WA4 Speedrun - Segment 19: Two corridors of death AND Soldiers? You jest

This is my Wild ARMS 4 Official speedrun video. The rules under which this speedrun takes place will be from SDA official rules. To put simply:
- No use of a new game+ data, cheat codes or outside devices
- Start a brand new game from scratch and work towards completion. Game ends when an EX. File is saved.

Segment 19 is similar to segment 11. It looks very easy from the start, but there's a couple of things that are much harder than they look.

First that jump across the platforms I make without hitting the switches? If you use Accelerator, you get nailed with the fire ball. Not using Accelerator pits a chance of getting caught by a random battle. Thankfully, the encounter in this room usually is not that high. Yes, I say "this" because the last two rooms where you pick up the pot and load it with fire and then walk back seems to have encounter rates up the wazoo.

I've lost multiple segments before no thanks to encounters during these spots. This is why my accelerator taps are much more frequent. Doing this also lets me walk past both platforms supported by the fire jets in one go.

Finally, to end of the segment is another battle, which looks easy. You might be thinking, initiative Raquel and Intrude to win, right? Wrong. See, since Raquel is around 8 levels lower than what she normally might be at, I don't have the points to get more class levels or stats. On top of that, these guys are rather durable. I need to spend two Raquel turns to knock them out.

This isn't really optimal, since now I have three enemies left, no FP and Raquel's not getting another turn until sometime. Meanwhile, Jude and Arnaud and Yulie can't really contribute. So...after some thinking, here's the result.

I borrow a page from Tal and set up Red Zone. Those who were in DL chat probably remember when I was screaming obscenities since setting this up was very tricky. With Red Zone set up, I can put the Tiny Flower on someone else and get a similar result, although somewhat delayed. The choice ended up being Yulie. I pump up her damage and the initial opening summon rips out around 65% of their HP which is pretty good. This leaves them weak enough that Jude can pick off the one in front of him. Arnaud defends to reduce time. And here's the kicker. He HAS to be attacked at least once. Doing so, charges up just enough FP. Once Raquel gets hit by flamethrower and the Grenadier's kick, Red Zone will trigger boosting her turn, activate Intrude and the stragglers get killed. In this run, Jude somehow fails to kill the soldier, so I had Arnaud finish it instead. Rest of it is still pretty much the same.

While this sounds dandy, here's everything that can go wrong:
1) Red Zone can fail (and has once or twice) with Raquel taking high variance damage.
2) The Grenadiers seem to have a 50-50% chance at triggering Amnesia. Each time they activate, they prevent Jude and Yulie from getting EXP and take extra time.
3) If the two soldiers don't attack Arnaud and both move instead, you end up not charging enough FP and the whole plan falls flat.

Since there's several elements of luck here, I settled with eating one counter and not getting the EXP. I don't think it has a large effect for the next several fights, which was what ultimately contributed to the decision.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• WA4
• Speedrun
• Segment
• 19
• Wild
• ARMS
• nineteen
• Jude
• Arnaud
• Yulie
• Raquel