Super Mario RPG Restricted Weapons/No Deaths Run - Bowyer

Channel:

Master Knight DH

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1,950

Published on November 11, 2023 4:00:08 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MezrZP_GE4

Game:

Super Mario RPG (1996)

Duration: 24:09

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General rules on playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO2o0_k4kOryI-6ur48Q1fjPRv3waRk57

Relevant rule exception:
-Restricted Weapons is off for this fight due to Bowyer's INSANE DEF stats for this point

Already we have a boss that necessitates breaking the most important rule unless we want to do MORE grinding. I can point out that he's theoretically possible to No Damage Run regardless of your stats and everything, but that's due to blatant AI exploitation as I will get into, and the process would again be tedious as sin anyway, not helped by how there's a long enough cutscene right before the battle.

If you don't get it, Bowyer has not only 720 HP, but 35 Magic DEF and 40 Physical DEF, which without our weapon improvements is going to be excessively hard to punch through. In fact, I can say that Bowyer does better than any boss thus far at having us consider more than attack-heal-attack-heal, partly because of the shocking defenses on its own, but also because he has a gimmick where he can lock one of 3 of your controller buttons for 2 rounds. The control buttons includes the A Button, and he will target that as a potential call out of you using regular attacks.

In case that's not enough, Bowyer has different behavior based on which Button is locked. His A Button lock behavior is arguably the most dangerous, as he can use either Bolt, which is powerful but also single-target, or Static E, his most dangerous attack as it hits everybody for decent damage and even 2HKOs Geno if Geno is not defending, and there's no stalling this out by having Bowyer run out of FP because Bowyer has 250 FP, more than any other boss for a while. On the X Button lock, Bowyer can either do a simple arrow shot for blockable damage but he has enough Physical ATK to hit hard at this point, or throw out Bolt or Lightning Orb, the latter being significantly weaker than Bolt. It's his Y Button lock where Bowyer becomes a potential No Damage Run, as Bowyer will either do his simple arrow shot that again is blockable, or fire a G'Night arrow that will put the target character to beddy-bye if they don't have a Wake Up Pin equipped, while not dealing damage.

In case you can't tell, Bowyer having a No Damage Run being possible without grinding would involve keeping the Y Button targeted and blocking all of the arrow shots, and he has exploitable behavior for this as well. What happens is that Bowyer's Button selection is based on an accumulator, resetting upon the Button locking, that is increased by 4 points with a regular attack, 2 points by a Special attack, or 1 point by an Item attack (which for all intents and purposes we actually don't have at this point), or you can do nothing that bothers him directly and no points gets added. Below 6 points, he will lock the X Button, I assume to disrupt some sort of camping with items; anywhere from 6 to 15 points will have Bowyer go for the Y Button, and 16 or more points results in the A Button which you would have had to use to get to 16 points (you'd have 12 points at most with Special attacks from all 3 characters on both rounds) so of course Bowyer is not wanting you spamming physical attacks. But this system is imperfect, because you can see how you can throw 3 physical attacks per 2 Rounds and Bowyer just disables the Y Button. The clincher is that Bowyer can disable the same Button consecutively, and you can make him do that with either the X or Y Button.

If the remaster is going to opt to clean up scripts, I imagine that Bowyer's button targeting AI is definitely going to be on a hit list. And I can tell you that Square-Enix is no stranger to enemy behavior updates in their remasters. We already have Adventures of Mana involve updates to multiple bosses as I definitely remember being the case with Golem and Kraken, possibly to account for that game's inclusion of diagonal movement that Final Fantasy Adventure was missing, but definitely making use of how the gameplay was not under a pure 1:1 transition. SMRPG's remaster has shown added mechanics in its first trailer alone and we haven't even seen some of the potential stuff quite possibly because of spoiler territory (I guess a certain one of the Specials the JP site showed involving a later heated area was something they felt wouldn't reveal much of anything, let alone to one of us "dumb Americans" which to be fair...) so there could be further changes we don't know about. We will have to wait and see, but in the meantime, yeah.

Oh, and in case you find it inconsistent that I'm dealing so much damage with Geno's Geno Beam thanks to the STBP, if you're playing this on the original version, there's a buyable item called an Energizer that would allow the shown damage as speedruns make use of. Things like that are why I'm actually avoiding unnecessary item usage.

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