Super Mario RPG Switch Restricted Weapons/No Deaths Run - Rose Way and Rose Town

Channel:

Master Knight DH

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Published on December 11, 2023 10:51:41 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTy3rUhqJno

Game:

Super Mario RPG (1996)

Duration: 38:07

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Original version videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R32dHRy6_rw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50pz6L7FGJI (missable Flower Tab)

Playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO2o0_k4kOryFUHsFDdkj9f0n2YfuNKar

New relevant rule:
-Weapon general restrictions per character: max allowed ATK increase = 10 + (max possible ATK increase - 10)/2 (the main point of this challenge aside from No Deaths)

The Frog Coin treasure originally required dealing with 2 given Shy Guy encounters, but one of them is now skippable for the treasure. Of course, since my guys are lagging on EXP as a result of Croco being possible to do No Damage, and Claymagnus and Belome not being nightmares, I get into a few more encounters to snag Mario a needed Level Up.

As I stated, the whole point of Restricted Weapons is to get into the resource management of attack spell usage by keeping weapon usage from outpacing it. That's the stated summary and I'm sticking by it. The Switch remaster is going to provide conveniences that will let me get by even better with this rule, and suffice to say that I end up getting to drop an exception I was using in the original and it pays off very nicely, but I'll get to that.

The highlight here is the existence of Special Enemies, added in the remaster. Sometimes in mook encounters starting on Bandit's Way, a given enemy will be enhanced to be a Special Enemy. They receive the following benefits:
-Tripled HP
-Speed increased by 10
-Highest power stat (tie going in reverse display order) multiplied by 1.5
-All other power stats multiplied by 1.2
If you overcome the encounter with the Special Enemy bested, the Special Enemy will yield doubled EXP and Coins, in addition to a Frog Coin.

This does allow for moments of interest as we see here, but I do not think that every enemy being Special would make for a good Hard Mode, since tripling every enemies' HP, by itself, would invite tedium, in addition to having bosses like Claymagnus have Mogenar Syndrome (what I use to describe bosses who have inflated difficulty as a result of more durable sub-targets that need to be hit first to damage the already more durable main part, such as Reset Bomb Pod in Kid Icarus Uprising; named after Mogenar in Metroid Prime 3) to further aggravate things. I'll eventually make a video about how SMRPG could provide a good Hard Mode. Let's just say that the Timing Chain mechanic does have design space possibility.

Oh, and I erroneously thought that Special enemies get improved Evade if they have any. They don't. I actually looked into it. I'll talk about that in a later video.

Meanwhile, enemies on Rose Way have plentiful Physical DEF to scream at us to have our new weapons equipped. Even then, Special Shy Guys and Special Arachnes get particularly boosted Physical DEF as a result of having Physical DEF as their highest power stat, forcing magic usage and its burst damage involvement...against already tripled HP threats. Yeah, I think you get my point about magic balancing as well as well as Special Enemies being a difficulty band-aid when all is said and done.

There is one other thing worth bringing up, and that is relating not to combat, but to a Rose Town NPC, and it concerns a bug. This concerns the old man walking in and out of his family's house handling water provision. In a case of interest, the old man is actually indoors for talking to him there when he actually goes into his family's house. This is something that applied to the SNES version and it applies here too, with the appropriate grammar update in the dialogue. But there's a problem.

The bug is that the old man being available indoors is inconsistent. I have to use specific movement to account for this.

I don't know what causes the bug, but the bug did make recording about the old man's dialogue bothersome to say the least. I was guessing that the developer handling this had set the timer to the intended amount of seconds not thinking that the value would be read as frames, which I was considering Bumblebee in Kid Icarus Uprising, with its 2 auto-dodges per charge, to have the exact opposite problem with intent of it lasting 1.5 seconds by default instead of that ridiculous 90, if Bumblebee didn't have full line cost and auto-dodge anticlockwise movement inability. Of course, for whatever reason on this reason, I was consistently getting the old man actually being indoors until I randomly wasn't. Otherwise, I'd be thinking the availability window would erroneously be 3 frames instead of 3 seconds.

This is something I'd have to check if it applies to after helping the people of Rose Town with their arrow problem, but I hadn't encountered the bug then.

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