First off, thanks as always to the staff of SDA past and present for all the work that goes into giving myself and all the runners a place to put our work. A belated welcome to Enhasa in particular (Not to slight the rest of the staff by any means).

Thanks also go to those who wanted to see this run, and who later encouraged me to get off my lazy butt and finally initiate the process of sending it into SDA.

Finally, thanks to Walker Boh, whose tool-assisted run of the game formed the basis for this run strategy-wise.

Okay, so no doubt you're looking at the game, plus the runner, and thinking "What the hell, this isn't a Zelda-esque adventure game..." Well, you'd be right--I had taken that particular genre as far as I was willing to with Willow and wanted to try out something different for my next run. Why I settled on this specific game, I'm not really sure, other than perhaps "It's short, linear, and self-explanatory"--in other words, basically the polar opposite of my previous two runs. In short, if The Magic of Scheherazade was my Master of Puppets, and Willow was my ...and Justice for All, this run would be my Black Album. Except that I'm now counting on a run of an obscure game to catapult me into the mainstream, and this analogy is sinking fast, isn't it...

Anyway, no novel-length comments for this one. Basically, what you need to know is that the Sword is the strongest weapon, but also uses the most magic. Again, the strategies were based mostly on Walker Boh's tool-assisted run, with some slight adjustments made on the bosses (Rather than splitting the magic between the minibosses and endbosses, as he does, I just used swordplay on the minibosses and unloaded my magic on the endbosses). Really, the secret to speedrunning this game is taking advantage of your long lifebar, plus invincibility periods when you do get hit. Because of the annoying amount of ledge-guarding enemies that often lie just out of reach of your weapon, it's usually better to just take damage and simply walk through them. Further, because of the way the game drains your life and magic at the end of each level before refilling them, it's in your best interest to actually have as little as possible of both at the end of each stage.

Execution-wise, the run was pretty good except for my sloppy 5-2 (Where I somehow gained 3 seconds on an unsubmitted test run anyways)--even for a speedrunner, 5-1 is the last really hard level in the game, so there was definitely a "home free" feeling to the last three levels, not that I didn't try to keep a high level of execution through them of course (Indeed, my 6-1 gained 14 seconds on my test run, making it one of the three best levels in what you're watching in terms of improvement, behind only my 4-2 [24 second improvement on the test] and 2-2 [22 second improvement on the test]). There were some tactical decisions I made that cost me time, especially in 4-1 and 5-1 where the lag simply got overwhelming and I used magic to clear it out rather than saving it for the miniboss at the end of each level--comparing my test run times to this one showed that dealing with the lag another way, either clearing enemies one at a time, or just putting up with it, would have been faster (Such is the power of magic in this game when used on bosses). Lastly, this is another case of my following the TAS a bit too closely--in 6-2, Walker didn't use magic on any of the minibosses, and so neither did I, not realizing that the game refills your life AND MAGIC automatically upon beginning the Blackhorn fight (It would have served me well against the Griffin). Still, I'm happy with the run overall.

For the further adventures of Emptyeye, check out my website. I can be reached at emptyeye AT emptyeye PERIOD com.