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Shadow Armor is an interesting armor to play around with, its buster shot (or shurykens) can go into three directions (straight, diagonal up and diagonal down) and it is random. It does not have mid-charge buster and its charged buster is a powerful (yet, can lag the game a lot) saber slash with a crescent tip that can deal huge amount of damage. X cannot use any weapon acquired. Its Giga Attack is the most powerful of all but has a big start delay. It can do a high jump to stick to the ceiling (just like Zero with Hyoroga) and can shoot shurykens down. It can also stick on walls without sliding down, touch spikes without dying and even wall jump out of them (you cannot do this normally).
For a speedrun or TAS point of view it is not the ideal armor to go since it does not have any weapons (like Yammark Option) to pass through enemies really fast like X normally can. Therefore, I equipped Buster+ and Speedshot to speed up the enemy sections, even though, sometimes the shurykens fly where you do not want them.
The charged buster is powerful but prone to heavy lag since it can hit multiple times (each hit causes four frames of lag). I did found out that by using it in the air and try different times, I can make it hit only once (though, sometimes it was faster to get two hits). This is heavily useful in boss refights.
In addition, the Saber Walljumping Trick is also different, you cannot walljump until the Saber animation ends so you cannot walljump as fast, fortunately, Shadow Armor saber animations are faster which means shorter animation time.
Gate 1, Parts Equipped: Hyper Dash, Hyper Barrier, Buster+, Speedshot, Quick Charge and Weapon Recover
Since it cannot use weapons, I had to use the traditional magma area pass through with Hyper Barrier to save a good amount of time. In addition, in the Nightmare Mother bossfight, I can burn RNGs faster because its buster does burn a RN. I managed to beat it in one cycle using its Giga Attack twice by using Weapon Recover (Giga Attack freezes them, so I get longer cycles using it).
Gate 2, Parts Equipped Hyper Dash, Jumper, Hyper Barrier, Buster+, Speedshot, Quick Charge and Power Drive
In order to do the totem skip, I had to use the Jumper Part, otherwise, it is impossible to do it with this armor. For High Max, destroyed its shield with the charged saber and then used Power Drive to beat him faster. In the second part, you can see that by not having weapons, this armor is slower since you have to avoid enemies or get hit by them to pass through. For the Gate fight, used shyrukens to manipulate him and charged saber to destroy the balls, I also used its Giga Attack to destroy 2 balls with it, it is faster since you don't get lag (but harder to manipulate). Sometimes I ended up using shurykens instead since he is harder to manipulate when he has low HP.
Final Stage, Parts Equipped: Hyper Dash, Buster+, D-Converter, Ultimate Buster.
Equipped Ultimate Buster to get faster bossfights and D-Converter to get the Giga Attack faster (6 hits vs 8). Used the Giga Attack on Mijinion to avoid a lot of lag. Left Sheldon to fight later to fill Giga Attack with the other bosses. Scaravich fight was fun. Shark fight is a bit hard since he moves a lot, had to get hit to fill up my Giga Attack. Went back to Sheldon and finished filling up the Giga Attack to use it on him, his final form causes too much lag. Manipulated Phoenix to stay down for a faster fight. The rest is self-explanatory. For Sigma 1, it is faster to use Giga Attack and for Sigma 2, charged saber for the win.
So after doing the Shadow Armor run, I was curious as how much faster/slower is it compared to Falcon Armor, so after some calculating, Shadow Armor remains useless for a TAS :(
The difference in Sigma 2! Too bad the mavericks are too slow otherwise =[
Gate 1 and Gate 2 are both lost causes as well, right?
Yeah. In Gate 1 both Falcon Armor and Blade Armor can do the skip on the magma area with the ice block glitch and in Gate 2 Blade Armor can do a very fast High Max fight. So, lost cause.
I did some quick testing on this, nothing very deep yet. But basically you trigger the Alia convo the same frame you get warped back, and the convo is shown after being warped, while on this convo, any object in the main corridor won't get loaded until the convo finishes.
The main advantage of this is to be able to skip every other totem as Zero by dashing while the enemies in the main corridor have not loaded yet (you do this by double tapping forward to dash). Though, it is not easy to setup and does require a bit of time to do so, but in the end, it is positive (at least, in the vertical room, this is where I tested this glitch).
For a 100% TAS, this still can be useful because you don't have to beat the totem nor wait for it's explosion to move forward, which is very positive. The main thing is, that you can't do this on every room.
Just finished my last TAS project, using the Megaman X6 Tweaks Patcher (link in video description) I altered the game to have max dash speed, introducing many glitches and possibilities that are normally not possible. Enjoy
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Video with commentary and cutscenes:
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