Full-run timelapse video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GMPVe2jFio
At a Glance
| K3 | Fable 5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Actions | 1,999 (2,046 requests) | 2,000 |
| Total cost | $16.60 | $73.50 |
| Average cost per action | ~$0.008 | ~$0.037 |
| Endpoint | Midway through Viridian Forest, no badges | Boulder Badge + Route 3 |
| Party | Bulbasaur Lv8, Pidgey Lv3 | Ivysaur Lv18, Pidgey, Pikachu |
The same harness, the same Chinese ROM, and the same 2,000 actions: Fable 5 cleared the Gym, while K3 had only just entered the forest—roughly where Fable was around action 700.
The Unexpected Backtracking
The most interesting detour in the entire run happened between Viridian City and Pallet Town. The log actually contains three round trips, each completely different in nature:
| Action | What happened |
|---|---|
| About 736 | First round trip: a minor mishap. While looking for the Mart in Viridian City, it accidentally took the wooded path south and ended up back on Route 1. It immediately wrote “wrong direction for story” in its notes and turned around. |
| About 841 | Second round trip: a required story beat. After receiving Oak's Parcel, it returned to Pallet Town, delivered it to Oak, and received the Pokédex. |
| About 991 | It caught Pidgey, and normal progress continued. |
| About 1,134 | Third round trip: the amnesia-like mistake begins. A notes overwrite lost the fact that the parcel had already been delivered. At the Viridian Pokémon Center, it wrote, “NEXT: find Mart, clerk gives OAK'S PARCEL”—something it had completed long ago. |
| About 1,216–1,350 | It went all the way south to Pallet Town and spent nearly an hour circling the laboratory entrance and its own front door. Finally, it realized: “I already have Bulbasaur and Pidgey in my party, so the starter event must have happened already”—using its party composition to disprove its own incorrect notes. |
This detour cost about $2 and a few hundred actions. It is exactly why the system prompt says that “notes are hypotheses, not ground truth.” It also exposes the risk of overwrite-style notes: a single update can destroy an important story milestone.
Much Cheaper
K3 was 4.5 times cheaper per action, but the two models were much closer when normalized by progress: reaching the same point in Viridian Forest cost K3 $16.45, while Fable 5 had spent $21.85 by the time it cleared the forest's trainers. Most of the savings were consumed by unfamiliarity with the map and repeated exploration. If K3 had map-level memory, the same budget should carry it much, much farther.
Conclusion
Kimi K3 plays more like an ordinary player: it has heard the FireRed story, but it has not memorized the map from a walkthrough. It is not completely free of guide knowledge. Before receiving the parcel, it predicted that “the shop clerk will give me Oak's Parcel”; it knew the rival would choose the type advantage, and it knew Mom could heal the party. What it lacks is map-level memory: whether the laboratory is to the north or south, how to navigate the ledges on Route 1—everything has to be discovered through trial and error. Its thinking repeatedly contains self-doubt such as “Ugh, memory again” and “I shouldn't over-rely on memory.”
Compared with the previous article's finding, Fable 5's Kanto memory is “script-level”—it wrote down the item name Oak's Parcel 141 actions before seeing it—while K3's is “outline-level.” Placing the two models side by side suggests that map memory has a major effect on game progress.
K3 did not clearly remember the FireRed walkthrough or map, yet at one-quarter of Fable 5's price it produced reasoning that felt like an ordinary player's. I personally prefer this kind of result; it also better matches our intuition of what playing a game looks like. Next, I may test a ROM hack and see what the model does with it.
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