Today (March 22, 2024) happens to mark the 28th anniversary of Resident Evil 1. This wasn't intended.
This submission is a ~20 seconds improvement of the current publication ([5378] PSX Resident Evil: Director's Cut "Jill" by arandomgameTASer in 1:03:38.67), with bulk of the inputs staying the same. The difference involves a new trick and a route change that involves killing off Barry early.
The point of divergence is around the 36 minutes mark and all inputs up to that point are identical to those of the current publication. For this reason, the provided encode starts at the 127245th frame.
Goal Choice
Just like the previous movies of the branch, this one aims to beat the original Resident Evil with the character Jill asap.
Route Change
Given the goal, it is intuitive to simply go for the worst ending where neither Barry nor Chris is saved, and this involves making a "bad" choice at the first possible chance to lock the game into the worse endings in the previous movies and RTAs alike. While this makes perfect sense and would indeed be the fastest route to simply reach an ending under normal circumstances, it is actually just slightly faster (as in by ~1 second) to get on track for a potentially better ending first so that we can kill off Barry earlier in the game instead in order to have shorter cutscenes toward the end of the game if we can skip the first cutscene normally required to go down that path.
To illustrate, here is the flowchart of the second half of Jill's game by Reala on GameFAQs with the route in the current publication marked red and the new one marked green. YES-YES and NO-NO answers at the start of the tunnel section both allow us to go down the desired path, but the former ends the cutscene faster by seconds.
Edit: It also turns out that returning to the courtyard the same way we came via the rope after getting the battery, which is the path taken in RTA of the best ending category for Jill, is actually ~19 seconds faster than the path taken in the current publication. Now this is the real benefit of this new story route.
New Trick
Normally, waiting for Barry to replace the rope would result in an extra cutscene. However, this can be avoided by leaving the room when the cutscene is just about to play so that we don't have to sit through the scene while the game still registers the route choice. The cutscene would normally take a bit more than a minute so the route used in this movie gets to be faster than the long established route only thanks to this skip.
Special Thanks
- arandomgameTASer for the current publication.
- SephJul for the documentation of the glitch and the proposal of the route change in question.
- YOU, for reading the submission text and watching the movie.
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Replacing the movie, fixing the cycle count, and accepting over [5378] PSX Resident Evil: Director's Cut "Jill" by arandomgameTASer in 1:03:38.67.
EZGames69: Processing...