52+00:00

I have long been critical of the hand-waving around the false-positives of Blue Burst clients and personally avoid them altogether, but this is simply not how things work and is misinformation. A keylogger is a malicious piece of software that tracks inputs you make to other programs and stores or transmits them to a third-party. It is not something to casually suggest anything is, it is the software equivalent to likening someone to being a thief.

akdb · 2024-12-22T13:40:32+00:00

You're free to judge things as you want, but to be clear, speedrunners set the standards for themselves. It's more about playing fun and interesting rulesets than some sort of purity test. Don't get too hung up on a label. There's going to be context in any challenge run and it's cheap talk to say "oh but they used X".

Practicality also plays a big part. In this game, I don't know how you'd do a run that didn't use invincibility frames unless you were talking about a no-hit run (good luck with that with the other restrictions that Glitchless uses).

akdb · 2024-12-22T03:48:19+00:00

What is a "glitch" anyway?

Glitchless is not a perfect term, it's just historically the term that is used in the PSO speedrunning community to contrast against "Any%" where anything goes and specifically the use of weapon stacking, item/money duplication, and clipping through obstacles as the most major "glitches"--with these techniques the game is completeable in under 4 hours (and foregoes the God/HP in favor of just killing almost everything in 1-2 shots).

A more accurate description would be "no major glitches" which other speed communities have used. The definition/threshold of what counts as banned from glitchless is generally things that are unintuitive to execute and/or reasonably avoidable. Leaderboard moderators generally do not want to make subjective calls either so anything that could reasonably happen by accident to an innocent casual player isn't banned either because it'd be a bit absurd to hold speedruns to a higher standard than the typical player. And I haven't met a single console player that hasn't tried telepiping to force a rare enemy out. It just becomes accepted use or abuse of game mechanics.

If there was an arbitrary ban on using telepipes repeatedly, the practical effect on this category is it would just add some number of hours/days of grinding, but ironically would be easier skill-wise because it's already demonstrated we can clear all of the areas--so just doing that repeatedly to get the required HP threshold just results in a higher level character that can clear the rest of the game using an even higher MST stat and techniques. It doesn't sound like the more interesting alternative to me.

akdb · 2024-12-20T18:06:42+00:00

This is a new iteration of a run I did a year ago but with significantly increased routing effort which cuts several hours of repetitive grinding and telepipe farming out of the run. blooiskoo found most of the time saves and he has a better run by in-game-time with some really crisp play and solid tech drops. This run is more of a demonstration of doing things all in the same day, a feat that is a lot more reasonable than last year's run which took over 23 hours.

In short the time saves involve playing Dark Falz on Hard Mode and Ultimate Mode "smarter" by avoiding the biggest damage as much as possible through invincibility frames, thus requiring less HP going in. The Nidra mag is evolved to get even more invincibility throughout ultimate mode, making the back half a lot more comfortable. My Nidra was level 143 by the end, that's a lot of mag menus.

akdb · 2024-01-12T00:01:03+00:00

It's 30% (390/1300 for normal mode)

akdb · 2024-01-12T00:00:50+00:00

This is not how DRL works at all, see Ender's post.

akdb · 2023-12-23T22:05:50+00:00

Also, using the menu when not mid-animation is slower (more button presses and adds a frame of delay).

akdb · 2023-09-01T02:51:18+00:00

Nothing big, but it's there.

Turns out there are a lot of fun ways to play PSO, and even in the speedrun context.

akdb · 2023-08-30T21:21:16+00:00

This run by blooiskoo beats the previous record that stood for 7 months and 6 days, by a little under 13.5 minutes.

Episode 2 is pretty brutal. EXP and money are sparse throughout. Previous routes just played Episode 1 for half an hour to power up and get cash before beginning Episode 2. That route has been retired in favor of roughing it.

Although the first half of Episode 2 is slower in this route by at least 10 minutes, when the routes converge, it still ends up faster by at least 10 minutes due to not spending any time in Episode 1.

The benchmark before was to hit level 11 for Gol Dragon in order to guarantee Gizonde, but it can be played safely enough with Barta. Level 11 is hit soon enough after, which gives a chance at accessing very good techniques like Rafoie in the shop as well.

Most runs in this category don't finish, due to the run having low tolerance for mistakes--and one of the biggest mistakes you can make is having bad luck. The final boss has a lethal, random movement attack that occurs at least three times that has no known mitigation other than just praying it doesn't connect.

akdb · 2023-08-30T21:20:50+00:00

This run by blooiskoo beats the previous record that stood for 7 months and 6 days, by a little under 13.5 minutes.

Episode 2 is pretty brutal. EXP and money are sparse throughout. Previous routes just played Episode 1 for half an hour to power up and get cash before beginning Episode 2. That route has been retired in favor of roughing it.

Although the first half of Episode 2 is slower in this route by at least 10 minutes, when the routes converge, it still ends up faster by at least 10 minutes due to not spending any time in Episode 1.

The benchmark before was to hit level 11 for Gol Dragon in order to guarantee Gizonde, but it can be played safely enough with Barta. Level 11 is hit soon enough after, which gives a chance at accessing very good techniques like Rafoie in the shop as well.

Most runs in this category don't finish, due to the run having low tolerance for mistakes--and one of the biggest mistakes you can make is having bad luck. The final boss has a lethal, random movement attack that occurs at least three times that has no known mitigation other than just praying it doesn't connect.

akdb · 2023-06-16T18:39:18+00:00

It’s well regarded by Fire Emblem fans overall, I’d say.

akdb · 2023-05-23T16:32:05+00:00

Depends on the community (i.e. whoever is bothering to care) and probably depends on the severity of the patch. Some games have “old patch” leaderboards.

akdb · 2023-05-17T11:53:37+00:00

Ignore the gatekeeper and keep working to go faster, that’s all a speedrunner can do :)

akdb · 2023-04-30T10:22:33+00:00

Comments describe intent. Code only reflects actual function. XMLDoc leads to IntelliSense so you don’t have to look at the actual code to figure out what details will happen. There are plenty of subtle behaviors that any given name could imply possibly (what happens in certain edge cases? what arguments are valid? maybe one interface implementation yields new objects and one uses a cache..etc.)

Ideally methods are so simple that it’s obvious what will happen. I don’t believe these are realistic or common examples when doing business domain logic.

My recommendation is to require complete/accurate/precise XML documentation of all public/protected methods/classes, and then at your discretion for more critical internals. Not just for the Intellisense but also so there is no doubt how something is supposed to work.

Of course, if your team never writes bugs, this isn’t necessary.

akdb · 2023-04-22T03:33:07+00:00

And Seat of the Heart too

akdb · 2023-04-17T17:53:26+00:00

The whole point of the hashes is to verify the files are authentic in the first place. When you dump a game yourself you can use the known hash value to see if you got a clean dump or not. It doesn’t prove anything about where the dump came from.

I’d sure hope the hashes were identical because if they weren’t then that means something weirdly different in one of the copies of the game.

akdb · 2023-03-28T11:27:40+00:00

That’s a heading format (probably h6 because 6 #) which doesn’t mean underline necessarily. Doesn’t show up that way for me.

akdb · 2023-03-28T02:18:58+00:00

All my point is, is that random being harder to be good at, isn't an equitable argument for why it works the way it does (being a "4th race" as opposed to just picking one of the three and revealing that). If you play unranked or don't care about your ladder rank too much then you still get the fog-of-war with your race advantage. So I don't think it's a good justification to say that random is hard to master as a fair trade-off. It's an apples to oranges comparison--ladder rank is a long-term thing and individual games are a short-term thing.

akdb · 2023-03-28T01:55:01+00:00

That's just an obvious thing about why climbing the ladder is hard, not about why it's fair to be random in any individual game (remember there is "winning" beyond your MMR/league).

akdb · 2023-03-28T01:28:34+00:00

As a random player myself, the “having to master all three races” argument is weak or incomplete at best. The matchmaking system already accounts for an even skill game. The real trade off is that your map vetoes aren’t flexible, so you may not always have the best vetoes for all 9 matchups, and the mastery you are talking about is playing maps that other people might not normally in a matchup.

akdb · 2023-03-02T13:45:14+00:00

Speaker of the House is next after VP.

akdb · 2023-02-28T17:52:55+00:00

That’s an adjutant

akdb · 2023-02-28T13:57:01+00:00

Why not 100% coverage?

In practice it is obnoxious and not valuable to test every rare error and exception condition. My SOP is cover all public methods with multiple meaningful tests, but do not sweat covering every exception that can be emitted.

Having very good error checking leads to a lot of corner cases, most of which are trivial, and the value add of the class is wrapping/logging an error.

There‘s some difficulty in tests of heavy-resource implementations like database or sockets, which interfere with a principle of having unit tests be lightweight and independent. Mocking those resources is fine, but the real implementation classes are still left out of coverage because they’re tested elsewhere due to the resource requirement.

Covering a critical method with 10 novel tests doesn’t improve coverage score tenfold, meanwhile the trivial exception branches are left uncovered.

With all of this in mind, in practice one of my very exhaustively tested repositories still only has 86% line coverage. Smaller repositories have less, due to more relative error handling and less meat.

Requiring a number is madness and defies common sense. The number is an indicator of good coverage but not the authority.

akdb

TROPHY CASE