I have completed a Secret of Mana run using the weapon glitch. The link below should take you right to the download part of my file front page.
http://files.filefront.com/SoM+Glitch+Runsmv/;7959957;;/fileinfo.html
I used Snes9X v1.43+ v10 and the Secret of Mana (U)[!].smc ROM to make the movie. I was able to watch the whole movie with no problems or desyncs.
My run clocks in at 2 hours and 45 minutes. I will be the first to say that I know this run is not optimized at all. However, this being my first complete TAS of any game, and a long RPG at that, I think it turned out quite well. You may notice the relatively low rerecord count. The truth is, I was more concerned with actually getting through the game rather than shaving off frames for the fastest possible time. Each room or area becomes a maze of its own when it comes to navigating around walls and obstacles and I did not want to spend hours just figuring out the fastest way from one door to another, merely getting there and continuing on. That being said, I did try to be as speedy as possible.
I'll point out a few things about the run as well as some other things I noticed while making it.
The weapon glitch worked very well with killing bosses quickly. There is only 1 boss that I was not able to kill with the weapon glitch. I became fed up trying to find a way to hit Spring Beak, the boss before you get Sylphid's magic, with the spear. No matter where I tried, I could never land a hit on it. Yet, the AI controlled girl managed to get a weapon strike in while I was spamming it with Gnome magic. I am positive that it can be hit by the spear. I just got too annoyed while trying and decided to redo the section after killing the 3 blue hedgehogs. I bought 4 Faerie Walnuts, hoping it would be enough to kill the thing with 0 magic at that point. Luckily it was. Every boss afterwards gets hit with at least 1 the super spear of death!
I spent the majority of the rerecord count on the boss fights. Learning how to manipulate each one to my favor was quite fun. I eventually figured out a nice tactic against bosses that liked to cast magic on the guy and ruin my weapon charge, more than likely killing him. Since using the glitch requires 2 players, I would often place either the sprite or girl near the boss so that when it picked a target for the spell I knew was coming, it would target one of them, not the guy charging for the weapon strike. It worked rather well.
As the run progressed, I noticed that the maximum damage done by the glitch was slowly dropping. I guess this has to do with the boss's armor rating or something, I don't know. Regardless, it was doing less damage and that meant I would need to land more hits in order to kill the boss. Only too late did I realize a nice trick. If you cast moon energy on the guy while the he is holding the spear and the weapon glitch is charging, the next hit will ALWAYS result in a 999 critical hit. This is most evident fighting the Mana Beast, when I first realized what was happening. You need to cast it before each hit though. This may be due to my extremely low magic level though. It may last longer with a higher magic level.
I think the amount of time that could be saved in my run is enormous. 30 minutes, probably more. Probably a lot more. I hope it can serve as a guide for someone who is much better at TAS'ing than I.
Any feedback would be awesome. I hope you enjoy it!