Rando in my mentions: Talking about Randomizers

[SpoonyBard]

Kinda surprised TT 3.0 hasn't had a dedicated Rando thread yet. Ah well, here we are!

Randomizers (Randos), for the uninitiated, take a game you're (presumably) familiar with and mixes it all up according to some predefined criteria. Like a Super Metroid randomizer that might have you find the Space Jump somewhere in predefined Crateria.

That was tortured, sorry.

There's a bunch of em that are popular, and a number of TT folks still run em on the regular, whether streaming or not. Some of my personal favs:

Final Fantasy IV - Free Enterprise
Final Fantasy VI - Worlds Collide (Old Site with old version: here)
Super Metroid - Varia Randomizer
A Link to the Past Randomizer
Super Metroid + A Link to the Past Randomizer

There are many others, and the concept has gained such traction that even games like Bloodstained have added its own built-in randomizer, which is a trend I'd like to see continue.

And to justify starting this thread, here's a link to my most recent Varia Randomizer run, which turned into some real shenanigans:

Spoiler

You start in eastern Maridia, have to fight Botwoon with no ammunition and one energy tank, do multiple hell runs before finally finding the Varia in the Norfair Reserve Tank room, find that three of the four main bosses are locked behind Spazer doors and the Spazer is the last beam you'll find, and you won't even get High Jump or Space Jump until after even that.

Oh and green/pink Brinstar is a trap. There are no progression items there, only ammo expansions and E-tanks, and there's a grey door that locks behind you trapping you with only one exit: a portal to the entrance to lower norfair so do not save if you don't have a way to survive and jump up through the lava to the entrance which you likely won't until near the end of your run.

But most hilarious of all, when you beat Mother Brain you'll find the escape timer gives you eight and a half minutes. The game has one final troll for you when you see where you are depositied for the escape.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

I had a phase where I was super obsessed with the Super Metroid+LttP randomizer (known in the community as SMZ3), it's such a weird, fascinating thing. I haven't played it in a little while, mostly because the game is 2/3 Zelda by volume, and I just don't enjoy that game as much as Super Metroid. Also, runs take me a good 5-6 hours at this point, which is still a bit longer than I would like. I'd love to try out the multiworld mode at some point, but I'd need to find people who would be willing to play the game in 2-hour slices, because that's all the time I can spend on a single sitting. Breaking it up definitely makes things a little harder, but with the right combination of item trackers and notes you can make it work (all of my SMZ3 runs so far have been done over several play sessions).

I also spent a little time with the Bloodstained RotN randomizer, which is the first one I've seen that is officially supported by the developer. Unfortunately, I didn't find that this rando had quite the legs I wanted it to, as the list of critical items is fairly short. You basically need some way to fly (invert or the high jump) and the Zangetsuto, almost everything else is secondary. You can shuffle key items between bosses, at which point you're just optimizing your path from boss to boss, or else you can put them anywhere, in which case it becomes a total scavenger hunt as you try to track down the one enemy whose drop you haven't gotten yet. I'd love it if they integrated a hint system to make the complete shuffle option a bit more manageable - bookshelves could offer hints like "an enemy in the volcano area has the double jump shard" to point you forward without making it 100% obvious.

There's also the Hollow Knight rando, which I've been thinking of trying out for a while now. The only problem is the sheer size of that game, which is far too massive to clear out every time you do a run. I think they get around this by duplicating certain key items so they can be found in more than one location, but in some ways that makes it seem a little less satisfying to me? Dunno, I should really give it a try and find out.

One thing that can make almost any randomizer better is randomizer more fun is racing it against other people. Even if the routing ends up being utter nonsense, figuring it out more quickly or more efficiently than another human adds a fun layer to the process. Not that I've ever actually done that myself...

 

[SpoonyBard]

SMZ3 is fresher with the, still in Alpha, Keysanity option. Mixing all the Zelda keys around both game worlds and even adding keys for locked doors in Metroid does change things up and while it's still 2/3s Zelda there's a lot more going back and forth.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

SMZ3 is fresher with the, still in Alpha, Keysanity option. Mixing all the Zelda keys around both game worlds and even adding keys for locked doors in Metroid does change things up and while it's still 2/3s Zelda there's a lot more going back and forth.

It's true that one problem with regular SMZ3 is getting into Metroid Mode. Once you have a few key items, you can make huge progress in SM, where item drops tend to happen more frequently than on the other side. Conversely, you're more likely to get stuck somewhere in LttP because you're missing a particular item, so you're really incentivized to get as much stuff as you can in SM before heading back. That means that every game of SMZ3 I've played was basically all of SM followed by all of LttP, with a few trips back and forth whenever I'd run out of stuff to do in Metroid. The downside of keysanity is that it makes the game even longer, plus I'm not good enough at LttP rando to deal with the extra layer of challenge there. Most of my time loss in SMZ3 runs comes from not being super familiar with the pendant and crystal dungeons, so adding in strict key requirements to that is a bit too much for me. Do you know if it's possible to add SM keys only? That might actually be the best way for me to play, since I'm pretty familiar with SM's map.

 

[SpoonyBard]

Not yet as far as I know. Keysanity is an all or nothing setting. Might be a good suggestion though? I have no idea how development is coming, that Alpha has been around for a bit.

If you haven't played Varia rando lately an update or two back added doors that are only opened by specific beams (giving poor, neglected Spazer a use) and that's kind of like keys.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

For some reason, I haven't been drawn to Varia as much as SMZ3. There's something so weirdly compelling to me about walking through a door on Zebes and coming out in Hyrule, I think without that I'm just not as interested. But it's true that I enjoy the Metroid half a lot more than the Zelda half whenever I play the combo rando.

 

[Torzelbaum]

I also spent a little time with the Bloodstained RotN randomizer, which is the first one I've seen that is officially supported by the developer. Unfortunately, I didn't find that this rando had quite the legs I wanted it to, as the list of critical items is fairly short. You basically need some way to fly (invert or the high jump) and the Zangetsuto, almost everything else is secondary. You can shuffle key items between bosses, at which point you're just optimizing your path from boss to boss, or else you can put them anywhere, in which case it becomes a total scavenger hunt as you try to track down the one enemy whose drop you haven't gotten yet. I'd love it if they integrated a hint system to make the complete shuffle option a bit more manageable - bookshelves could offer hints like "an enemy in the volcano area has the double jump shard" to point you forward without making it 100% obvious.

I have only ever played the randomizer with the Defeat Gebel flag so I have never had to look for the Zangetsuto. But I think in addition to the key stuff you need a way to beat the boss or bosses (which could just be a stack of healing items).

Dimension Shift can be used for some short flights but it is no substitute for those other shards.

I do like the scavenger hunt but I wish the key drop(s) would be guaranteed.

 

[SpoonyBard]

Oh hey, Final Fantasy IV Free Enterprise had an update today!

Looks like one of the biggest changes is the addition of FF4Advance extra weapons, on top of various tweaks.

 

[Beowulf]

I've been trying out Worlds Collide, and I think I've figured out why it's not working for me: It turns FF6 into a SaGa game. In theory you can do anything in any order. In practice, you have a lot of false starts as you discover what areas can can and cannot handle, sometimes when you reach the boss, and you're never able to level past problems because of the scaling. Nothing is gated, except that everything kinda is. (I have a weird aversion to "testing the beef gates" gameplay, though I can't say why.)

What I generally want from a randomizer is an experience like the HMS Jayne FF: Dawn of Souls randomizer, where the key items get rearranged so you end up in a pseudo-metroidvania experience. I'm not sure you could do that with FF6, especially given the nature of the World of Ruin.

 

[SpoonyBard]

Hm, what settings are you using? When you say everything is open, I guess you're not using Character Gating? That locks checks behind certain characters, rather than have everything open all the time (with a few exceptions). You can also choose how bosses and enemies scale, my preferred method is by progress rather than time or level but ymmv.

I do wish the rando had a few more settings to make runs more unique. I once suggested a 'Three Statues' mode which would lock Kefka's Tower until you find and defeat the three statue bosses, but I guess they didn't go with it.

One thing I do like to do on occasion is an 8 Dragons mode, which will lock the final battle until all eight dragons are defeated. They're not randomized and are always where they are (though you can set it so the dragons shift positions among themselves), but set it so they're not affected by scaling (and thus are always as hard as they naturally are) and you have a bit more of an interesting goal. Though it ultimately becomes 'find Cyan, Edgar, and Locke' if you have character gating enabled in order to encounter the Storm/Blue/Red dragons.

 

[aturtledoesbite]

Recently some of my friends and I have gotten into the habit of playing an Ocarina of Time rando together every week through OOTOnline. It's delightful. I tend to go for the easier checks, like around the Kokiri Forest, meanwhile one of the other two ends up clipping into Water Temple like five seconds after starting. Once we're at the point where we just need to kill bosses, all bets are off as we become more of a threat to each other than the boss is by attempting to crash each others' games with Bombchus.

It's incredibly fun.

 

[Beowulf]

I did some Free Enterprise this weekend, and it's much closer to the experience I want because of the key item gating. It's also just hilariously entertaining to have two Paloms and three Poroms all try to join my party at various points.

 

[SpoonyBard]

The Varia Rando discord has a weekly race seed, and this week is the 50th so they actually offered up too, an easier one and a harder one, but with the same theme between them: Morph Ball? What Morph Ball?

I completed the first seed and you are indeed limited to just enough of the game world that you can access without the Morph Ball. It resulted in some tricky situations, and it was tougher than my usual seeds, but I had a lot of fun with it. (just a note, since it's a race seed you can't change certain QoL improvements even with the customizer, so you are stuck with vanilla item fanfare and room transitions)

One little spoiler for near the end of the seed:

Spoiler

In order to fight Ridley with a Varia suit you'll have to be able to pull off a Green Gate Glitch, and that held me up for a bit as I tried to figure out just where one more accessible item location could be.

I'll give the harder seed a try too, but I dunno if it'll be beatable with my skillset, but it'll be fun to try!

 

[nosimpleway]

I like randomizers because I like recontextualizing games that are otherwise familiar to me. I can't imagine ever getting enough into the scene to actually try to speedrun, though.

There are some pretty good Castlevania randomizers out there.

 

[Purple]

So, I caught wind of this a while ago, but didn't realize just what an amazing thing it was until I saw it in action here:

That is the initial testing runthrough of the since-finished StarCraft 2 randomizer ("To find the mod, head to the CUSTOM section of Starcraft 2, and then click the subdirectory CAMPAIGNS, and search 'Random Edition'").

It's a full recreation of the Terran campaign, except instead of deciding what units you produce/start with, all units in the game are sorted into... I think it was 9 broad categories, like "cheap basic units" or "big heavy units" produced by and for roughly the price of whatever bread and butter Terran unit is in that category.

And the thing is, "all units" really means ALL UNITS. Not everything Terrans normally get. Not everything normally available to any of the 3 factions. Not even everything including weird campaign-only stuff. If it's in the map editor, it's in here somewhere.

I THINK the only exceptions are larva, drones, probes, things other units create like broodlings, and fully passive decorative neutral units. Watching this playthrough he's getting stuck trying to finish missions with like, a bunch of quillgors and APCs and stuff coming out instead of marines and whatever light vehicle you get early.

 

[SpoonyBard]

I completely missed this last month but SMZ3 has brought Keysanity out of alpha and is now just a regular option! It doesn't fundamentally change anything for me since I've been rolling seeds through the alpha anyway but if you were on the fence and wanted to wait until the devs were satisfied to bring it 'live', as it were, there ya go.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

Keysanity is a cool addition to SMZ3, but I would still like the option to toggle it on for each game individually. I really don't need that extra level of complexity in LttP, I can barely muddle through that game as it is.

 

[SpoonyBard]

Yeah, SMZ3 could use some of the fine tuning options available in the other randos of its component games. If nothing else they should copy Varia's beam locks to have a similar effect as keycards.

 

[Kzinssie]

I've been playing a ton of the Wind Waker randomizer lately, both casually and learning to speedrun it. The biggest draw here (besides being Wind Waker if you're like me and just really like playing Wind Waker) is the sheer granularity of options - there are 22 different categories of checks, things like "Dungeons", "Minigames", "Puzzle Secret Caves", "Combat Secret Caves", "Submarines", and "Treasure Charts", and you can choose exactly which ones will ever have progression items (the others will only have things like rupees and heart pieces). There's also a "Race Mode", which lets you specify a number of dungeons which will be randomly selected so that their boss contains progress items, while any dungeons not selected won't have progression. What this means is that you can change your whole approach based on what you want to do with the randomization - you can turn everything on (referred to by the community as "allsanity") for a 9-hour speedrun or casual run over the course of a couple days, or only turn on a handful of options plus 2-dungeon race mode for a 1-2 hour speedrun. On top of that, the community's made a ton of custom models, and a lot of them come with accompanying custom item models, so part of the fun can be just picking a new skin and figuring out what the creator did with it (the Hero's Charm in particular is always a treat). The big downside to all this is that even more than other randomizers it's practically unplayable without a tracker - Wind Waker's world is so huge and its checks are so spread out, especially if you turn on shit like lookout platforms and big octos, that I can't imagine keeping track of what you have and haven't done in your head.

 

[Troa11]

If you missed it, Ocarina of Time 3D has a randomizer now. In case, like me, you wanted an OoT randomizer but didn't want 20 fps. It's still working out some kinks but works surprisingly well in emulation or on original hardware through homebrew.

 

[aturtledoesbite]

Keysanity is a cool addition to SMZ3, but I would still like the option to toggle it on for each game individually. I really don't need that extra level of complexity in LttP, I can barely muddle through that game as it is.

see, i would go for the opposite, that SM really doesn't work with keys

anyway I've been playing a lot of OoT Online with a couple friends
it's really fun being able to divide locations up and comb through a seed
then sometimes we get a hint saying our progress is on 50 skulls (which, of course, we have skullsanity on) and all cry
or sometimes it bugs out when we save and quit and i alone (not the others, despite item sync) end up with 91 spirit temple keys
or it turns into impromptu pvp, when someone pulls out a bombchu, which is unstable and can cause other players in the same map to suddenly crash out
or the stars can align and we all land the final blow on ganon at the same time, model collision causing us to push each other out of the way during the cutscene

it's honestly a blast

 

[RT-55J]

To whom it may concern: a public beta of the Metroid Fusion Open Randomizer just dropped an hour ago.

 

[Tomm Guycot]

Glad to see folks discussing the Bloodstained randomizer >_>

I really wanted the support the trend and hopefully spur other developers to do the same, but obviously the game wasn't initially built with this in mind so we were a bit limited in what we could do. I think we did a decent job all things considered!

 

[Torzelbaum]

Glad to see folks discussing the Bloodstained randomizer >_>

I really wanted the support the trend and hopefully spur other developers to do the same, but obviously the game wasn't initially built with this in mind so we were a bit limited in what we could do. I think we did a decent job all things considered!

This means you have an excellent opportunity to design/build 2 with this in mind .

 

[MCBanjoMike]

Please don’t take my comments the wrong way, Tomm. I was super happy that you added the randomizer mode to Bloodstained and I’ve competed several runs of it. But most randomizers that have real longevity have been revised multiple times as people figure out ways to make replaying the game more enjoyable - LTTPR certainly wasn’t built in a day. I know it’s difficult to get funding to work on a niche feature like this, but if the opportunity ever arises I would love to see another update that takes some community feedback into consideration. Or is the game moddable? If so, commubiry developers could take what you’ve done and keep building on it. Anyway, if RotN 2 winds up having a randomizer mode, I’ll definitely spend some time with it.

 

[Tomm Guycot]

Please don’t take my comments the wrong way, Tomm. I was super happy that you added the randomizer mode to Bloodstained and I’ve competed several runs of it. But most randomizers that have real longevity have been revised multiple times as people figure out ways to make replaying the game more enjoyable - LTTPR certainly wasn’t built in a day. I know it’s difficult to get funding to work on a niche feature like this, but if the opportunity ever arises I would love to see another update that takes some community feedback into consideration. Or is the game moddable? If so, commubiry developers could take what you’ve done and keep building on it. Anyway, if RotN 2 winds up having a randomizer mode, I’ll definitely spend some time with it.

We've already updated/patched it more than is affordable. I don't know if you have played it since initial launch though. There have been a lot of adjustments to fix the more glaring issues. (I think all of these have gone live. It's possible there is one in the hopper).

 

[RT-55J]

I'll admit that the only reason I haven't played Bloodstained rando is that I haven't played Bloodstained in the first place. Then again, I haven't only played 1 (one) post-classic Castlevania, so I think I just might need to turn in my TT membership card.

Still, I am very glad it exists and that you made it! I hope that the experience and knowhow you gained from making it help you if you ever have the chance to make another one, and I also hope it marks the start of a general trend of officially developed randomizers (*stares at MercurySteam*).

Anyhow, the Metroid Fusion randomizer is actually surprisingly good, in spite of some weird jank. I played 3 seeds of it over the weekend (with a major/minor item split), and it was fun. I wish there was a bit more done with regards to, ya know, softlock prevention, but I have at least avoided saving in places where I couldn't get out. It's very weird just having to reason with this weird little game world in dozens upon dozens of ways it was never intended to be engaged with. A word of warning though: Fusion has a lot of stupidly hidden items, so make sure you actually know where they are before starting.

 

[Tomm Guycot]

I haven't played Bloodstained in the first place. Then again, I haven't only played 1 (one) post-classic Castlevania

Good news. If you purchase Bloodstained you can download Classic Mode for FREE, and play that to retain your accomplishment.

 

[nosimpleway]

A word of warning though: Fusion has a lot of stupidly hidden items, so make sure you actually know where they are before starting.

This is honestly why I haven't tried it yet. I don't have the familiarity with Fusion that I do with, say, Super (or even the NES original). I had some trouble the first couple of runs of Legend of Zelda randomizer because, well, there's a tree somewhere in the breadth and depth of Hyrule that you never found as a kid. It was a Door Repair Charge in vanilla so it never mattered that you never found it. Now it's level 4...

 

[RT-55J]

Yeah, one of the most common softlocks unprepared folks seem to be running into in Fusion rando is beating Arachnus but then having no way to leave his arena because they didn't find the morph ball. This is because there is an energy tank hidden behind a missile block in the ceiling just before Arachnus (which you'd never find playing casually unless you did a very thorough clean sweep of the game after getting power bombs).

The randomizer can still output dead seeds at the moment, but from what I've seen most complaints complaints of dead seeds have been false alarms like that.

Anyhow, one funny thing about the rando so far is that Ridley is almost never required. AFAICT, only two possible major items that are necessary to finish the game can be held by him (currently Speed/Gravity), with everything else either being (a) unnecessary to beat the game or (b) required to get to him in the first place. It's like the Shaktool check in SM but even more ridiculous.

Good news. If you purchase Bloodstained you can download Classic Mode for FREE, and play that to retain your accomplishment.

lmao (I swear I'll play the Igavanias one day I swear!)