Fight simulator

See how to press A once a fish is hooked, and fight fish yourself in a simulator that follows the game’s own code frame by frame.

Loading the fight data…

TL;DR

Best way to press A

We let a frame-exact copy of the game’s fight run thousands of random fights with different ways of pressing A. Every tip uses only what you can see: the fish running away, coming closer or standing still.

  1. Don’t hold A the whole time, and don’t mash it. Both lose almost every fish, even the Yamame. Holding or mashing while the fish runs only fills the line-strain meter.
  2. Let the fish run. While it swims away, keep your thumb off A.
  3. When it stops to rest, press A once and keep holding. The pause is your window; a fresh press starts the reeling. (Holding from before the pause does nothing, so let go first.)
  4. Let go the moment it stops coming closer (or slows to a crawl). Then wait for the next rest and repeat. Holding past that point is what loses fish.
  5. The giant eel needs the same rhythm and a lot of patience. Only about … of simulated eel fights end in a catch within 100 seconds, and … are still going. Tapping A while it sprints lifts that to …, but it needs sharp eyes and more eels get away. With frame-perfect timing the simulator reaches ….

Auto-finder

Choose a fish and tackle. The finder tried many ways of pressing A on a thousand random fights and kept the best one a player can actually follow.

Play it yourself

Fight the fish with the same 60 Hz timer as the real game. Hold the big A button, or Space, Z or A on a keyboard.

· Change the setup

Press and hold the big button (or Space, Z or A) to hold A; let go to release. The fish is already running when a fight begins.

How we know

The fight engine on this page is a frame-exact port of the game’s own fish-fighting code. It was checked against 96 real fights recorded from the original game running in an emulator: every tracked value matched on every frame, and the result (caught, got away, line broke) matched every time. Read the full model on GitHub.

Of those 96 checks, 28 changed nothing in the game (the Area 1 Yamame). The other 68 used RAM-modified set-ups: the fish, rod, hook, bait, scene or random numbers were written into the emulator’s memory before the hook was set, and casting, lure and fly fights were forced the same way. They prove the code, not that every real playthrough will match.

The percentages are shares of simulated random starts: 1000 different fights per setup, with a fixed list of hidden random numbers, timing, cast distance and fish size. They are not a promise for any single fight. “Unfinished” means the fight was still going after 6000 frames (about 100 seconds). The finder assumes a reaction time of 8 frames (about 0.13 s) and only uses what is visible on screen.

Your HP does not matter in the fight; the game never reads it. HP only matters afterwards: losing the tackle costs 1 to 4 HP.

Not covered here: lures, flies and decoy-ayu fishing. Whether a person can tell a fast run from a slow one on the real screen has not been tested.