Submission #5366: Malleoz's GC Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door in 2:16:52.63

(Link to video)
Nintendo GameCube
baseline
Dolphin 5.0
1476800
179.82052771626348
36546
Unknown
Submitted by Malleoz on 1/21/2017 12:48:55 AM
Submission Comments

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door any% in 2:16:52.63 by Malleo

Game Overview:

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is an RPG developed by Intelligent Systems and is the second game in the Paper Mario series following Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64. It incorporates a world made of paper and turn-based battles, much like its predecessor. In it, Peach asks Mario to help find a treasure hidden in Rogueport. When he arrives, she is missing as usual, and he must collect 7 Crystal Stars to save her and open the Thousand-Year Door to collect the treasure.
Except, this time, Mario is sick of having to repeat this game six times, so he does it even faster. This is an improvement of 5:32.95 or 19977 frames.

To sync the run:

  • Emulator used: Dolphin 5.0
  • Idle Skipping Off
  • Dual Core Off
  • DSP LLE Recompiler
  • No Memory Card
  • Native internal resolution, no anti-aliasing, no antisotropic filtering (because Dolphin is good and desyncs the run if quality is raised...Good luck with this)
  • Requires an AMD GPU running with OpenGL

Objectives:

  • Aims for fastest time
  • Manipulates luck
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Major Skip Glitch
  • Abuses programming errors in the game
  • Skips a Palace faster than ever before
  • Genre: RPG
I use the Japanese ISO with the MD5 checksum: bec52fb8c1912bc6f8014801b6281422

Detailed Improvements:

Blooper Skip / Hazard Respawn Glitch

Jumping as soon as you enter a room results in the game failing to correctly distinguish where Mario was standing. Therefore if I get hurt by a hazard, such as falling in water or falling from a floor, it spawns me at approximately 0 on the X, Y, and Z axes. I say approximately because the exact position can fluctuate due to an unknown reason. In the case of the Blooper Skip, I can land in the water and spawn right by the unloaded Chapter 1 pipe. Its collision is still solid, so I can take it straight to Chapter 1. I use this again shortly into Chapter 1 in the bridge room. Jumping into the water with the Hazard Respawn Glitch results in me landing right on top of the water. When you land from a hazard mid-air, there is always a one frame window in which you can jump, allowing me to cover enough distance to make it across to the other side. As a result of performing Blooper Skip, I actually don't have an audience by the time I get to the Fuzzy fights in Shhwonk Fortress, meaning I can't get an HP Drain drop This costs a few seconds due to slower fight strats.

Faster Palace Skip

Shortly after the release of my last TAS, SolidifedGaming found an RTA-viable method for Palace Skip, which actually turns out to be faster. One small note: This requires the Ultra Hammer, which can be obtained quickly through Ultra Hammer Early, which I've explained in my previous submission texts. After getting text storage from an Ember, you can walk near the back seam and perform a Hammer Swing using the Ultra Hammer. Visually you can watch as Mario twists around, but the direction Mario is facing actually does change as he moves. If Mario is rotated to face towards the camera, Yoshi will spawn behind Mario onto the seam of the room after running from the Ember battle. From here you must go into Paper Mode to push Yoshi farther onto the edge of the seam. I unspin from Paper Mode, pause, and use an item on Yoshi. This causes Yoshi to unspin from Paper Mode, which would otherwise result in him falling while unspinning. I cannot teleport to Yoshi while he is unspinning, so I have to use the item on Yoshi. After Yoshi begins to descend, I close out of the text box and teleport to Yoshi. This next part was accidentally discovered by myself on stream. I Yoshi hover upwards until the frame before Mario would land on the floor. Letting go of the hover one frame before Mario would land on the floor results in Yoshi properly landing on the floor. At the same time though, Mario does not properly land on the floor. Because Yoshi landed, I'm now disengaged from Yoshi and have full control of Mario. Normally you cannot move up or down on the Z-axis while on Yoshi, but this precise Yoshi hover timing allows for full control of Mario. I simply hold up to reach the loading zone and entirely skip the last encounter.

Possible Improvements

1. The bridge skip near the beginning of Chapter 1 could be 30 frames faster. The game actually doesn't set Mario's respawn position until a bit closer to the stream under the bridge. Because of this, I can speed swap, rather than jump instantly.
2. The double jump in Hooktail's Castle, which skips the plane panel, saves time initially, but loses 15 frames overall due to losing coins and having to sell one extra badge to make up for it.
3. It takes a long time to enter horizontal pipes. Before you enter, there is a 20 frame timer that counts down before you actually enter the pipe. Pushing sharply against a wall before actually reaching the pipe counts towards this timer, which would have allowed for faster pipe entries. This would have saved several seconds over the entire run.

Theoretical Timesavers

Blimp Ticket Early/Skip

This still remains to be the single biggest timesaver left. If we can somehow advance the game’s sequence position from Chapter 2 to post-Chapter 2, we could retrieve the Blimp Ticket immediately after getting Flurrie rather than after completing the entire Great Tree. This would probably save 25 minutes. I have a detailed video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2-DRlXRXrk

Palace Skip without Yoshi

I believe that this is not likely, therefore I don't recognize it as a larger timesaver than Blimp Ticket Skip. This would cut out not only the Glitzville sequence, but also the need to finish Chapter 2. The only reason we finish Chapter 2 is so we can go through the Blimp Ticket sequence, which can otherwise not be triggered. This means we would get a Flurrie from Boggly Woods and immediately go to Chapter 7 and then Chapter 8, cutting out approximately 35 minutes.

Suggested Screenshot

VI: Anywhere from 405173-405185 http://imgur.com/a/rikWh

Special Thanks

Almo - speedrunning, getting me interested
Nathanisbored - finding Goombella Buffer
Cronikeys - Finding various glitches
Masterjun - finding speed swap, working on first TAS
CoolKirby - first TAS
Dsydude - finding Double Jump
SolidifiedGaming - Text Storage, Teleporter Room Early, Double Jump, Paper Mode Item Jump, Sort Glitch, Faster Palace Skip Method
Really_Tall - Yoshi Teleporting, Chapter 2 oobs, TRE w/o Super Boots, some PMIJ applications
Tiwill14 - Cage Skip, Teleporter Room Early
Jdaster - star point calculator making routing easier, info about audience members and their drops

Masterjun: Hurray for finding the glitch that requires Mario to jump all the time! Judging this one.
Masterjun: Sync verified (shoutouts to Fog). Judging incoming.
Masterjun: Of course, it's Malleoz again with incredible work on one of the best games ever made. Just leave it to the TTYD speedrun community to find time saving glitches right when Malleoz finishes his new TAS, so that he once again has to go back and redo the run. I think by the time this run is published, it's not unlikely that he works on yet another improvement. :D
Anyways, even if it is a long run, it's a great and entertaining TAS. The improvements were nice to see and added a lot to the entertainment. I agree with Nach on the judgement message on the previous submission. So, accepting to Moons as an improvement to the previous run.
Fog: Processing.
Last Edited by adelikat on 10/19/2023 6:55 PM
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