Recorded in FCEU 0.98.12 w/ Blip Record Patch
- Takes no damage
- No deaths
- As fast as possible
- Abuses hit detection a wee bit
- Manipulates luck an even weer bit
Cocoron is one of my favorite hidden gems for NES. It runs on what appears to be the Mega Man 2 engine, but instead of receiving powers from the bosses you kill you get another character to add to your roster. Each character is built from a sequence of head, body, and weapon parts. Each of these parts is assigned a weight and an HP or damage value. Putting heavy parts together results in a slow bruiser, and putting light parts together results in a frail little speed demon.
Guess which one I chose.
This is where Cocoron gets tricky. Weight affects not only your movement speed and jumping height, but also your momentum. Even when planning jumps frame by frame you have to take into account how much momentum you have built up. This usually means holding the opposite direction of travel for five or six frames to come to a dead stop before jumping. I think I handled this pretty well, especially when climbing the leaves in level two.
My weapon of choice, Parasol, is far from the most damaging in the game. However, there are several points in the game where its unique "unfold and rise" shot path is indispensable. Grabbing powerups doesn't increase the damage done so I ignore eggs and almost every enemy.
My main character isn't the absolute lowest weight you can put together, but when momentum, flight, and weapon utility are taken into account I'm betting it's the fastest to complete the game.
The route here is pretty solid. There are a few preconditions to reach the last level:
- Beat all five bosses
- Then, and ONLY then, does the princess appear in a mid-point egg
- In fact, she's always in the same egg. It's a plot thing. We skip the plot.
This is my second submission, which is very nearly my first submission, since my first used a fan translation of Cocoron. I was suitably chastised in the forum and dedicated today to whupping CocoronJ even worse. I did so in fine style: this movie is 2:35 faster in real-time, 21 seconds faster in game-time, and uses a little over half the re-records. The speedups came mostly in a greatly improved Trump Castle boss fight and not recording the credits.
A couple notes:
- The Trump Castle boss' spade attack always fires at the same rate. To bring down the next card only depends on if any spades are left on screen. Theoretically only the last two need to be shot to advance as fast as possible...but I wanted to spice this battle up.
- Tapir is a mostly-invincible jerk.
Suggested Description: A winged pumpkin man rights wrongs in the World of Dreams with his tiny twin parasols of doom. No, that's not a euphemism for anything.
CANCELLED due to many many improvements found by the forumites. Monthenor will return in CocoronJ With a Vengeance.