Gate of Doom

• This D&D inspired isometric role-playing beat-'em-up arcade game is named Dark Seal (AKA Gate of Doom) made by Data East and released in Japan in 1990. The game is notable for its steep difficulty curve, but well received by arcade goers of the time. The game is also often compared to Gauntlet.

• This TAS uses the default Dipswitch settings.

Gameplay

• There are four different characters to choose from and each differ in their weapons and special abilities. The chosen character is the Ninja since he starts off with a speed boost as his basic trait. The Ninja is also strong enough to deal high damage but only at close range. The Ninja's basic weapon are throwing stars which deal very low damage individually, but up close the damage stacks on enemies. The Wizard does good damage at close and mid range, can do high damage with stacking attacks, but is not as fast moving as the Ninja. The Bard is a spearman which has great range, but the attack strength is rather lacking. The Knight has the strongest base attack, but also the slowest attack animation.

• Bad status: There is poison which slowly whittles your health down until you die. Getting a potion would cure this. The Pig status turns the player into a pig for a time which cannot attack. The third status is (sic)"Petrificate" aka Petrification which is instantly lethal.

• There are five pieces of equipment. The boots increase speed, the gauntlet increases attack power and adds some additional characteristic to a character's attack, the armor negates 3 attacks, the necklace negates 3 fire attacks, the ring negates 2 cold attacks, and the scarabs negates poison (and pig?) attacks. The gauntlet adds additional ninja stars to the Ninja's base attack which can bounce off enemies to do additional damage to surrounding enemies. This tas only gets a gauntlet and boots.

• Items: Potions can remove poison and give one health. The bell gives an extra life (players get three lives per continue), a Bestiary which kills all enemies (not minibosses), and a Magic refill book.

• There is a Magic bar which is filled as enemies are killed. On the side a book of magic spells is displayed and as time passes the book flips through a sequence of spells. Once the bar is filled the spell can be cast, and the spell ends when the magic meter is empty. The spell sequence seems to only depend on which character is chosen.

• The Magic spells are as follows. Most Magic forms also take damage from enemies. Magic Spells cannot be used on bosses. Casting a spell takes several seconds so most of the time it is faster to not use them.

#Tornado - Turn into a tornado which damages anything that comes into contact. Floats character above ground when used.

#Light - Turn into a Light ball which shoots out weak homing bullets.

#Fire - Turn into a Fireball which shoots out exploding Fireballs

#Plant - Turn into a plant that shoots out very weak paralyzing powder in all directions.

#Thundercloud -The GOAT spell. Turn into a Thundercloud that shoots out an extremely high damage lightning spell. Ex: Takes 54 out of 96 hp from the frost dragon miniboss, even though it is slower than using the Ninja's basic attacks. Effectiveness becomes near useless later on with the max damage caps on minibosses later on. Floats.

#Swarm of Rats - Turn into a swarm of rats. Ok damage but range is short and does not float. One of the worse if low key horrifying spells.

#Water Sprout - Turn into a water sprout that shoots out wide ranging circling water bullets.

#Rock - The rock can barely move but its main attack is a full screen attack that does moderate damage. Takes no damage from enemies.

#Medusa Head - Shoots strong short range lasers that will petrify normal enemies. Floats.

#Steel Ball - Very high damage steel ball that moves slower, but is also impervious to damage.

#"?" - This spell has two possibilities. The most likely result is turning into a pig. The pig is actually not bad, it has high movement and a small hitbox, but it has no means to attack so cannot break open doors. The second is to turn into a Treasure Chest which spits out random equipment and items. It can drop all five of the character equipment as well as potions and a "Bestiary" which kills all enemies on screen. Note that it cannot drop the "Magic" refill item (or at least I have not seen it do that).

• A stage usually consists of a stage with normal enemies and obstacles and a miniboss and then a boss. A Magic spell can be used on the standard stage level portion and the miniboss but not on the bosses. In the normal enemy section there are chests that can drop items and a healing crystal that can give some health. After the stage is complete the player gets one extra heart if they are missing any. Note that the player cannot cast the spell then move into the boss area then use the spell. Instead the game just removes the magic spell once the boss area starts.

• Bosses all have 96 health but the difference is that the cap for max damage that is possible per hit gets lowered. I write that rather than say they have higher defense, because even very high damage attacks cannot go above the cap. Each boss has a weak point except for the last boss.

• If the player is idle too long there is a timeout reaper which appears. Once it touches the player it causes petrification which kills the player.

• Ninja RTA 14m 10s by LastBoss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwo1ACqHKg8
• Existing TAS using Wizard in 15:51 by Retro Gaming TAS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GqQm8SjG0o
• 1cc with the Knight by 努恩的電玩教室 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2gE5qGL3eE
• 1cc with Bard by LordBBH https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA7F1y1XGh8

Stage 1

Here in the second room I get the gauntlet before killing the harpies. The harpies need to be killed or the door cannot be destroyed. Pick up a health from the healing crystal before the boss. The boss's weak point is the head. Here the strategy for the Ninja is to get up at close range and use the throwing stars. When the throwing stars overlap on the enemy like this the damage stacks. Without that mechanic the Ninja would be trash tier for most of the game since a single ninja star does 2 damage. The larger the weak point hitbox is tends to mean the more effective the Ninja is at close range. Here the Ninja does 26 damage per attack on the first boss.

Stage 2

Second stage has icy damage areas which are easy enough to move around. Two tricky enemies are the spawners and the slimes. The spawners are fairly beefy with health and their hitbox extends down far more than the sprite suggests. The slime also has high hp and seems to straight up designed to slowdown and trick the player into getting close then using wide ranges attacks.

The miniboss dragon is dealt with similarly to the first boss. Attack the head and it dies very fast. There is some rng involved in preventing it from doing some attacks that are slower like a jump.

The boss is this strange blob thing with arms that move around. It also shoots out little slime balls that explode. This thing's weak point is the very top of it. Taking some damage then moving through the boss to get to the top works well to get the weak point.

Stage 3

This stage areas have a lot of pitfalls, but the developers also put some "guard rails" where you cannot fall off or run off. Rather transparent of the developers that the spots that you cannot fall or run off the ledge would let you get to the end of the section faster. In this game if the player is invincible the player can run off into space while it lasts. There is a decent amount of lag reduction in the stage sections near the doors since the game is starting to pack in the enemies now.

The Flying Snake Dragon is a miniboss which is heavily rng based. Depending on how you move and attack it, it will moves in unusual and evasive ways. I end up attacking it twice to get its health down so that two hits from the Steel Ball will kill it.

The boss is a Beholder and its weak point is the colored section of the eye. The general strategy here is to position the character so that when it starts moving towards you when its eye is fully open and vulnerable the character can just attack straight up at close range. Once the eye takes damage the boss will shoot three lightning streams forward as well as releasing destructible homing mini-eyeballs. The arms on the top are damageable but it does not do any damage to the boss hp.

Stage 4

The fire stage is where the game stops playing around and wants your quarters. Lots of enemies with mid to long range attacks alongside environmental hazards. Taking damage in the lava does a little damage boost forward which is used to quickly bypass most of the enemies.

The Cerberus miniboss is the first instance where the game really wants to drag things out by drastically decreasing the max damage cap. Regardless of how high the damage is this miniboss takes barely anything. Most of the time the boss damage caps at 2 but when it is stationary and not attacking it can take 4 damage out of full 96 health.

The game has a bad camera bug on the Cerberus fight where if you kill it when it is on the extreme bottom left of the screen and try to move towards the door, the game fails to unlock the camera. Then you get stuck and have to wait for the "timeout reaper" to kill you repeatedly to game over. Overall the game is not too buggy though you can walk over pits if you are currently invincible.

The second stage area has a little shortcut where if you take damage you can run across the chasm while the invincibility lasts.

The boss of the fire area is a Fire Dragon. The Fire Dragon uses a breath attack alongside magic explosions that shoot out fireballs in four directions. Once its health reaches about 50% the attack frequency of the explosion magic increases dramatically. The Fire Dragon's weak point is the head and some of the neck and this is a rather challenging to get consistent high damage on with the Ninja. The boss has different hitbox(es?) depending on how the head is oriented, and it seems that there is an additional temporary hitbox on the arm when it moves it. The max damage fluctuates between 3 to 5 depending on what is going on. The 5 damage hit seems to be an additional hit from when the arm hitbox is active. Once the Fire Dragon is destroyed move up right.

Stage 5

Final stage just packs in the enemies all over the place. The fastest route is the left branching path since the right path has a lot of lag in addition to some lightning casting statues. There is a minotaur blocking the way on the left side, but attacking towards the left pushes it to the side. Then there is a run to the door.

The room with the Lich Boss is full of treasure with only a couple actually having equipment with most spawning additional enemies. Moving up on the screen enough will cause the boss to activate. The Lich can only be hurt by hitting the gem on its chest. Here the max damage varies between 1 to 2 damage regardless of character or items. The Lich will cause instant death through petrification if the player touches the boss. It casts a slightly homing spell which can cause Pig. Also weirdly in rare instances the spell will travel two to three times as fast for some reason. The Lich can spawn three ghost heads that home in on the player and when destroyed shoot out three bullets. The head detaches and does three kinds of attacks. It can shoot fireballs, hover around shooting bones at the player, or tries to ram into the player. At around 50% the Lich starts moving side to the side in the arena. Amusingly one of the best spots to attack the Lich is while under his robes. While it is possible to move above the Lich towards the door, the door only opens once the Crown is collected after the Lich dies.

Note: While this did not turn out faster this could be used for a tas with a different routing. There is a chest on the upper right which gives boots and a gauntlet which I tried to route in, but turns out it is slightly slower for this tas. The trick to get them quickly is to destroy the chest and have the items to spawn in, then move up the activate the boss. When the boss is activated all the chests disappear, but the items will stay active for awhile. During one of the periods where it is invulnerable jump off the top cliff to remove any current equipment. This is necessary since in the game equipment does not have its countdown timer refreshed if you pick up the same item. Then on another section where the boss cannot be harmed take the opportunity to pick up the item. This strategy loses little time but it seems that when I compared it to not picking it up you lose some time since the Lich boss is not as vulnerable and takes an extra attack. With the ninja the boots and gauntlet are not even necessary for the last boss to beat it asap.

The Last Boss is the enemy Knight character. He spawns in with four weak lookalikes. The main thing to keep in mind is that the boss will become vulnerable most of the time if you move your character into front of the Boss's looking direction. At the start the play is to move or kill the lookalikes and get the Boss to see you and begin an attack. Here three of the lookalikes die and the boss takes the first hit. Max damage during these phases is 4. At this point the Gauntlet expired during the Lich fight, so the Ninja only has a couple ninja stars. This means positioning is more strict than usual to get 4 damage instead of the default 2 damage.

Once the Boss gets hit here a couple things can happen. If the boss sees you and prepares to attack but you attack prematurely the boss can to a teleport dodge move. One teleport dodge move can move the boss to a position near you where it looks like after images are circling the player. It is possible to get the boss stuck in the wall with this kind of dodge. The tas uses another move is to attack the boss when he is just recovering from being attacking, and the boss will do ninja dodge move teleporting behind you and does a lunge attack. During the attack the boss can be hit. Once the boss takes enough damage the boss does this whirling dervish like attack which is invincible and lasts way too long. For entertainment at times move in between the swords during the attack. This can be looped until the next phase.

During the Last Boss fight the Boots expire and this makes the final phase tricky. The final phase begins after the second whirling dervish like attack. This phase is where the Last Boss takes singular long steps towards the player after short waiting periods. The problem is that if the player is too close to the boss right as he would use the step he will change into an attacking position and keep attacking several times. Then the boss would end the attack with a whirling dervish which costs massive amount of time upwards of 20 seconds. When the Boots expire it is important to make the boss step in a roughly rectangular pattern around the edges of the room. It is tricky to keep the boss far enough away yet also being in position to hit the boss. While in this final phase the boss also only takes 1 damage per hit.

Once defeated the final cutscene plays, and as a final comedic note the timeout reaper appears and kills the player by causing petrification. Then the credits play.

Final Thoughts and Potential Time Saves

While I am not completely satisfied with this tas, the potential time saves should not be more than a couple seconds as far as I could tell. At this point this tas has too much "baked in" and would need to be redone for worthwhile improvements. There are a lot of unknowns for this game such as:

• Which "1 Player mode" character is actually the fastest? Each character has strengths and weaknesses which make this unclear. My two most likely choices are the Ninja or the Wizard. The Ninja starts off with a passive speed boost and and very close range he is surprisingly strong. However the Ninja does trash damage at mid range which means time gets lost running up to enemies, and he sucks at the Flying Snake Dragon. The Wizard seems to excel at close and mid range, can do high damage with stacking attacks, but is not as fast moving as the Ninja. My next possible fastest bet would be the Wizard. The Bard is a spearman in this game and has great range, but the damage is not as high as I would like. The Knight is probably the slowest choice with the the slow attack animation. The Knight is strong at close and mid ranges, but that strength would not even be able to work well on the last half of the game's bosses due to their extremely low max damage per hit. Each character gets its own unique magic spell order too, so some may be more effective than others. To really tell which is the fastest a TAS would have to be done for each one.
• For a "2 Player mode" what strategies would complete the game the fastest? Abusing quarters to make one player run ahead abusing invincibility frames might work well. Using one player as a Magic user than getting a temporary game over with that slower character might be good too. Which two character would play off each other the best? Would sticking to just a single character per player even be the best way to go?
• Are there faster equipment and chests routes? There could be since while I believe I chose the most important equipment there are multiple routes to get certain equipment. Especially considering the magic "?" which has a chance of getting a Chest to appear which may drop potions and equipment.
• How the heck does the Fire Dragon hitbox(es) actually work?
• Can the Flying Snake Dragon be RNG manipulated to be taken down quickly without magic?
• Is there a way to manipulate the Magic spells outside of waiting?

Requested screenshot Frame 17416

https://i.ibb.co/8g4s24j5/Dark-Seal-World-revision-3-fire-dragon-frame-17416-2025-09-06-08-14-29.png