In which our heroes head for new horizons (at last), and try to avoid getting squashed by a glorified trash compactor (SHUT THEM ALL DOWN, HURRY!). Will they succeed?
In which our heroes attempt to not get burned by Fire Gigas. Again.
This part was split into two videos due to interruptions and such. Quality is poor. I’m still behind. I intended to record more last week, but that plan didn’t work, so hopefully will catch up with recording and streaming tonight.
I really should be keeping up with these more.
This time round, we head for the Underground Palace and take it on head first.
In which we make our way deeper into Elinee’s castle and get a lot of abuse from werewolves.
Recording interrupted by random wifeperson appearance.
In today’s episode… we die… a lot.
Part 2 of our hardcore SoM playthrough sees our hero make his way over to the Dwarf Village to free them of Tropicallo and meet up with Popoi the sprite.
This part is somewhat longer than most, still to this day working on getting the timings right.
Not too long ago, forum member Sene posted a thread called Secret of Mana Challenges. In this he details a hardcore mode for Secret of Mana to make the game more difficult:
Sup y’all, been playing Secret of Mana for fifteen years (and probably completed the game as many times by now), and recently I picked it up again for the first time in a few years. However, it’s also probably about fifteen years since the game posed any real challenge to me, so in my madness, I decided to make up a Hard Mode – the deal is: no armor allowed, and no offensive Magic against bosses (e.g. no Sprite Magic, and no Lucent Beam/Fire Bouquet/etc – defensive Magic like Cure Water must be allowed, or the challenge is completely impossible). Additionally, no cheating (no blocking spells with Moogle Belt), and no Mana Magic for the Mana Beast (doing this in normal playthroughs is already super cheap). Complete the game under these terms, and you can officially proclaim yourself a SoM-veteran! (and life hater, I suppose)
So to sum it up:
– No Armour
– No Offensive Magic against bosses
– No Glitching
– No Mana Magic against the Mana Beast.
Challenge accepted, says Kassidy. I’ve started playing through the game in this manner and, I agree, it’s quite a bit harder than I expected. Not only that, but I’m video blogging / let’s playing / documenting the agony. Above is the first instalment of this series, with more to follow soon.
Tool Assisted Speed-runs are those done with the assistance of programs that allow the player to re-record segments, edit them, time actions on a frame by frame basis to manipulate luck, and all sorts of other funky things that wouldn’t strictly be possible when playing normally. The aim of these is to get to the end of the game, from a clean state, as quickly as possible, though sometimes speed is sacrificed for entertainment value.
While very often this is seen done for platformers, it isn’t limited to that genre alone. In this case, SD3 has finally been TASed, and completed in just under 3 and a half hours by praetarius3. You can watch it on YouTube here, or download from the tasvideos.org page here. Also, if you want to understand some of the things going on a bit better, check out the author’s comments here.
When watching the video, turn on closed captions in YouTube to get some background as to what is going on, as this plays on a non-patched version of the game.
There are times when I can’t quite avoid scratching a hole in my head out of sheer amazement at how bizarre TV commercials can be. This, my good people, is one of those times, and it’s a commercial for Shinyaku Seiken Densetsu, aka Sword of Mana:
Now for the part where we link this back in to MMM: here’s the track from SwoM that plays during the action scene in that commercial.
[audio:https://www.seikens.com/seikens/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/04-Colosseum.mp3|titles=Kenji Ito – Sword of Mana – Colosseum]
