In this game you must collect sea shells in order to upgrade your weapons and kill Jaws.
Movie Summary:
This saves about 4 seconds over the previous run. Not much else to say. I take roughly the same strategy as the previous movie by Adelikat, though I have some better RNG manipulation, and better controls in some places. Battles are generally fixed time, and there aren't really tricks for moving faster on the overworld either.
Tricks used:
As in the previous run, it turns out it is very difficult to manipulate the item drops. But it is not impossible. The drops are affected by one or more of the following: points, position of player/enemies/items, killing enemies in a different order. With this knowledge, it's not too hard to get enough shells and stars so that diverting to fight Jaws as the second fight isn't necessary (we easily have 30,000 points after the bonus game).
The boat moves on the world map one tile every 16 frames. However, if you are moving Right or Left, you can move in the opposite direction to change course mid-tile. This makes avoiding fights take only a few frames instead of needing to wait periodically as in the previous run.
Jaws can only be hit once per 25 frames, and has 5120 health. This means he takes quite a while and really no room for much improvement on the boss fight as a result.
Tricks not used:
I did try manipulating item drops so that I could get the mini sub and power level 3. However this only deals 96 damage, compared to 64 with power level 2 and the sub. Traversing the map takes too long to make this worth it.
You can kill approximately 24 enemies in the first encounter. If somehow, someone could perfectly manipulate drops, arguably there might be room to get 13 shells, and 30k points within the first fight. However, I tried all sorts of things, but the only reliable way to change the item drops was killing enemies in a different order, which seems to indicate that this is not a possible strategy.
During my play, I found a glitched encounter with Jaws. Video can be found at https://youtu.be/WiMXOpjHf5w Movie file can be found at userfiles/info/37638661301592657 I think it has something to do with jaws temporarily cutting a corner, and thus not being within a legal grid space when the battle started. (At first I avoided this by LRLR a few times before the fight, to delay it so jaws could get in a legal space). If someone tried this game in the future, I might recommend investigating if any useful glitches can be found this way (maybe code execution?).
feos: The author of the existing tool-assisted record posted his movie file, so I was able to compare the movies side-by-side. The strats are different, and it's not exactly clear what causes the different outcome (whose randomness DonkeyKongGenius puts in doubt, saying how similar gameplay actions result in similar events), but in every section his run is faster than this one (about 00:04.99 seconds difference, ignoring the differences in emulation). .
Even though the Vault rules allow to publish an improvement that's known to be improvable, even Vault doesn't let in movies that can't beat existing records. In this case, the TAS record was simply missed, but in future, the knowledge base DonkeyKongGenius has and his movie can serve as a great basis for making a new submission, which won't only be faster than the published run, but it'll also be fully optimal. Good luck with the improvement, Meerkov!
I should note that QuickNES isn't the most accurate core for TASing, and since DonkeyKongGenius's movie was made on FCEUX, I suggest to either use FCEUX for precise measurements, or switch to NESHawk for maximum accuracy.
Rejecting this one.