207 replies to this topic

[Moosh]

Nicely done! I never actually unlocked that one legit because it took me days of attempts just beating him the first time.

[Deedee]

Congrats on being completely, 100% done!

(just don't pay attention to the occasional random message you get from collecting the cursed skulls you're done you can go home now there's nothing left to do)

[Cyberventurer]

Nicely done! I never actually unlocked that one legit because it took me days of attempts just beating him the first time.

In my experience, unlocking Venser himself was much harder to the point I had to cheat with frame advancement, though I don't know how much of that was due to playing as Tartaros and not knowing that the boss's death rune was conditional to being below a health threshold. At the very least, the vanilla fight "only" has to deal with two elements, an easier-to-disrupt ultimate, and no final phase to worry about. Also I think the attacks were slower? Half of the fight was me using Wan to shoot partially-charged Sound Waves at the head while strafing tight circles around him, since that'd conveniently dodge a couple of his attacks in the process. And it took me a bunch of tries before realizing his DVD screensaver attack only pulsed out AoE when he'd collide into a wall, making that move a bit more predictable to deal with. Then the downtime would be me using PK Fire on one hand and instantly switching to Bubble for the other to get damage out on both at once, if my positioning was lucky enough to do so without really having to move.

 

Also since I'm posting, I guess I can share a couple of final potential minor things I noticed:

-When chosen as your follower, Wan won't pass on his upgraded Sound Wave to the player. Maybe it's getting wrapped up with the additional robot-to-robot-only perk he's supposed to offer to his friends? The other two might have the same bug.

-This might be a ZC thing in general, but if one of Venser's open hands is overlapping the head's hitbox, the hand is effectively invulnerable to your attacks anyway, and you won't be able to interrupt it if it's holding an elemental charge. This applies to both regular and bossless attempts, as the head's hitbox (immune or not) seems to take precedence over checking if the hand is being hit.

-If Autimecia happens to inherit the time reversal power as her ability, it will activate during cutscenes if you hold B to speed up dialogue. I don't know what effect this has other than making her appear in the upper left corner of the screen during the story intro, though.

-If, for some reason, you choose to hit F6 and continue in the middle of Autimecia and Dracus's intro story scene, it will finish by placing you in the Yuurand map, regardless of which map you actually chose to play. Although it's admittedly a player bringing it on themself to actually do this, I figured it'd be safer to report it anyway.

 

 

And two teeny cosmetic bits, most likely not worth fixing but just in case the sprites ever get reused elsewhere?:

-Venser's north-facing Baphomet skin's walking animation is mistimed, with one step persisting for 21 animation frames instead of 7 like everybody else. (I counted this out with F4)

-When Autimecia is walking over water, her north-facing sprite animations appears to be mis-animated, missing a neutral step and also having a frame shifted downward while also having an errant brown pixel on the upper left part of her fedora.

[Cyberventurer]

Actually one more story question and then I'll stop bumping the thread, since I recently zipped through Yuurei again (I had only played through as Naiya and forgot there was a questionnaire to let me play as others for their stories).

 

What happened to Hito, Jack, and Will? Since they weren't yuurei, did Flect lie about regaining immortality and they faded away after banishing Jandra and Tyre? Or did Vanice kill them when they tried to go against her themselves, which was why she had to find someone else to continue her work? Or is Naiya's ending also canon and they became enslaved to her?

 

Edit: Huh. Did I miss content in Yuurei and Reikon with the orbs around the warp pads, or were they just teasers for Yuurand?

Edited by Cyberventurer, 17 May 2025 - 09:04 PM.

[Russ]

-When chosen as your follower, Wan won't pass on his upgraded Sound Wave to the player. Maybe it's getting wrapped up with the additional robot-to-robot-only perk he's supposed to offer to his friends? The other two might have the same bug.

Huh... I will have to look into this one. I'm wondering if it has to do with a recent sound wave refactor we did.

-This might be a ZC thing in general, but if one of Venser's open hands is overlapping the head's hitbox, the hand is effectively invulnerable to your attacks anyway, and you won't be able to interrupt it if it's holding an elemental charge. This applies to both regular and bossless attempts, as the head's hitbox (immune or not) seems to take precedence over checking if the hand is being hit.

I think you've described exactly why it's happening. It's an annoying ZC-ism that the version Yuurand was built it can't do much about, though newer ZC versions are... still not great at this problem but slightly better.

-If Autimecia happens to inherit the time reversal power as her ability, it will activate during cutscenes if you hold B to speed up dialogue. I don't know what effect this has other than making her appear in the upper left corner of the screen during the story intro, though.

Welp, I bet I know exactly why this one happens. Easy enough to fix at least.

-When Autimecia is walking over water, her north-facing sprite animations appears to be mis-animated, missing a neutral step and also having a frame shifted downward while also having an errant brown pixel on the upper left part of her fedora.

Would you believe I've noticed this since Yuurand first came out years ago and kept silent, seeing if anyone else would notice? The sprite sheet got shifted over, so it includes her attack animation instead of neutral, but I kinda liked the idea of her marching and gesturing as she moves over the water. I always imagined her make choo choo noises while miming a train whistle. It should've been fixed long ago, but I was deathly curious to see if anyone would notice. Congrats on being the first.

Actually one more story question and then I'll stop bumping the thread, since I recently zipped through Yuurei again (I had only played through as Naiya and forgot there was a questionnaire to let me play as others for their stories).
 

What happened to Hito, Jack, and Will? Since they weren't yuurei, did Flect lie about regaining immortality and they faded away after banishing Jandra and Tyre? Or did Vanice kill them when they tried to go against her themselves, which was why she had to find someone else to continue her work? Or is Naiya's ending also canon and they became enslaved to her?

The only canon Yuurei stories are Rhone's and Will's. As Aevin explained it to me, the Wisps are in a sort of weird position. Jack and Hito are effectively immortal now, having claimed a Yuurei's power as their own, but because they never died, they didn't enter into a "contract" with Vanice and the Spectral Web, so to speak, so they don't support the web the same way other Yuurei do. They're in a similar position to Holm at the end of Reikon, immortal so long as they aren't killed. Will, on the other hand, is in much the same position he was in with Tyre. He's dependent on a Yuurei sharing their energy with him to survive. If Naiya were to die, he'd ultimately fade away. Naiya, because she was defeated before the Spectral Web fell apart, didn't pass on and will still revive after a time like the Yuurei do (well, did), but after that, she'll be in the same position as Holm, Jack, and Hito: Getting killed would be the end of her, and she'd move on to whatever's on the other side of death. So the Wisps are still alive and kicking. They just didn't show up in Reikon cuz there wasn't enough room in the story for them. Presumably, they were off doing their thing and are probably wondering "What the heck happened to Naiya?"

Edit: Huh. Did I miss content in Yuurei and Reikon with the orbs around the warp pads, or were they just teasers for Yuurand?

No missed content there! I don't know if I'd call them teasers for Yuurand. They were just designed as easter eggs, representing different groups of characters. One of Naiya's subscreen messages in Yuurei says "The orbs in the warp points mean something", and when I first played Yuurei, I took that literally and assumed they must hide some kind of secret. So when we started making Yuurand, I pitched the idea to Aevin of having them actually hide a secret.

[Ether]

When I first played Reikon, I did use the orbs to catch some foreshadowing ahead of time.

 

Spoiler

Specifically, the Warp Space orbs had a Vanice/Flect + Holm/Mirr arrangement. That was one of the clues I used to figure out the life-that-was twist ahead of time.

 

As for Flect not getting the wisps' cooperation after Yuurei...I feel like, for all that the narrative tried to set her up as this manipulative puppetmaster, there's no evidence that she's ever once gotten someone to work against their own interests successfully. She didn't have to trick the wisps into killing Tyre and Jandra; it was a mutually beneficial arrangement, and they didn't even finish the job. I kind of figure at some point after Yuurei they went, "Listen, we're busy ruling the Labyrinth like gods, we're not going to kill Will's girlfriend, now leave us alone," and she just got shut out.

[Cyberventurer]

So heeeey I know I said I was done but I was curious to see what my password looked like, then one thing led to another and I think I have a couple of final bug reports to make, although they may be "tainted" because apparently slapping in 90 letter Fs counts as a valid password and I don't know what that might have done to my save file under-the-hood. On the bright side, I think I isolated which password digits control my currency count.

 

First is that the Thunderwaves voucher doesn't show up on Tyre's consumable shop list at all, even though every other spell is. Is its exclusion intentional? (It doesn't show up on a clean, new save either)

 

Second is that trying to buy out every consumable (sans pillow) in one go eventually led to my shop window appearing like this:

 

 

You can't back out of the bad window with B, and trying to select an "option" hardlocked ZC and required ending it from the task manager. This did NOT happen when I broke up my shopping into two trips (bought a bunch of vouchers, left the house, re-entered and cleared out the rest).

 

Edit: The order you buy stuff doesn't seem to matter. It happens after the 21st purchase in a row, when you talk to Tyre to start your 22nd. To help keep track, if you just go down the list, it fittingly freezes up after buying Death and Halt would be next.

 

Edit2: Removed an erroneous message. It did happen on a clean save file with an imported normal password.

 

Update: It's not purchasing the vouchers or using a password that does it.  I think it's related to pop-up select boxes. Talking to Tyre and asking to see his collection of blocks 33 times in a row also caused a crash on a new, untouched file. Replicated twice, both with and without the "Let's chat for a bit" precursor box in the way too, though the 33rd chat on the second test froze on that box instead of the usual shop window that appears after it.

Edited by Cyberventurer, 18 May 2025 - 04:53 PM.

[Russ]

Now that is fascinating. I suspect what's happening is some kind of memory overflow issue - dialogue scripts in 2.53 are fairly resource intensive. Unless... alternatively, if FFC scripts are getting launched and not quitting cuz you're not exiting the menu, it could run out of FFC slots and then hang trying to find another. The fact that this happens if you do it 33 times, when 32 is the max number of FFCs per screen, definitely has me curious. I'm gonna test this out.

 

although they may be "tainted" because apparently slapping in 90 letter Fs counts as a valid password and I don't know what that might have done to my save file under-the-hood. On the bright side, I think I isolated which password digits control my currency count.

This greatly amuses me. Initially, both passwords had some hash digits to avoid just entering random passwords to see what would happen. The hash system broke for house passwords at some point, and I couldn't isolate it, so I just bypassed the hash check altogether, since I figured that was a better problem than valid passwords being rejected. I assumed no one would try random passwords to see what would happen. I was apparently mistaken. Out of curiosity, what does the sidequest menu look like? Do all conversations still show as completed? I think... I'm gonna need to experiment but it's possible you've flipped a particular flag that may have a particular implication if you were to keep playing enough. Maybe.

 

First is that the Thunderwaves voucher doesn't show up on Tyre's consumable shop list at all, even though every other spell is. Is its exclusion intentional? (It doesn't show up on a clean, new save either)

I... don't think it was an intentional exclusion, but you're right in that it sure isn't there. I'm not sure how we overlooked that one.

[Cyberventurer]

I thought something similar about bit values since I know 32 is one of the Fun Numbers when it comes to hexadecimal stuff, but I didn't want to jump to a wrong conclusion since that wouldn't explain why 20 was a cursed number in the consumable list. I should have also mentioned that I talked to a random NPC at least 65 times in a row (specifically to doublecheck dialogue boxes) but the game was fine, which is why I think I isolated it to selectable pop-ups instead.

 

 

Out of curiosity, what does the sidequest menu look like? Do all conversations still show as completed? I think... I'm gonna need to experiment but it's possible you've flipped a particular flag that may have a particular implication if you were to keep playing enough. Maybe.

All sidequests and dialogue boxes marked as completed, and Tyre's entire inventory of house items is exhausted except for a single purchasable headband. The house's size won't update until you save and quit, then reload. I bought a pillow and then woke up to Vanice walking through the northern wall to talk to me, so even though Flect is shown to be completed like all of the others, the game treated the scene as something still needing to be resolved. Her quest is still shown as completed afterward, though.

 

As for how I even found out about this, it started out as a bit of boredom after just coming off of Yuurei again and being told a couple of passwords from there (even though there was nothing left to unlock). So I started putting in other plaintext names: Aevin, Rush, Moosh, Banana, Bananas, Autimecia, Legacy_Of_The_Wizard, Pall, Tartaros, etc. Then I thought to check my save file's password as a backup in case I screwed something up, and out of curiosity of what a "finished" password looked like and saw a whole lot of Fs going down the line.

 

So I just filled the whole thing with the letter F, saw that it worked, but didn't notice anything different other than seeing my currency count as 65,535. Loaded an old save, converted my motus crystal count into hexadecimal, saw that it matched up with part of the password, and wondered if I could fake a "New Game Plus" mode with it. Then I tested to see if vouchers were saved in the password (they are not), and crashed after the 20th purchase.

[Russ]

Okay, now here's where it gets interesting. I can't replicate this crash. I did the same thing you did and no dice. I checked the FFC scripts, and not only was it not hitting the screen limit, the script that runs it was resetting, so it shouldn't be a memory overflow issue. Wondering if this is a version specific thing. What version of ZC are you playing on?

 

I bought a pillow and then woke up to Vanice walking through the northern wall to talk to me, so even though Flect is shown to be completed like all of the others, the game treated the scene as something still needing to be resolved.

Oh, yup, I tested it out and got that too. It seems it sets all weird house event flags. Which, incidentally, I did confirm that it set the flag for a certain other event you haven't seen that now has a low baseline chance of happening in fragmented runs.

[Cyberventurer]

Okay, now here's where it gets interesting. I can't replicate this crash. I did the same thing you did and no dice. I checked the FFC scripts, and not only was it not hitting the screen limit, the script that runs it was resetting, so it shouldn't be a memory overflow issue. Wondering if this is a version specific thing. What version of ZC are you playing on?

2.55.9, live build that happened to go up yesterday when I looked.

 

Edit: Also it's Autimecia, isn't it. I was suspicious back when you asked if I told her the truth for her quest. Hopefully whatever happens will trigger despite it being on the save file where I told her the correct answer.

 

Also, is Venser supposed to lose his ability's charge if you try to hold it between rooms? Tartaros's charges are way stronger and he gets to keep his, so on the whole I don't think it'd be unfair for him to retain his charge too.

Edited by Cyberventurer, 18 May 2025 - 07:47 PM.

[Russ]

2.55.9, live build that happened to go up yesterday when I looked.

Well I'll be damned. Sure enough, it's broken in 2.55 when I test it. Works fine in 2.53. It looks like it's not eating through ffc script slots though, so I'm not sure why it would be broken. I think I'm gonna have to consult the ZC devs and see what broke. Good catch.

Edit: Also it's Autimecia, isn't it. I was suspicious back when you asked if I told her the truth for her quest. Hopefully whatever happens will trigger despite it being on the save file where I told her the correct answer.

It maaaaaaaaaay be.
 

Also, is Venser supposed to lose his ability's charge if you try to hold it between rooms? Tartaros's charges are way stronger and he gets to keep his, so on the whole I don't think it'd be unfair for him to retain his charge too.

He is, I believe. I can look into this one as well.

[Cyberventurer]

Couple more things since I'm back on the Content Grind. No, it's not my responsibility to manage my problem. It's everyone else's fault for making the game.

 

-Ask me how I beat Lumen on Sadistic mode without taking a hit (it's because Venser's ice glyph can stunlock her, unlike other bosses).

-Speaking of, his ice glyph won't trigger frost orbs, presumably because it causes tick damage debuffs instead of being a direct ice attack. Probably not a bug, but feels inconsistent from a player PoV. Dunno if it's something to change, or if it's even easily done.

-PK Thunder doesn't work on the challenge area's elemental boss when it's in water form. Other water elementals might not be hyper-vulnerable to it either, but I bring it up for the boss version since it's immune to all but its weakness.

 

Also question: Does Autimecia pull her random ability from *all* available characters on your list? I know random means, well, random, but back when I was trying to test for that time-rewind bug again before reporting it, it felt like her selection of abilities was somewhat limited or restricted in some way.

 

Edit: Lmao, this seed gave me Autimecia with Bastille's power, both Pall and the Death spell within the first 10 minutes, then Meteor Storm 5 minutes later. Like the game put a "Kick Me" sign on itself. Breaking into a challenge area already.

Edited by Cyberventurer, 19 May 2025 - 11:16 AM.

[Russ]

Couple more things since I'm back on the Content Grind. No, it's not my responsibility to manage my problem. It's everyone else's fault for making the game.

This is the exact same mentality I have. I'm so sorry for inflicting this upon you.

-Ask me how I beat Lumen on Sadistic mode without taking a hit (it's because Venser's ice glyph can stunlock her, unlike other bosses).

While unintended, that's kind of hilarious. And fitting enough given their relationship in IoR.

-Speaking of, his ice glyph won't trigger frost orbs, presumably because it causes tick damage debuffs instead of being a direct ice attack. Probably not a bug, but feels inconsistent from a player PoV. Dunno if it's something to change, or if it's even easily done.

It would be... quite difficult to change. Ice is an utterly cursed weapon type. In later versions of ZC, there are more weapon type defenses to play with, but 2.53 is more limited, and we had to use reflected magic for ice. This is a weapon type that damages the player by default, so there's all sorts of nonsense on the back end turning the collision of ice weapons off and on if the player is colliding with them. It mostly works because most ice weapons don't normally collide with the player the begin with, but I don't know if I trust it to work with the ice glyph.

-PK Thunder doesn't work on the challenge area's elemental boss when it's in water form. Other water elementals might not be hyper-vulnerable to it either, but I bring it up for the boss version since it's immune to all but its weakness.

This is another fun instance of limited weapon types. Thunder is internally a bomb explosion. PK Thunder is internally a magic weapon, same as wind or metal blade, which is why it hits green orbs. For complex scripted bosses like Venser, we can do specific accounting for it, since their defenses are all scripted. For regular enemies like elementals that use the engine's base enemy defenses, there's not a lot that can be done for it.
 

Also question: Does Autimecia pull her random ability from *all* available characters on your list? I know random means, well, random, but back when I was trying to test for that time-rewind bug again before reporting it, it felt like her selection of abilities was somewhat limited or restricted in some way.

She pulls from most. Looking over the list in detail...
- She won't pull from a character that you haven't unlocked yet.
- She won't roll herself (obviously).
- She won't roll duplicates, meaning she can't pick Boreas (same as Calais), Jack or Will (functionally the same as Hito without the character ability modifying it), Wan or Sue (same as Ven), Xaya, Morgan, or Jake (same as Lucas essentially), or Vanice (huge functional overlap with Flect, just better, but see further below).
- She won't roll Ava's, Julius's, Zarath's, Desio's, or Maria's due to some hard-coded nonsense in how these signatures work. Making these work with her would require changing a lot of checks that assume only a particular character can use them.
- She won't roll Hera's as that ability is inextricably tied into her passive.
- She won't roll the Avatar's signature, as this changes based on what you set and often overlaps with others.
- She won't roll the signature of any of the five superbosses.
So basically, she has a pool of 46 unique signatures she can roll from. It's not the entire pool, but it's a huge chunk of it. Ignoring duplicates, there's essentially just 11 she can't pick - 5 for superbosses, and 6 for obnoxious hard-codes. The pool actually used to be larger, but we enabled her to work with some of the ones that were previously deemed too hard-coded to be worth it (namely Leroy's rewind, Victors muramasa dash, and Eli's gun). The image of Autimecia with a gun was just too fantastic to not make it work.

Incidentally, as a total minor thing, she has a unique animation if she rolls Loammi's signature, using her own little wings to fly. We like random attention to detail here.

Edit: Lmao, this seed gave me Autimecia with Bastille's power, both Pall and the Death spell within the first 10 minutes, then Meteor Storm 5 minutes later. Like the game put a "Kick Me" sign on itself. Breaking into a challenge area already.

Holy cow. That's a won seed right there.

[Cyberventurer]

Wait, 5 playable superbosses? I know Vanice, Pall, Tartaros, and Venser, but what's the other one? Also that explains why I couldn't ever force Autimecia to get Maria, but it makes sense if programming hassles get in the way of that.

 

As for the probably-Autimecia event in a fragmented run, is it something I'd be able to trigger by rolling seeds one after or another, or would I likely only stumble across it by actually playing? Not that I mind (I wouldn't bother if I wasn't still enjoying the game) but I don't know if my tendency to mostly-if-not-100% a run would slow it down, and I don't want to burn myself out looking for it.

Edited by Cyberventurer, 19 May 2025 - 05:18 PM.