Phantasy Star Cave Message Board

Or at least anticipate it somehow?

If you could somehow force PD3 to never use Cancelling, that would open up new possibilities. Even just knowing whether Megid waz coming would enable you to not heal despite being in critical health.

if that could be done, the speedrun would be a TON safer. Unfortunately, because the RNG calculates on a per-frame basis and the game runs around 60 FPS, manipulating the RNG is humanly impossible.

in the speedrun community, we've worked hard to try to figure out a way. the best we could come up with was a menu glitch which hasn't been fruitful yet other than producing a 5-Chaz final boss fight and a ghost "6th" character that can cast a random skill. this is however, still frame perfect.

One can manipulate RNG via controller input. Doing some seemingly random input just before enemy attack method is choosen might be possible way to manipulate enemy actions. You'd really need a good TAS emulator which is able to display values from system (console) memory frame-by-frame to manipulate the RNG.

in a TAS setting, yeah, manipulating the RNG is possible to do as you can pinpoint everything on a frame basis. Outside of a TAS setting, it is humanly impossible to manipulate the RNG in PSIV to get the encounters you want and/or the drops you want. If it were, Shadowblade strats would be a more widely-used option for RTA strats (the current WR holder uses Shadowblade strats, but ask him how many attempts he had to rip because Shadowblade wouldn't drop). But since the RNG calculates too fast to even react to, you'll never see it done.

MrStarbird wrote:in a TAS setting, yeah, manipulating the RNG is possible to do as you can pinpoint everything on a frame basis. Outside of a TAS setting, it is humanly impossible to manipulate the RNG in PSIV to get the encounters you want and/or the drops you want.

Yup. Outside of TAS you cannot manipulate your luck. And iirc there's pretty much no way to manipulate enemies to do certain actions in PSIV... at least I cannot recall atm.

Yeah, there is no way. The RNG just runs too fast. A shame though, as a guaranteed Shadowblade drop would be ideal.