Submission #8330: JHolleworth's PSX Tail Concerto in 1:02:07.37

• Emulator used: BizHawk 2.8 (Nymashock)
• BIOS: SCPH5000.bin
• Aims for fastest time
• Takes damage to save time
• Doggo catches cute little kittens in a mech
• WAFFURU NO BAKA

Introduction

Basic Actions/Mechanics

Region Choice

General Run Comments

Resaca

• I make sure that I'm as close to the exit doors as possible whenever I catch and teleport the last kitten in a room. I also aim to face the center of the doors so that Waffle doesn't have to sidestep towards them.

• The second warehouse has four kittens hiding in barrels to the left. If a barrel is moving and sweating, there's a kitten hiding inside it. The idea is to pick up a barrel, throw it at the wall, and jump up to catch the kitten in mid-air.

• The third and last warehouse in the harbour has two bomb-throwing kittens in black shirts on top of high ledges. Waffle suggests in his dialogue that the player can throw their bombs back at them so they fall to the ground, but it's also possible to catch them at the peak of Waffle's jump.

• I walk up to the Mayor and speak directly to him as soon as all three warehouses have been cleared of those naughty little kittens. His dialogue can also be triggered if you run up to the plaza doors and try to interact with them, but that's a few frames slower since he has to run up to Waffle.

• The planes that we first see in the plaza can be taken down with one bomb and two bubbles, or two bombs if that's faster depending on the height they're at.

• The first boss is a hot air balloon called the Black Cat Mecha. I run towards it with the Police Robo's arms flailing about and remain underneath it as best I can. Not close enough to get hit by it, but close enough to be able to continuously deal damage to it. It is possible to crash the game on this boss if it hasn't attempted to throw a bomb at Waffle or grab him upon losing all of its health.

• After defeating the boss, I head back over to Porto to gather intel on our next three locations (Ferzen, Airleaf, and the Archeonis) from the townspeople and our chief.

Ferzen

• Since remaining close to the kittens' drills with the Police Robo's arms spinning is the riskiest way to deal damage without getting hit yourself, I fire a few bubbles at the drills to keep them slightly elevated.

• Mine 6 marks the first time where I intentionally take damage to save time. I pick up a bomb thrown by one of the kittens and run into a drill so that when Waffle drops the bomb upon getting hit, the bomb will take out both of the drills immediately.

• As long as you don't move Waffle at the start of the Black Cat Mecha-II fight, the boss will immediately go for the wall behind him so I dodge this attack with an emergency dive and just wail on it with flailing arms, chasing it down as it retreats to the middle to do a spin attack, and the fight basically ends before I have to throw the drill bombs it spawns at it or jump over them from a standstill as I attack the bit that Stare is sitting in.

Airleaf 1

• There's nothing of note to talk about here, I just dive off the starting island as soon as I get the jetpack from the inventor and land right near Grandpa Russel by flying upwards when the jetpack has about 50% fuel left. If you don't face the opposite direction by the time you pass the little floating rocks, Waffle will go careening off the island due to too much forward momentum.

Archeonis

• Jumping when outside the Archeonis is faster than walking due to the strong wind current.

• After cleaning out the main hall and both parts to the left and right, I get the toolbox which I give to the engineer downstairs to shut off the steam and access the last part of the plane.

• Jumping up ladders is faster than climbing them normally. The same goes for pipes as we'll see later in the Abandoned Factory and Secret Base.

Grimto

• This island is pretty laid-back, with all of the rooms only having regular kittens in them. Also shout-out to whatever that weird-ass biting skull head thing is doing in the LTB universe.

• The Black Cat Mecha-III is a tricky boss to fight in a normal setting due to it being pretty tanky (no pun intended). Again, the plan just consists of chasing after it with spinning arms, as well as throwing the cat missile thing that comes out of its butt back at it for big damage.

Abandoned Factory

• We see more damage abuse here via running towards the tanks whilst holding a bomb in my hand. The tanks require one bomb and one bubble to take down and reveal the kitten manning them.

• Normally when you go back outside after the first room, you're supposed to turn a valve to stop the third climbable pipe from constantly blowing out steam which damages Waffle, but with a precise enough jump, we don't need to do that.

• In the fourth room, if you place yourself just right, you can go through the door without having to defeat the tank that's blocking it; this is called a door skip.

• The Black Cat Mecha-IV is the most free boss in the whole game. It can't move or do anything at all, so as long as you hit the sweet spot (literally pixel-perfect, slightly higher than the second horizontal line in front of the boss), you have nothing to worry about as long as you don't move from your spot and jump over the shockwaves that the wrecking ball causes.

Secret Base

• In the second room (not counting the first one where all you do is jump up a pipe and go through the door), I hug the upper-left corner of the piston going up and down to get a bubble to clip through the grill so it can activate a lever from the right side. This lever activates the moving grill required to reach the end of the room.

• When the five-minute countdown to destruction starts, the final moving platform in the first room is on a cycle where because of the dialogue with Fool we have to skip, it's stupidly difficult to catch in RTA without going outside the room and back in again to reset the cycles. In a TAS setting, this isn't a problem as we can just about make it.

• Outside of some spiky wrecking balls in the second room, the rest of the escape is fairly easy, as I escape with 3 minutes and 56 seconds remaining.

• After we escape from the Secret Base and check on Waffle's airship parked in Porto, Grandpa Russel is waiting for us in Ferzen and he wants Waffle to see Gray in Coolant and borrow some translation references from him (he and Russel end up fighting every time they see each other).

Coolant

• There are two waves to the kittens outside the ice mountain. The first wave consists of two running kittens, two kittens in carts, and two kittens pushing the carts. If you're close to the mountain entrance (which I am in the TAS), it's more optimal to enter the mountain and clean out the two rooms inside before taking on the four balloon-riding kittens from the second wave.

• The kittens inside the mountain can make snowballs and throw them at Waffle, so I have to careful of those as I'm catching them.

• Once all the kittens are caught and we get the Yellow Crystal, talking to Gray will clear Coolant, so I go back to Ferzen to give the translation references to Russel, which takes us back to Waffle's house for a brief cutscene and an FMV which brings us to the Moving Fortress.

Moving Fortress 1

• The first room was pretty hard to optimise because of all the plane-riding kittens. I opt for the "throw a bomb and shoot two bubbles" approach on most of them. Others, I do a short cheeky arm spin for the finishing blow. Even if you don't press Circle a second time to teleport the kitten that's in your hands, it'll just happen automatically (as we see with the final kitten as I'm heading for the door).

• The next two rooms are pretty trivial, as I only have to move right for a bit to avoid getting knocked back from the bombs' explosions, as well as catch any bombs that are shot my way. I also do another door skip with a purple tank that's in the way.

• In a cutscene where Cyan charges to the next room and comes back out all beat up, you can tell that he got his ass tail kicked for a reason. With six tanks, this is easily the hardest room in the game (if you don't count the final boss). Much like the plane room, this took a while to optimise, but with precise mid-air bomb catching, careful spacing as the Police Robo's arms are spinning, and a bit of damage abuse, I'm fairly happy with the result. A handy thing to note about this room is that if you capture a kitten before dying, their tank won’t respawn.

• The following room where you're hanging across moving grills while bombs rain down on you is basically an auto-scroller. Not much you can do to make it any faster.

• The last three rooms aren't much of a problem. I have a bit of a close encounter with a boulder, but as long as you hug the wall on the rooms where you're constantly jumping up, they're like a breath of fresh air when compared to the plane and tank rooms. After making it through that, we get a pretty amusing bit where the boss music plays and you think you're going to fight Fool, but then he's like "lol nope, I don't do physical labour". Instead, the first Moving Fortress visit comes to an end as the part Waffle's on blows up and he gets out of there.

Airleaf 2

• Literally the only thing we have to go back to Airleaf for is the Moving Fortress Sensor. We’re not even going to be making use of the enhanced jetpack with extra fuel in this run, that's only good for finding photo pieces where getting all of those is its own run.

Moving Fortress 2

• We have two fights with the Black Cat Mecha-V, one with Flare and Stare, and one with Alicia. Flare and Stare use a magnet to attract Waffle towards them. A direct hit from the hammer will take away more than half of your life bar, so I jump into the magnet so that I only take a minor bit of damage. I also catch the missile that comes out of the mech's mouth and attempt to jump so that I avoid getting knocked back from the explosion itself. After that, the rest of the fight just involves chasing the mech from its behind.

• Alicia's mecha uses a megaphone instead of a magnet, so we're greeted to such wonderful tsundere-like cries from her ("WAFFURU NO BAKA!"). Just stay clear of the soundwaves and you'll be fine. Apart from the megaphone, this fight is basically the same as Flare and Stare's.

Iron Giant's Resurrection

• Flare's dialogue when she's brought back to Waffle's house is shorter than Stare's by two boxes, so I go to Resaca and enter the clock tower in the middle of the plaza to find her first. Stare is literally just standing in the Grimto forest entrance.

• After skipping an FMV where Fool resurrects the Iron Giant with the five crystals (one of them being Alicia's pendant), we find ourselves in the Prairia Castle. All that needs to be done here is speak to all of the NPCs once, which then leads into another FMV where Waffle goes inside the Iron Giant (no, not that one, the JP release of this game predates the Warner Bros. movie by one year).

Inside the Iron Giant

• With literal frame-perfect timing and a couple of flaps, it's just barely possible to jump over one moving platform and grab onto the edge of the one that comes after it. When you combine that with some weird platforming on the red platforms that don't move until you land on them, this saves 12 seconds over the RTA-safe route of waiting for the first blue platform to come back.

• Another reason why the Japanese version is slightly more optimal: In the US version, you're given an opportunity to save right before the final battle with the Iron Giant's Guardian. In the Japanese version, you're just launched straight into the fight.

• The strategy for the Guardian fight features a lot of risky play here. Chasing after it as I constantly fire energy blasts and flail the Police Robo's arms at it, catching one of the bombs it spawns and throwing it back for huge damage (I can't hit it too much there otherwise I won't get that chance), basically just a bunch of fast but unsafe stuff.

• You'll want to be standing as close to Alicia as possible when you defeat the Guardian, as Waffle will run up to her after the Guardian sinks back into the ground.

• When the five crystals spawn and the Guardian comes back to life, you can immediately end the fight AND the run right then and there by grabbing the blue crystal. GG WP

Suggested Screenshot

Special Thanks To...

• The RTA runners for discovering and coming up with a lot of the strats used in this run throughout the years

• My Twitter followers for showing strong interest in my work with this game

• CyberConnect2 for making such an awesome first game (as well as being a GOATed company for making the LTB series their passion project, even if it doesn't make them as much money compared to their licensed games such as Naruto and DBZ: Karakot)