Battle of Olympus improved by 3:33. I'll try to only talk about the most important points:
The main thing to talk about is olive collection. 60 olives have to be collected to buy the ocarina. Instead of devoting time to collecting them like Jackic did, I just collected them along the route. However, this did require a lot of planning, because there are only about ~78 single-attack-death enemies with the potential to drop olives before reaching Poseidon, who sells the ocarina.
What an enemy drop seems to depend on its position when it's killed. Most of the olives collected are from enemies that drop from the ceiling. This creates a problem, because there are only 3 height levels that determine what it drops (i.e. killing it while the hero is ducking, standing, or jumping (also high jumping after getting the sandals)). So, the problem is that the enemy may not drop an olive at any level. In this case, the hero can either skip the enemy, or briefly wait for the enemy to move over a little more. Sometimes I have to do the second option, but this option also leads to future enemies in the immediate area generally being more likely to drop an olive. This is most notable on olive number 2, where I did what I did in order to make the first 13 enemies drop an olive (otherwise the randomness was really unlucky, as only 6 of them were giving olives.)
Enough about olives, yes? They are the main timesaver compared with Jackic's though. That saves about 2:30. I used death twice in order to save time (about 12 seconds). I decided to do this when I realized that death would be the difference between being more or less 20:00, and I was spiritedly aiming for the movie to be less than 20:00. Another notable timesaver is in boss fights, thanks to some cleverness. The rest of the time is saved by avoiding some delays caused by enemies, acceleration, text, etc.
I've said some more at Forum/Topics/1671
Thanks to Jackic and whoever enjoys this movie.
Your thoughts?
Bisqwit: My thoughts: An improvement this big can be nothing
but good. I'm processing this movie.