Cocoron is a platformer released exclusively in Japan in 1991. The game lets the player create customizable characters to play with, and the first half of levels can be played in any order featuring unique entrance and exit sections.
This run finishes the game 3559 frames faster than the TAS uploaded to nicovideo by もりそば さん.
For people who care about the in-game CLEAR TIME, it is 00:06:41.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: FCEUX 2.2.2
- Aims for fastest time
- Takes samage to save time
- Abuses programming errors in the game
- Manipulates luck
Comments
Game objectives
Unlike many other games that allow to play some levels in arbitary orders, this game is unique that the layout of the freely selectable levels have variants depending on where the player starts off as well as arrives at. Some of them each consist of three sections separated with screen transitions, but some others have only one each.
The five peripheral locations as end points of levels each features a boss that will be gone for the rest of the game after getting defeated.
The central house as an end point of freely selectable levels has no bosses.
So what is needed to be done to beat this game?
The answer is to defeat the five bosses each locating at one of the five peripheral end points first, then find the princess between the two end points on the bottom of the map, and just continue on the plot to beat all of the remaning fixed-order levels.
Route
As you may have concluded, in a speedrun one of the two bosses on the bottom of the map must be beaten last among the first five, since they are the closest to the princess.
Because the sum of any two of the five levels connecting to the central house are longer then any of the five peripheral levels, the central house has no value to visit, except as the starting point of the game.
These reduce the free part of the route for consideration to two. With testing, the winner is the current:
- Titania the Fairy Queen in Fairy Forest
- Harvest Moon on Star Hill
- Ice-Dragon on Ice-Fire Mountain
- Joker in Trump Castle
- Flint the Pirate over Milk Sea
But that's not all.
Characters
The game allows to create a character before every "true" level that features a boss, up to five in total.
Each can choose from various body parts and weapon that have different strength and weakness, but two character can't use identical body parts, except with a glitch that allows to use the same first variant of body parts before the game could check against it.
In a platforming game, speed is almost always the modst important thing for speedruning, but the ability to hover in the air, the power to take down bosses fast, and sometimes the defence to take damage to save time are often as important as well.
Weapon of each chracter can be permantly upgraded by collecting... weapon upgrades of certain amount. That usually increases the fire power, but can also slow down the game with excessive lags. Bosses usually have no invulnerabiliy but can only receive damage once every frame. Thus weapon upgrade has to be ballanced for speedruning.
So with careful calulations and tests, three charecters with different strength and weakness are used this run:
- The "Smiley Dragon" that is capable of hovering with high speed and ballanced attacking power.
- The "Spring Clown" that has maximized speed and jump ability with a fragile body and nerfed weapon.
- The "Cloud Warrior" that has the most fire power and some toughness to endure damage, but is slow and jumps low.
More specialized characters can be created, but that won't make up for that time cost in creating them. Menu navigation is quite slow in this game.
Lags
Yeah, this game lags a lot.
Hovering usually reduces the lags a lot, but that won't help with overloaded sprites.
Destroying enemies and eggs that contains power-ups and weapon upgrades can inrecrease or decrease lags, which needs testing.
Even the BGM track that is randomly chosen for the search of the princess has to be manipulated to be the one that lags the least.
Luck manipulations
Boss patterns are random. The toughness of enemy-dropped eggs are random. What are contained in eggs are random.
And lags are random. All are to be manipulated.
Movements speed
All speeds have maximum caps.
Each character used in this run has different walking speed caps.
The "Spring Clown" is so fast that its bullets will fall behind when it advances at maximum speed.
The "Smiley Dragon" is not much slower than the "Spring Clown".
The "Cloud Warrior" is so slow that it is only used in a boss-fight-only level. Its power does save time, though.
Dashing down a slope is the fastest to move in this game.
Other Comments
Thanks to all previous players for their runs.
Thanks to mtvf1 for the encode.
GoddessMaria: Judging.
GoddessMaria: As far as the game is concerned, it's unique if not strange. As for the submission, it's managed to keep entertainment going without wasting more time. It has indeed managed to beat all currently known records as well. The audience response has also been overall positive and in favor of this movie too. About my decision...
I'm accepting this to Moons.
fsvgm777: Processing.