[Golden Sun] Deadbeard - Mia solo

Channel:

Vik

Subscribers:

364

Published on May 24, 2022 6:48:44 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3UaZMKIfac

Game:

Golden Sun (2001)

Duration: 9:25

491 views

23

This is a partly tool-assisted run in which I defeat all the bosses in Golden Sun with Mia only. See the restrictions, stats, and my thoughts about the fight below.

--- Rules and restrictions ---

- Only Mia can be alive at any given time
- No Djinn can be on standby before the battle to prevent turn 1 summons
- No items may be used, including in-battle uses of equipment like rings

--- Tool-assistance ---

This run makes use of something I've decided to call "RNG routing." Battles in Golden Sun can be very predictable with the use of savestates since only certain actions advance the RNG before you commit to an action. Thanks to this, it's possible to go through the fight and methodically write a turn by turn action list that will theoretically give you the same result every time you enter the battle on the same RNG seed (like when you load a savestate right before it.) This is a consequence of retrying fights quickly on emulator and rather than have it be a side effect I'd try to ignore I decided to embrace it as a tool I could use to make entertaining videos. If you're put off by this and would rather see a run that is played normally, I recommend looking up my Isaac solo.
It's also worth pointing out that even though I say the run is tool-assisted in some way, I'm still the one performing all the inputs in real time.

--- Mia's stats ---

Level: 65
HP: 837
PP: 251
Attack: 534
Defense: 310
Agility: 320
Luck: 14

Weapon: Wicked Mace
Head: Mythril Circlet
Hands: War Gloves
Armor: Storm Gear
Shirt: None
Boots: Quick Boots
Ring: Cleric's Ring

Djinn: Flint, Granite, Vine, Sap, Ground, Bane, Kite

--- About the fight ---

The big boy optional boss of Golden Sun. Saturos and Menardi are still a little harder for solos since there's always that risk of instant death but Deadbeard has the ability to deal huge amounts of damage by buffing his attack stat and just unloading haymakers onto you. This especially becomes a problem later on in the fight when Deadbeard runs out of PP which, yes, that can happen and, yes, it happens in this video.
I use Break here and there to remove his attack and resistance buffs. I can't say for certain that doing so makes him likely to reapply the buffs but if so it shouldn't really matter since I'm still spending a turn doing no damage and he then possibly spends a turn doing no damage or less damage in return so it should roughly even out as far as opportunities to exchange damage are concerned but hopefully I saved some health by doing so. It definitely helped towards the end when he doesn't have enough PP to cast anything and will always attack twice every turn. Even one Impact buff there would increase the damage output by a whole lot.

Another neat little thing that happens in this video is me casting a Psynergy that I shouldn't be able to. After I use Kite the second time, I queue up Pure Ply and Ground. So far so good. However, Ground is a priority Djinn (just like Granite and Flash) and will always go first, and when I use it I change into a class that doesn't have access to Pure Ply, yet I'm still able to cast it. How the heck?????
Well, I was able to cast it at the time I queued the action and presumably there's no check for if I'm still able to do so when I actually cast.
If I had to guess, the game first checks if your Psynergy is blocked at the time of casting and if you still have enough PP to cast it (maybe you lost some due to Psy Drain) and if not it just allows you to do it since if you selected it from the list it should be a valid action, since this exact scenario shouldn't come up very often so why bother implementing an exception for it. Mystery solved!
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