SaGa 2 (aka Final Fantasy Legend 2) is a far more complex and involved than than its predecessor, which (as we all know) can be completed in just under two minutes. You’ve got to travel across multiple worlds, unlock the secret behind the mysterious MAGI, and figure out where your father went — that’s a lot to put on one man’s shoulders. We’re gonna need a lot more time for this. Like, half an hour.

Most of this two-part video is the TASser working the game’s assorted random-number seeds (whose memory locations are monitored on the upper-right) in order to trigger the bugs he needs to skip vast tracts of the story. In part one above, the climax of all these arrangements takes place at 8:22, when the following situation takes place:

- There is a total of 16 participants in a battle between your party and the enemy
- An ally or enemy dies of poison damage
- Your final action in a turn is something that doesn’t require a target (such as using a shield to defend yourself)

This, for some reason, triggers a bug that causes the most significant bit of assorted inconvenient memory locations to be set to 0. This alters your party’s race, HP, stats, and inventory, and any empty slot in your item list is suddenly transformed into a Katana, which deals ridiculous damage if the wielder’s high in agility — which you are now, thanks to that bug. Consuming the bugged-out meat that the bugged-out battle gives you also transforms your hero into a BlackCat, a monster far, far more powerful than what you’re supposed to be able to access this early in the game.

Part 2 chiefly depicts our hero switching between monsters depending on whether he needs to teleport around the world or set off some other bug. At 8:57, the TASser exploits a famous SaGa 2 bug that was fixed for FFL2 — the game erroneously treats “Counter” (an ability skill that some monsters have) as an item that can be unequipped. “Counter” just happens to sell for 272,823 GP in the shops, enabling your party to obtain all the weaponry they need for the final battle without much fuss.

In 9:48 you can see the fairly famous trashcan bug in action, one that wasn’t fixed for FFL2 despite being pretty obvious. In Saga 2, double-clicking the trash can when you have 29 MAGI suddenly ups your MAGI total to 255, letting you skip about 85% of the game and open any dang door you like in the celestial world. Finally, at 11:29, we see the party rent a mount for the dragon races in Race Town, only to teleport right on out after the race starts, granting them a blazing bugged-out ride that can clip through walls.

Straight to the final boss we go, and from there, onward to an ending filled with fabricated memories and people we swear we’ve never seen before in our lives. Whew.

This tool-assisted speedrun takes advantage of a bug in the original game to get its results. In terms of execution, you could do everything in this video on a real Game Boy, although not this quickly.

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It has been said that the tower in the center of the World is connected to Paradise. Dreaming of a life in Paradise, many have challenged the secret of the tower, but no one knows what became of them. Now, there is another who will brave the adventure. He is kind of in a hurry.

What is happening in this video? Let’s work it out in timeline fashion, as revealed in the author’s very long and technically dense explanation.

Makai Tōshi SaGa (called The Final Fantasy Legend in the US) features three “ethnic groups” among playable characters: humans, mutants and monsters. Humans power up via items and mutants by fighting battles, but monsters grow stronger only by transforming into other monsters. You do this by having them eat the “monster meat” that some enemies drop when you kill them. The creature you get after nomming on a monster corpse depends on both the eat-er and the eat-ee and is determined by complicated voodoo.

In the original release of SaGa, there is a bug that, at the time, was described like this: “Go to the inventory screen for any party member, bash all the buttons for a while, and when you go back to the field map, the game will be all messed up.” All messed up meant that your party, their items, the gold you carried, the graphics, and even the world you were in were all mixed up and usually corrupted. It was the first major bug in a series that became known for humorous game-stopping bugs (especially Romancing SaGa 1 and 2).

Essentially this TAS is all about empirically determining the exact behavior of this memory corruption and using it to its greatest advantage. The author’s explanation is hopelessly complex, but here is essentially what’s happening in the video:

0:00-0:42 – Begin a game with the dreaded “four monster” party — Wererat (“ghoul” type), Redbull (“lizard” type), and two Zombies (“skeleton” type). Go out of town, return at once to avoid map-name corruption, and execute the inventory bug on character #3. This warps the party into the version of the town you visit after completing the world’s quests and also kills a few of your characters, letting you exchange them for a Dragon and an Albatros in the guild.

Reset the game (this resets the “seed,” so to speak, for the behavior that happens when you trigger the bug), do the bug on the Albatross in slot #3, then do it on the character in slot #2. This turns the Warrior into a Goblin. Do the bug on the Dragon, turning it into a Warrior (“skeleton” type). This Warrior has a Chainsaw, which, thanks to another one of Square’s famous SaGa bugs, can one-hit kill boss enemies.

0:42-1:13 – Now that we have a Chainsaw character, switch the party order so the Warrior is in front and the Albatross is #2. Reset the game and the seed, then do the bug on the Albatross. This puts you in a bugged version of the tower, with all the spheres you need to reach the tower’s apex, riding a bugged version of the motorcycle you pick up at one point in the game; this one lets you travel one tile per frame, 16 times your normal speed. This causes the background to largely be destroyed while you’re moving around.

Storm your way up the tower on your rad bugged bike. (You have a couple of random encounters along the way, but having a buffed-out Warrior leading your party makes it easy to run away.)

1:13-1:24 — In front of the door leading to the final boss, get off your bug-bike for a little housekeeping. Save and reset, then do the bug on the worryingly corrupted character taking up slot #4, turning him into a Demon. Do the bug on slot #2 to turn the character into a skeleton, then one more time to turn it into a Goblin. This process puts assorted in-game parameters back to normal and ensures the final boss battle actually works.

1:24-1:58 — Fight the Creator. (Note that SaGa is the only game I’m aware of that lets you kill God with a chainsaw in a single hit.)

1:58-4:46 — Marvel as the ending completely fabricates your previous adventures.

Just a little update today (been up since 3am), so you only get a little screenshot.

Heavyweight Championship Boxing (called just Boxing ボクシング in Japan, where it was developed and released by Tonkin House) is a standard sort of 8-bit boxer in the style of Punch-Out!!. The main thing it adds is an overhead view when the fighters are maneuvering around the ring — the Punch-Out!! first-person view doesn’t kick in until you get close enough to your opponent. You’re also allowed a tiny little bit of customization with your fighter’s skills.

Nicovideo account req’d. How to get one. Click that “…” word balloon on the bottom to turn off scrolly comments.

I bring it up on Magweasel for two reasons: the adrenaline-laced in-game music, and the hilarious TAS linked to above. Did you know that midair combos were legal in boxing until at least 1990?