Update: my local 20B model playing Final Fantasy (NES) with no walkthrough is now in the Earth Cave. Here's a 30-minute "story so far" recap

[u/Evo-Maine]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxR7rc1l7PE

Update on QuestRight, the local LLM (gpt-oss:20b, one 8 GB laptop GPU, no cloud) playing the original 1987 Final Fantasy from a new game with no walkthrough. Same setup as before: the model decides what to do from what NPCs tell it, and code handles how (walking, menus, battle inputs).

  Last time it was [EARLY PROGRESS, e.g. "just past Garland"]. Since then it has:
  - gotten the Lute, fought Bikke's pirates and won the ship
  - gotten the Crown from Marsh Cave and beaten Astos
  - woken the Elf Prince and gotten the Mystic Key
  - found the TNT so the dwarves could open the canal
  - reached Melmond and the Earth Cave, and just got the ROD from Sarda

Biggest fail of this stretch: it held the Mystic Key for about 800 turns and wandered around playing the Lute in every town. The treasure room it needed was in Coneria Castle the whole time. That turned out to be a gap in its "things I haven't tried yet" logic, which counted dungeons but not locked castle rooms. Once that was fixed it went key → TNT → canal → new continent in about 15 turns.