Ouch! What do you do? Goonies II has always been one of my favorite NES games since I was a kid. I love both the exploration and platforming aspects of it. This is the No Super Jumps route. We don’t do any bomb-blasts or damage boosts to fly across the screen, rearrange the level tiles, or glitch ourselves out of bounds. However, there’s been some newly discovered techniques to move faster throughout the game while still staying inbounds. Thanks to ThatPunk_, they have figured out how to do “special jumps” or momentum jumps off of moving platforms. These are precise tricks. If you’ve ever watched speedruns of Castlevania II : Simon’s Quest, you’ll see some of the top runners do a similar trick. Both are Konami games, so it makes sense I guess haha. Unlike Simon’s Quest, we can continue the momentum for as long as we are able to with frame-perfect jump inputs.
There are quite a few places throughout the run where we can do these special jumps to save time. We even skip the “impossible jump” in the red cave by the waterfall! Getting across the bridge is much quicker. Taking death-warps in both the orange and green caves saves time too. We got a pretty fast key drop in the green attic. When pressing the opposite direction on the d-pad while taking damage to an enemy, you can get a tiny speed boost. Although, this seems to be more significant before getting the hyper shoes. Grabbing vines and ladders will spawn some platforms quicker so you don’t have to wait to jump on them. For those unfamiliar with Goonies II speedrunning, we do a thing called the “glasses glitch” to trick the game into thinking we have the glasses in our inventory. After collecting the transceiver, a frame-perfect B and A press will reveal hidden doors and safes as if we had picked up the glasses. The Japanese version is used as it is faster overall due to less text in the dialog boxes.
I think that’s pretty much everything I wanted to mention here. If I remember anything else important later, I’ll come back to edit this. Thank you again ThatPunk_ for helping out by giving feedback and suggestions while I was working on this. This wouldn’t have been possible without these new strats. I also want to give a shoutout to ProfessorRetro, Zephis, and McBobX for their contributions to the Goonies II speedrun community! It’s fun to play the Goonies II!
Tegron: Claiming for judging.