Magician (US) for NES. Emulator used: FCEU 0.98.12, NTSC
Aims for fastest time. My second submission of this movie, with 21 seconds shaved off over the previous version.
Doesn't use warps or passwords (not possible), doesn't use death to save time (not possible). Takes hits to save time, and plenty of them.
I take advantage of some pause abuse to scroll text more quickly in certain spots, otherwise the game freezes certain types of input while the text is playing. If I enter and exit inventory quickly for no apparent reason, this is why. I also manipulate luck a bit (enemy behavior), mainly by jumping at certain times.
Magician is a pretty obscure and wretchedly hard game that I've always liked. It's an action game with some RPG elements. It keeps track of food and water, which the player has to stay on top of, and the spell system is pretty neat. All the spells are available either for purchase or to be found, but it's not necessary and you can enter them in manually, which I do for the vast majority. I also skip several sidequests that give hints as to some of the puzzles, as well as puzzle points. As a result, I don't get the best ending.
I speed up my progress through the game by using the Jump spell, which moves me a bit faster than walking. I can't use it all the time because I have limited mana, but I get as many in as possible (quite literally). There's another option, called Fleet Foot, that isn't quite as cost-effective, so I use Jump.
As I watched my previous entry, I noticed a few small flaws and decided to try improving it. Most of my 21 second improvement comes from entering Jump right at the very beginning and taking advantage of my natural mana regeneration in the first level to get some extra jumps in early. I also have some slight optimizations of my inventory usage which, since the inventory is kind of slow in this game, saves about a second per inventory visit. Most of this is on level 8 (the tower). I also save some time on the last boss. In addition, I cut it much closer on health this time, getting down to 1% at one point (it regens to 2% before I enter the inventory screen in the actual movie, but trust me, it's at 1% for a moment). I don't know that this actually saves time but it's certainly more stylish.