Submission #3283: Noxxa's PSX Mega Man X5 "X" in 19:43.80

Sigma returns again and Earth is in great danger. Zero is off having a party all night, so Mega Man X steps in to do the job. Even if not as awesome as Zero, he still manages to do the job in less than 20 minutes while also getting the Ultimate Armor.

The making of this TAS started a long time ago. It started somewhere in July 2010. After repeated sections that really demotivated me from this TAS (which includes the luck manipulation part, Shadow Devil boss, some parts in Virus 3 stage, and some of the boss refights (especially The Skiver), I finally managed to put an end to it.

In this stage you can already see that X is much better at blowing stuff up without wasting time. Expect to see a lot of explosions.

Luck was even less friendly than always at this part (which is ironic, because there's much more room for luck manipulation here). I couldn't make anything optimal out of it after many thousands of rerecords. This is probably the most improvable part of the TAS. (Note that this part was made long before I took a crack at the RNG and coded devices just to make this easier).

Not much is of note in the stage itself, other than X destroying some more enemies in the stage than Zero.

The boss fight, Shadow Devil, is probably one of the largest time-wasters as X. X can't defeat it in one round like Zero can. Instead, X needs three phases to do it, with having the Shadow Devil turning into Wily Machine 6 for the last phase.

Again, not much difference in the stage other than X being faster at destroying enemies and destroying more of them. In the Rangda Bangda W fight, only the green one can't be destroyed in one round. The rest, while also taking much longer to destroy, are still defeated in one round, if sometimes just barely.

I take unarmored X to this stage (rather than Fourth/Force armor), so I can get the Ultimate Armor for Virus 4. One rope part of this area looks a little different from how Zero does it in his TAS, which is because of very subtle 1-pixel hitbox differences between X and Zero, which makes X just a bit slower in this area. And there's another area where X has to waste time on a moving platform because he needs an airdash to quickly get across, and unarmored X doesn't have that.

Zero's AI is incredibly stupid and also very easy to manipulate. I tried to make him look as stupid as possible.

With the Ultimate Armor, I get an infinite-use Nova Strike, which is only faster in the stage than regular dashjumping if the stage is completely flat or it's possible to cancel the falling moment after the Nova Strike. It's also the best bosskilling tool X has at his disposal, dealing 8 damage to all bosses. However, since executing Nova Strike takes a bit of time, it's not possible to hit the bosses optimally regarding their invincibility time. So instead, I had to focus on making the Nova Strikes and the waits between them as small as possible. All bosses still fall surprisingly quickly to Nova Strike.

Of note is that some boss AIs are different between X and Zero, which causes some small time wasters such as Mattrex' fire dash and Dark Dizzy flying up to appear regardless of luck manipulation.

End-game stats:

Play time: 8:23
X Rank: SA
Zero Rank: SA

That's right, X did all this crap in less than 20 minutes and he only gets the same rank as Zero who didn't even do anything.

Thank you for reading this text!

Nach: Really nice run. Accepting.

OmnipotentEntity: I'll take care of the encoding for this run.