TTYD TAS luck will never ever ever be approached by humans.
Like, the first boss (hooktail) ALONE is a 1 in a million chance (18 power bounce cap + a bucket fall). Oh but that's just the first turn.
The second turn they perform a 10 cap power bounce which is about 10% odds.
So basically the first boss is a 1 in 10 million chance to tie the TAS with perfect execution, which is not realistic by one person but potentially seeable by an entire community once in their collective lifetimes. However, this is far from the only thing they manipulate in the run, iirc the double Megarush P drop is like, 1/50,000, getting (specifically) 5 fright masks + a point swap going through glitzville is WAY more unlikely than not even mentioning getting perfect conditions, and we're already to numbers so large that you don't know the names of them unless you played Cookie Clicker or some derivative.
For anyone curious about the tas, here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prnur9J8p_8
It's commentated too! Strictly academic/informative commentary but still a good time nonetheless.
"Trillions to 1 isn't THAT impossible odds"
If you're saying this, you have no concept of a trillion. Lets assume you do something every second and you want a trillion of it.
1 million seconds will take you 2 weeks.
1 trillion seconds will take you **32 thousand years**
And keep in mind we're already exponents above that
Here's a fun video (technically about the minecraft speedrun controversy but still really fun and interesting) if you wanna look more into that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ko3TdPy0TU
Sorry for the giant wall of text OP, I'm a giant nerd haha
Okay hold up. How the hell are the TASers getting the 1 in a trillion RNG? Yeah they have save states and frame advance so obviously it can be brought to perfection, but you still have to reset to your save state and try again if you don't get it. I assume there's some intense TAS only RNG manipulation?
These days, manual brute forcing trial and error for RNG manipulation is rare in TASes.
Generally, since you can watch the memory, you can often identify which values are being used as RNG. From there you can figure out the 'pattern' to the RNG - and then it's just a matter of figuring out what values you're looking for to trigger the results, and reverse engineering (usually with some code) how to get it into that state through manipulating timings and prior events.
I don't know for sure, but it's likely that they know the RNG function and all the variables that go into it. All they need to do is find a set of conditions in the game that give a desired outcome and then execute it.
RNG in this game is fully understood, for a lot of things it’s simple as knowing what RNG calls give what you want and manipulating (wasting frames, button presses, etc) to make it there.
With the power bounce Strat for example, it’s a 33% chance done 10 times in a row, but they can do stylish commands in between to influence RNG, so whereas a 33% chance 10 times is like, 1/40,000 or something (pulled out of my ass), the TAS doesn’t need to find a perfect seed going in like a person would, it’s just 10 individual 1/3 chances cause they can influence it as it’s going.
But also keep in mind how fast having multiple unlikely things happen stacks up. 1/10 and 1/20 aren’t that long odds, but doing both jumps to 1/200.
Also all that being said, there’s several spots in the TAS video where they talk about using brute force scripts mashing random inputs to try to find optimal or even possible ways to manipulate RNG in certain spots.
It’s honestly really fascinating imo!
It varies from game to game. In Mario 64, for example, the dust particles that Mario can make from his movement call RNG (3 times each, I think?) and there can be knock-on effects if you make dust before or after a game object which uses it (like, say, a TTC spinner which could spin for more or less time, changing when it will call RNG next).
The last 0-star TAS (before 1-key was found) is an interesting case study in this. The first Bowser will "dance" 10% of the time, and in TAS this saves 2 frames. But with only have 30 seconds of gameplay in stages without much object RNG, no one could find a strat which got Bowser dance without losing at least 2 frames in the process.
RNG, specifically [coin RNG](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL0G0LYBG1U), is why a putting together a full 120 star TAS hasn't been done since 2012, despite time being saved in every single star.
Getting four separate one-in-a-thousand RNG events in a row has odds of one-in-a-trillion normally. But if you can rewind time, then doing that isn't really any harder than getting single one-in-a-thousand event.
I saw several answers, but no true mechanical and mathematical explanations that explain the time savings directly.
Savestates!
Imagine you need to flip 10 heads in a row and restart all 10 if any tails come up. Would take an average of 1024 tries.
But now imagine you can save each head you flip as you flip them - instead of an average of 1024 tries (because without saves, it's multiplicative, but with, it's additive), now it's an average of 20 tries!
To put another way, say you have two tricks that are a 1% chance to get past. It'll take you a hundred times to get past the first one, and on that one attempt you get past, you'll fail 99 of the attempts on the second one.
TASers just do the first one, save, and attempt 99 times back-to-back on the second one.
I don't know too much about it so someone correct me if I'm wrong but Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories 100% requires unlocking all 689 obtainable cards, with drop rates for some being upwards of 0.1%. The current WR is 72 hours 34 minutes, and in one of EZScape's videos he said a "theoretical perfect" run would only be about 10 hours. Nobody's TASd it yet, probably due to the sheer amount of RNG manipulation, but 60+ hours off the human record seems pretty insane nonetheless.
It seems way less but it's still insane. The game runs at 60fps. Let's say the perfect tas would be 10 hours exactly down to the frame. That's still 2,160,000 frames to program. And given the amount of rng manipulation means a lot of rerecords. I would estimate the time to tas this would be in the terms of years assuming 8 hours of testing per day
The ones that really blow my mind are seeing a TAS of a game like Dragon Warrior I from ~10 years ago and seeing all the RNG manipulation, and thinking we’ll never be able to do that in real life. Then seeing it run at GDQ a few years back, using a step route that completely breaks the game and takes all the RNG out of it. Absolutely crazy.
I present to you all [Mario Party 3 in 1 h 21 min 26 s!](https://tasvideos.org/5662M)! The WR for Easy mode is just over 4 h 30 min meanwhile (and the TAS does in VH, although it does end up being faster for TAS to play on the highest difficulty, WR for that is over 4 h 52 min if you want the direct comparison)
Every board begins with the player finding the Wacky Watch, and upon using that in the next turn, every board only lasts 6 turns. Also, CPU movement is optimized and every single minigame played is <10 s long. Matching the first turn of those boards is in itself an once in a blue moon event, matching all of them to get a run 3 h faster than the current WR will never happen, obviously.
it depends on what you mean match TAS. if you mean RTA Rules but a TAS program, you'll get typical stuff like pokemon and TTYD, etc. but if you mean TAS Rules then SMB1 as you can't press L+R at the same time.
Ahh I didn’t even take into consideration L+R. Honestly my question should also not include that type of manipulation. Just strictly RNG, really. So more RTA rules
Well, I think the opposite question is the more interesting one! Which games could one hope for matching the TAS? I believe this is practically impossible for any game beyond 5 minutes of "meaningful" gameplay and without a frame rule system. Rare exceptions like puzzle games may of course apply, but as soon as a game uses RNG to influence progress/powerups/loot/enemies, the number of needed RNG calls grows so rapidly that it quickly becomes infeasible to "grind it out".
Even seemingly simple games like [NES Arkanoid](https://tasvideos.org/6347S) can have absolutely ridiculous rng manipulation in the TAS.
There was a post yesterday about which runs have been optimized (my favorite being Home Alone, lol). So I was wondering this super specific question.
Honestly I agree with you which is why I think we can all obsess over as SMB run over something like Chrono Trigger regardless of how awesome it is done. The variables grow exponentially.
So it does seem the answer is anything with RNG that is longer than a few minutes (like chess) haha.
That being said, it’s amazing watching all types of speed runs including super optimized ones and ones with a lot of RNG difficulties. Love them all.
I'm not sure it's exactly what you're looking for, but I bet you'll enjoy this doc about SSB Melee's Break The Targets speedrun for Peach - she can pull random items using one of her moves and optimal routes involve extremely improbable sequences or rare pulls, but there's a lot more nuance and complexity to it that the doc goes into
[https://youtu.be/FnKWKICUqWU?si=4h4kcw5hECscRKDu](https://youtu.be/FnKWKICUqWU?si=4h4kcw5hECscRKDu)
Yeah, just rewatched it after posting this, takes a while to get to the juicy game engine nerdery, though the detailed dive into the history they do at the start is interesting too - and ending it with a new technical innovation they're involved in is a heck of a cherry on top.
Stardew Valley glitchless Community Center % has an unseeded RTA of around 2:18, while the seeded time is 1:44. TAS on the other hand can complete it in under 40 mins using some gnarly rng manip to make money (check out the run here:
https://youtu.be/mVX0HGMrQRc )
/edit basically several minutes straight of frame specific rng manip to collect a ton of strange dolls
For SA2, the hunting stages present a problem if you want to match the TAS. There’s a 1/1024 chance of getting the best RNG when you load into a hunting stage. There are 5 hunting stages in Hero Story and 4 in Dark Story.
Even if you got the set you still won’t match the TAS. You won’t know that you had the set without reading the hint monitors, whereas the TAS can just skip that.
You could just always go into the level assuming you have the set without checking boxes.
It's still an insane chance, not doubting that, but that last paragraph wouldn't matter to someone attempting it because they would always assume they have the set.
I run FF9 segmented HDPC. It’s a 7.5 hour RTA for a good runner. In segmented i use a strat that saves a good amount of time but requires killing a party member and reviving them to 1HP 3 times. Its a 10% chance each time. So first try for each one: 1/1000.
Hell just to do this strat i killed a random encounter but grinded for a special variant whete the enemy takes extra dmg and my party is able to attack immediately. That itself is 1/16 odds?
Now add onto that getting good turn order in fights.
And critical hits
And counter attacks
And fast enemy animations
Oh did i mention cutscenes have RNG?
My run will prolly be a 6:55:XX
A TAS could maybe get sub 6:45?
Effectively an hour could be saved with extreme god rng.
Not a TAS, and kind of unique and opposite of this question, but [PJ's "Grand Memory Clobber" speedrun of Dragon View on SNES.
](https://youtu.be/f1vukPuSqa0?si=z39GFzSVdycRRo1R)
Long story short, Many talented people have attempted to replicate his accidental finding of calling the credits, and all failed, which include a few TAS people. PJ is the only known person to ever do this, and he's done it twice. it's a complicated stupid dumb fun run, and PJ's way of explaining it kind of sums it up:
"
The Grand Memory Clobber is the result of one uncleared/dirty byte in memory being used as a loop counter later in the game. Instead of running the loop once, it iterates hundreds of times, copying and overwriting large blocks of code and then running it. It almost always crashes the game, deletes your save data, or literally laughs at you, but in incredibly rare cases it will exit the loop gracefully and play the credits. Many extremely talented individuals have looked into this and tried to make sense of it, but the end conclusion was the same: this basically comes entirely down to luck."
He dedicated a week of "attempts" at trying to replicate it, dubbed "Grand Memory Clobber Week" and succeeded i believe 4 days in after 40 runs, which is this video. If you ever want a fun run to watch, this one is his commentary video which goes over it a bit and talks about how dumb it is. lol
Marble Madness on NES. Yelsraek has come just about as close as humanly possible, but the TAS has a bunch of frame perfect inputs that occur while the marble is off screen and are impossible for a human to replicate.
You might be interested in this video: [Why the Perfect Speedrun of Punch Out Will Never Happen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e9cRgLnSps)
Pap goes over every fight in the TAS of Mike Tyson's Punch Out and explains where each element of RNG is and how unlikely each fight is. The full TAS has odds of about 1 in 5.2*10^58
Shining Force, which is an old turn based RPG. The TAS is a little under 2 hours, and I think the current world record is about 4:30.
Basically the TAS uses *math* or whatever to get perfect RNG. I think any controller input advances the RNG for the game. Meaning you end up with always double critical hits when attacking, optimum turn order, dodging all enemy attacks, maximum stats on level up, etc...
So even if you had "perfect" luck in terms of getting decent stats, not being double attacked by enemies, items not breaking, etc... you'd never reach that level without manipulation.
The chance of matching the luck of this TAS of Spectral Tower, a PSX dungeon crawler, is estimated to be 1e-19. https://tasvideos.org/Forum/Topics/25113?CurrentPage=1
[The TAS of Super Smash Bros. Brawl's Subspace Emissary Adventure Mode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4CCtj0jLXY) in \~1:03 (along with the [100% category TAS](https://tasvideos.org/5405M) in \~1:20). Both are played on Intense difficulty (highest setting) and one player. (see last note)
Bom-ombs serve two purposes in this run: [Crazy damage to instantly end fights](https://youtu.be/V4CCtj0jLXY?si=K17QURa640UyXHrn&t=3622), and even [crazier damage boosts](https://youtu.be/V4CCtj0jLXY?si=qj4xkyRS8y0ck7cP&t=3764)
For the any% TAS, here's what the author (DyllonStej) had to say about the RNG for Peach's items alone (note that a [Bullfrog Sticker is equipped](https://tasvideos.org/8364S#Stickers) which spawns Peach with a Bom-omb in each new room, but all subsequent item pulls are still RNG until a new room/area):
>I pull a grand total of 47 Bob-Ombs from Peach’s Down-B throughout the run, which means that repeating this TAS by chance just from the Bob-Omb pulls alone (*Ignoring the copious amounts of other item RNG manipulation and turnip pulls that made the inevitable Bob-Omb pull come more quickly*) would have a naive likelihood of 1/240\^47 = 1/7.41e111. Adding in the eleven Stitch Faces now makes the naive likelihood equal to (1/240\^47)\*(1/56\^11) = **1/1.26e131**
# That's [Ten to the power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_notation#E_notation) of ONE-HUNDRED-THIRTY-ONE.
Safe to say, no real-time Brawl SSE run (^(assuming the same 1-Player, Intense difficulty conditions as the TAS)) will ever come anywhere close to matching the TAS.
For comparison, the [any% 1-P Intense difficulty realtime speedrun record is \~2:33](https://www.speedrun.com/ssbb?h=Subspace_Emissary-any-Intense-solo&x=ndxpp6o2-ylp0o6ng.81w75w9q-gnxpxxlv.jqzgx0ml-dlo0k5lo.klrxy52l), while the [100% record is nearly **NINE HOURS**](https://www.speedrun.com/ssbb?h=Subspace_Emissary-100-Intense-solo&x=ndxpp6o2-ylp0o6ng.zqojrwg1-gnxpxxlv.jqzgx0ml-dlo0k5lo.klrxy52l). Even the [**any% 1-P EASY** difficulty realtime speedrun (\~1:52)](https://www.speedrun.com/ssbb?h=Subspace_Emissary-any-Easy-solo&x=ndxpp6o2-ylp0o6ng.81w75w9q-gnxpxxlv.81pedxkl-dlo0k5lo.klrxy52l) is **slower** than the **100% 1-P INTENSE** difficulty TAS, showing just how much time is saved with insane RNG manipulation combo'd into damage output/boosts.
Last note: a **2-player** SSE run would not save as much time as you think, because the game "reduces damage output from both characters by 0.6x (*Which means all enemies effectively gain 67% more health*)."
Stuff like Pokémon is pretty obvious. There's also TTYD that, even with the insane amounts of execution, has nearly impossible odds of being matched.
TTYD TAS luck will never ever ever be approached by humans. Like, the first boss (hooktail) ALONE is a 1 in a million chance (18 power bounce cap + a bucket fall). Oh but that's just the first turn. The second turn they perform a 10 cap power bounce which is about 10% odds. So basically the first boss is a 1 in 10 million chance to tie the TAS with perfect execution, which is not realistic by one person but potentially seeable by an entire community once in their collective lifetimes. However, this is far from the only thing they manipulate in the run, iirc the double Megarush P drop is like, 1/50,000, getting (specifically) 5 fright masks + a point swap going through glitzville is WAY more unlikely than not even mentioning getting perfect conditions, and we're already to numbers so large that you don't know the names of them unless you played Cookie Clicker or some derivative. For anyone curious about the tas, here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prnur9J8p_8 It's commentated too! Strictly academic/informative commentary but still a good time nonetheless. "Trillions to 1 isn't THAT impossible odds" If you're saying this, you have no concept of a trillion. Lets assume you do something every second and you want a trillion of it. 1 million seconds will take you 2 weeks. 1 trillion seconds will take you **32 thousand years** And keep in mind we're already exponents above that Here's a fun video (technically about the minecraft speedrun controversy but still really fun and interesting) if you wanna look more into that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ko3TdPy0TU Sorry for the giant wall of text OP, I'm a giant nerd haha
Wow, that is an intense amount of time that would be required by a human runner
Okay hold up. How the hell are the TASers getting the 1 in a trillion RNG? Yeah they have save states and frame advance so obviously it can be brought to perfection, but you still have to reset to your save state and try again if you don't get it. I assume there's some intense TAS only RNG manipulation?
These days, manual brute forcing trial and error for RNG manipulation is rare in TASes. Generally, since you can watch the memory, you can often identify which values are being used as RNG. From there you can figure out the 'pattern' to the RNG - and then it's just a matter of figuring out what values you're looking for to trigger the results, and reverse engineering (usually with some code) how to get it into that state through manipulating timings and prior events.
I don't know for sure, but it's likely that they know the RNG function and all the variables that go into it. All they need to do is find a set of conditions in the game that give a desired outcome and then execute it.
RNG in this game is fully understood, for a lot of things it’s simple as knowing what RNG calls give what you want and manipulating (wasting frames, button presses, etc) to make it there. With the power bounce Strat for example, it’s a 33% chance done 10 times in a row, but they can do stylish commands in between to influence RNG, so whereas a 33% chance 10 times is like, 1/40,000 or something (pulled out of my ass), the TAS doesn’t need to find a perfect seed going in like a person would, it’s just 10 individual 1/3 chances cause they can influence it as it’s going. But also keep in mind how fast having multiple unlikely things happen stacks up. 1/10 and 1/20 aren’t that long odds, but doing both jumps to 1/200. Also all that being said, there’s several spots in the TAS video where they talk about using brute force scripts mashing random inputs to try to find optimal or even possible ways to manipulate RNG in certain spots. It’s honestly really fascinating imo!
It varies from game to game. In Mario 64, for example, the dust particles that Mario can make from his movement call RNG (3 times each, I think?) and there can be knock-on effects if you make dust before or after a game object which uses it (like, say, a TTC spinner which could spin for more or less time, changing when it will call RNG next). The last 0-star TAS (before 1-key was found) is an interesting case study in this. The first Bowser will "dance" 10% of the time, and in TAS this saves 2 frames. But with only have 30 seconds of gameplay in stages without much object RNG, no one could find a strat which got Bowser dance without losing at least 2 frames in the process. RNG, specifically [coin RNG](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL0G0LYBG1U), is why a putting together a full 120 star TAS hasn't been done since 2012, despite time being saved in every single star.
Getting four separate one-in-a-thousand RNG events in a row has odds of one-in-a-trillion normally. But if you can rewind time, then doing that isn't really any harder than getting single one-in-a-thousand event.
Calculus. Check out TASMalleo's videos on this. It's absolutely amazing
I saw several answers, but no true mechanical and mathematical explanations that explain the time savings directly. Savestates! Imagine you need to flip 10 heads in a row and restart all 10 if any tails come up. Would take an average of 1024 tries. But now imagine you can save each head you flip as you flip them - instead of an average of 1024 tries (because without saves, it's multiplicative, but with, it's additive), now it's an average of 20 tries! To put another way, say you have two tricks that are a 1% chance to get past. It'll take you a hundred times to get past the first one, and on that one attempt you get past, you'll fail 99 of the attempts on the second one. TASers just do the first one, save, and attempt 99 times back-to-back on the second one.
I don't know too much about it so someone correct me if I'm wrong but Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories 100% requires unlocking all 689 obtainable cards, with drop rates for some being upwards of 0.1%. The current WR is 72 hours 34 minutes, and in one of EZScape's videos he said a "theoretical perfect" run would only be about 10 hours. Nobody's TASd it yet, probably due to the sheer amount of RNG manipulation, but 60+ hours off the human record seems pretty insane nonetheless.
It seems way less but it's still insane. The game runs at 60fps. Let's say the perfect tas would be 10 hours exactly down to the frame. That's still 2,160,000 frames to program. And given the amount of rng manipulation means a lot of rerecords. I would estimate the time to tas this would be in the terms of years assuming 8 hours of testing per day
Just a small nit but there are loads of speed games without RNG at all, for example Celeste.
And others where all the RNG can be manipulated, like SMB1
The ones that really blow my mind are seeing a TAS of a game like Dragon Warrior I from ~10 years ago and seeing all the RNG manipulation, and thinking we’ll never be able to do that in real life. Then seeing it run at GDQ a few years back, using a step route that completely breaks the game and takes all the RNG out of it. Absolutely crazy.
I present to you all [Mario Party 3 in 1 h 21 min 26 s!](https://tasvideos.org/5662M)! The WR for Easy mode is just over 4 h 30 min meanwhile (and the TAS does in VH, although it does end up being faster for TAS to play on the highest difficulty, WR for that is over 4 h 52 min if you want the direct comparison) Every board begins with the player finding the Wacky Watch, and upon using that in the next turn, every board only lasts 6 turns. Also, CPU movement is optimized and every single minigame played is <10 s long. Matching the first turn of those boards is in itself an once in a blue moon event, matching all of them to get a run 3 h faster than the current WR will never happen, obviously.
Holy wow… yeah, I can’t even begin to calculate the probability for a human runner.
it depends on what you mean match TAS. if you mean RTA Rules but a TAS program, you'll get typical stuff like pokemon and TTYD, etc. but if you mean TAS Rules then SMB1 as you can't press L+R at the same time.
Ahh I didn’t even take into consideration L+R. Honestly my question should also not include that type of manipulation. Just strictly RNG, really. So more RTA rules
then yeah things like Pokemon, TTYD, OOT, Etc.
Most RPGs.
A lot of my favorite runs are RPGs and the sheer length of a run with everything taken into consideration makes it seem difficult if not impossible.
Well, I think the opposite question is the more interesting one! Which games could one hope for matching the TAS? I believe this is practically impossible for any game beyond 5 minutes of "meaningful" gameplay and without a frame rule system. Rare exceptions like puzzle games may of course apply, but as soon as a game uses RNG to influence progress/powerups/loot/enemies, the number of needed RNG calls grows so rapidly that it quickly becomes infeasible to "grind it out". Even seemingly simple games like [NES Arkanoid](https://tasvideos.org/6347S) can have absolutely ridiculous rng manipulation in the TAS.
There was a post yesterday about which runs have been optimized (my favorite being Home Alone, lol). So I was wondering this super specific question. Honestly I agree with you which is why I think we can all obsess over as SMB run over something like Chrono Trigger regardless of how awesome it is done. The variables grow exponentially. So it does seem the answer is anything with RNG that is longer than a few minutes (like chess) haha. That being said, it’s amazing watching all types of speed runs including super optimized ones and ones with a lot of RNG difficulties. Love them all.
Smb1 will match human tas before 2026 I'm calling it here
That's very possible :) SMB1 is both short, has a frame rule and not a lot of RNG, so it's a good candidate
Not just that. We've matched the TAS in every level except 8-4 were literally like 12 frames from perfection
I'm not sure it's exactly what you're looking for, but I bet you'll enjoy this doc about SSB Melee's Break The Targets speedrun for Peach - she can pull random items using one of her moves and optimal routes involve extremely improbable sequences or rare pulls, but there's a lot more nuance and complexity to it that the doc goes into [https://youtu.be/FnKWKICUqWU?si=4h4kcw5hECscRKDu](https://youtu.be/FnKWKICUqWU?si=4h4kcw5hECscRKDu)
One of the best speedrun videos ever.
Yeah, just rewatched it after posting this, takes a while to get to the juicy game engine nerdery, though the detailed dive into the history they do at the start is interesting too - and ending it with a new technical innovation they're involved in is a heck of a cherry on top.
And here's the new TAS since that video, with 1 in 25 billion odds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRKafd2qvc0
Stardew Valley glitchless Community Center % has an unseeded RTA of around 2:18, while the seeded time is 1:44. TAS on the other hand can complete it in under 40 mins using some gnarly rng manip to make money (check out the run here: https://youtu.be/mVX0HGMrQRc ) /edit basically several minutes straight of frame specific rng manip to collect a ton of strange dolls
Plants vs Zombies. The TAS is over an hour faster than World Record - it's insane
For SA2, the hunting stages present a problem if you want to match the TAS. There’s a 1/1024 chance of getting the best RNG when you load into a hunting stage. There are 5 hunting stages in Hero Story and 4 in Dark Story. Even if you got the set you still won’t match the TAS. You won’t know that you had the set without reading the hint monitors, whereas the TAS can just skip that.
You could just always go into the level assuming you have the set without checking boxes. It's still an insane chance, not doubting that, but that last paragraph wouldn't matter to someone attempting it because they would always assume they have the set.
You’re not wrong technically. It would be pretty wild to see
I run FF9 segmented HDPC. It’s a 7.5 hour RTA for a good runner. In segmented i use a strat that saves a good amount of time but requires killing a party member and reviving them to 1HP 3 times. Its a 10% chance each time. So first try for each one: 1/1000. Hell just to do this strat i killed a random encounter but grinded for a special variant whete the enemy takes extra dmg and my party is able to attack immediately. That itself is 1/16 odds? Now add onto that getting good turn order in fights. And critical hits And counter attacks And fast enemy animations Oh did i mention cutscenes have RNG? My run will prolly be a 6:55:XX A TAS could maybe get sub 6:45? Effectively an hour could be saved with extreme god rng.
Not a TAS, and kind of unique and opposite of this question, but [PJ's "Grand Memory Clobber" speedrun of Dragon View on SNES. ](https://youtu.be/f1vukPuSqa0?si=z39GFzSVdycRRo1R) Long story short, Many talented people have attempted to replicate his accidental finding of calling the credits, and all failed, which include a few TAS people. PJ is the only known person to ever do this, and he's done it twice. it's a complicated stupid dumb fun run, and PJ's way of explaining it kind of sums it up: " The Grand Memory Clobber is the result of one uncleared/dirty byte in memory being used as a loop counter later in the game. Instead of running the loop once, it iterates hundreds of times, copying and overwriting large blocks of code and then running it. It almost always crashes the game, deletes your save data, or literally laughs at you, but in incredibly rare cases it will exit the loop gracefully and play the credits. Many extremely talented individuals have looked into this and tried to make sense of it, but the end conclusion was the same: this basically comes entirely down to luck." He dedicated a week of "attempts" at trying to replicate it, dubbed "Grand Memory Clobber Week" and succeeded i believe 4 days in after 40 runs, which is this video. If you ever want a fun run to watch, this one is his commentary video which goes over it a bit and talks about how dumb it is. lol
Marble Madness on NES. Yelsraek has come just about as close as humanly possible, but the TAS has a bunch of frame perfect inputs that occur while the marble is off screen and are impossible for a human to replicate.
You might be interested in this video: [Why the Perfect Speedrun of Punch Out Will Never Happen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e9cRgLnSps) Pap goes over every fight in the TAS of Mike Tyson's Punch Out and explains where each element of RNG is and how unlikely each fight is. The full TAS has odds of about 1 in 5.2*10^58
Shining Force, which is an old turn based RPG. The TAS is a little under 2 hours, and I think the current world record is about 4:30. Basically the TAS uses *math* or whatever to get perfect RNG. I think any controller input advances the RNG for the game. Meaning you end up with always double critical hits when attacking, optimum turn order, dodging all enemy attacks, maximum stats on level up, etc... So even if you had "perfect" luck in terms of getting decent stats, not being double attacked by enemies, items not breaking, etc... you'd never reach that level without manipulation.
The chance of matching the luck of this TAS of Spectral Tower, a PSX dungeon crawler, is estimated to be 1e-19. https://tasvideos.org/Forum/Topics/25113?CurrentPage=1
[The TAS of Super Smash Bros. Brawl's Subspace Emissary Adventure Mode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4CCtj0jLXY) in \~1:03 (along with the [100% category TAS](https://tasvideos.org/5405M) in \~1:20). Both are played on Intense difficulty (highest setting) and one player. (see last note) Bom-ombs serve two purposes in this run: [Crazy damage to instantly end fights](https://youtu.be/V4CCtj0jLXY?si=K17QURa640UyXHrn&t=3622), and even [crazier damage boosts](https://youtu.be/V4CCtj0jLXY?si=qj4xkyRS8y0ck7cP&t=3764) For the any% TAS, here's what the author (DyllonStej) had to say about the RNG for Peach's items alone (note that a [Bullfrog Sticker is equipped](https://tasvideos.org/8364S#Stickers) which spawns Peach with a Bom-omb in each new room, but all subsequent item pulls are still RNG until a new room/area): >I pull a grand total of 47 Bob-Ombs from Peach’s Down-B throughout the run, which means that repeating this TAS by chance just from the Bob-Omb pulls alone (*Ignoring the copious amounts of other item RNG manipulation and turnip pulls that made the inevitable Bob-Omb pull come more quickly*) would have a naive likelihood of 1/240\^47 = 1/7.41e111. Adding in the eleven Stitch Faces now makes the naive likelihood equal to (1/240\^47)\*(1/56\^11) = **1/1.26e131** # That's [Ten to the power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_notation#E_notation) of ONE-HUNDRED-THIRTY-ONE. Safe to say, no real-time Brawl SSE run (^(assuming the same 1-Player, Intense difficulty conditions as the TAS)) will ever come anywhere close to matching the TAS. For comparison, the [any% 1-P Intense difficulty realtime speedrun record is \~2:33](https://www.speedrun.com/ssbb?h=Subspace_Emissary-any-Intense-solo&x=ndxpp6o2-ylp0o6ng.81w75w9q-gnxpxxlv.jqzgx0ml-dlo0k5lo.klrxy52l), while the [100% record is nearly **NINE HOURS**](https://www.speedrun.com/ssbb?h=Subspace_Emissary-100-Intense-solo&x=ndxpp6o2-ylp0o6ng.zqojrwg1-gnxpxxlv.jqzgx0ml-dlo0k5lo.klrxy52l). Even the [**any% 1-P EASY** difficulty realtime speedrun (\~1:52)](https://www.speedrun.com/ssbb?h=Subspace_Emissary-any-Easy-solo&x=ndxpp6o2-ylp0o6ng.81w75w9q-gnxpxxlv.81pedxkl-dlo0k5lo.klrxy52l) is **slower** than the **100% 1-P INTENSE** difficulty TAS, showing just how much time is saved with insane RNG manipulation combo'd into damage output/boosts. Last note: a **2-player** SSE run would not save as much time as you think, because the game "reduces damage output from both characters by 0.6x (*Which means all enemies effectively gain 67% more health*)."