Submission #9252: Geferulf's GC Batman: Dark Tomorrow in 32:36.72

Versions

Gameplay notes

Level by level notes

• Gotham City Rooftops
  • We start off in an alleyway. We just need to KO and ziptie the 3 thugs ASAP and it's on to the next screen.
  • We immediatly start swinging across the rooftops with our batclaw, positioning ourselves with our jumps so that we avoid having to climb the wall at the end of the screen and save a bit of time.
  • We position ourselves on the roof so that we can swing straight across and brush against the wall, falling down on glass roof we run to the next screen.
  • More rooftop swinging, we position ourselves to land on the water tower, then the catwalk, then onto the last set of roofs.

• Gotham City Alleyway
  • Ignoring the bad guys, we hop over their heads with a double jump and then a single jump to get over the last guy who was just knocked down.
  • Watch out for the rocket!
  • We take a few shots from a guy in a gorilla gimp mask (who gets frozen in time) and then head out the door.
  • These next few screens are simply running from one end to another. We position ourselves to avoid the thugs coming down the road and continue running from one screen to the next.

• Gazette Square
  • More chasing down Black Mask from one screen to another. Nothing much of note other than we run past a guy who kills himself by running over a flaming gasline, then skip rescuing a hostage.
  • We perform a method too difficult for RTA by jumping on top of the shelves and over the counter, booting a thug in the face so he moves away from the doorway.

• Warehouse district
  • We skip a huge portion of the level and cheese about 10 minutes of gametime by running to the back of a building and batclaw swinging our way up a wall, letting us hop over a fence and continue on past some thugs to the next screen.
  • We have to tie up 4 thugs before Black Mask spawns in. Once he's in, we position ourselves to backflip through his shots to avoid hitstun, then start doing combo loops. Black Mask won't let us sneak in extra damage from stray hits, as he just absorbs them, so we need to just mash through combos as fast as possible. At 6:22, we move aside a bit for a canned animation, then perform the final combo and move to the next stage.

• Gotham Docks
  • We skip much of the stage by just jumping over some boxes, then hop through a railing to skip another section and move to the next screen,
  • We hop over more boxes while tanking damage and move to the next screen
  • We take a hit while falling with our medkit out so we regain health, then climb up a ladder and double jump over the crane geometry to skip the ending section of the stage

• GPD Rooftop
  • We hop down some walls, then beat up some thugs. The RTA strategy and intended route is to knock them all down and zip them up, but we are fast enough that we can just hit them and run to the locked door for the next screen.
  • We skip an entire action segment and simply hop into a vent before the thugs can catch up with us
  • We bypass this room by immediatly moving to the door and unlocking it before the enemy AI kicks in, so they don't get alerted and we don't waste time fighting them.

• Underground Sewers
  • No shitty game is complete without a sewer level
  • We run through the sewer, hopping over some electrified water (we criss cross, since jumping forward will come up just slightly short and result in us getting shocked and wasting time)
  • We dodge some badguys and hop through a breakable wall
  • Running past more enemies, we hop into the only underwater segment for a few seconds, then proceed forward.
  • We suffer through sub 20fps frame rates to pull 2 levers, then double jump and climb a ledge across the water to save a few seconds from climbing a ladder.
  • We move through a few screens and get to a short batclaw swing.
  • We bypass the rat gauntlets, just barely making it to the doors quick enough to open them up before Batman's combat state activates.
  • We clear out the Giant Rats as quickly as possible. When we can, we get damage in with batarangs across the stage, as well as perform some stray non combo hits when it's possible. The Giant Rats have 3x the HP on GC than Xbox, making this fight last much longer than that version.
  • Latin. Abandon hope ye who TAS this game.
  • We clear out thugs stuck in our path, we have no choice but to wait for their animation timers to finish before we can run past their bodies on the ground.

• Arkham Asyum
  • More bad guys we have no choice but to wait to get around because the hallways are too tight. We hit a switch and move past some loading screens to make our way to Killer Croc.
  • Killer Croc acts a bit differently from other boss fights, in that he will just stop taking damage after 2-3 hits. We mix in stray hits when we can with our combos to finish him ASAP. The RTA method to fighting Croc is to get in a corner or on the gate on the right of the arena, then crouch to break Croc's AI and spam non-combo punches until Croc falls over. Our TAS method is much faster.
  • We grab Croc's key and run to unlock the door, then head back the way we came to deal with more crazy inmates. We get around as many as we can without hitting them and wait for the ones we have to, then make our way through the locked doors and upstairs.
  • We free the nurses (withotu ziptying the bad guys as inteded) and move on.
  • Dodging some crazies, we continue down the halls and up some stairs to another locked door.
  • We run down the hall and stop just before the poison pods hit us, running past them ASAP.
  • The Giant Plant fight is nigh-impossible RTA without using an exploit to just through batarangs and smoke bombs at it from the doorway. However, using our TAS ability, we are able to jump in and do melee damage while avoiding the insane spam hitboxes of the vine tentacles.
  • We run back upstairs and past a bunch of crazies. We jump over the heads of those that we can, then continue running through the halls until we grab the plant killer.
  • Posion Ivy's Giant Plant fight is another fight that's basically impossible RTA without using exploits. The tentacle attack spam and poison bomb spam is incredibly annoying, but thankfully, we can position ourselves to the rear left of the boss and just wail on it with nonstop combo attacks.
  • Onwards into the freezer, we have our first encounter with ice phsyics. As explkained above, our movement is slightly different in this section, but we manage with our TAS abilities and maneuver around the freezing steam to get to Mr. Freeze's room.
  • Mr. Freeze is a stragithforward boss. We get behind him and wail away with combos. We backflip over his wakeup kick attack so we can start our combo ASAP, stunlocking him to death. EZ PZ lemon freezy.
  • We skip the investigation section and turn around out the doors.
  • We get through some crazies and run down more halls. We are skipping 45~ minutes of content and just ignoring everything since it has no effect on progression.
  • The Zsasz boss fight is a joke. What is supposed to be a high speed twitch action fight,we turn into a breakdance exhibition. We stunlock Zsasz with our crouchkick and make short work of him.
  • The Joker boss fight is next, but we just completely ignore it entirely. We are intended to fight off a pack of armed crazies on the bottom level and defend Commissioner Gordon, but since we have TAS speed, we instead leave him to his fate since we can hit the level complete trigger on the top floor before the first part of the boss fight begins.

• Ra's Al Ghul's Castle
  • This section is a pure autoscroller. We have no control on how fast we move, just needing to get to the end of the canyon without falling to our death. In RTA this is where runs go to die. Your wings do not need to touch the walls to result in failure, simply coming within a foot~ of the walls will send Batman tumbling. We also have to watch for when the snow shifts up/down, as this means we need to start gaining air with Batman or we will simply be auto-killed.
  • A short platforming section, we run to the end while taking a few falls that are unavoidable due to the ice physics and level geometry being uneven, resulting in a tiny bit of speed loss from Batman's recovery animation. Where these falls are, Batman takes a double jump to get some distance before hitting the ground.
  • We sneak past some guards then get inside, KOing 3 bad guys on our way in. We get down the hallways as fast as possible, making sure to take enough damage to put us 1 hit from death.
  • We take a slightly wide angle to avoid triggering all the guards in the area, continuing to the castle wall.
  • We get ourselves killed ASAP with one enemy bullet so we can get back our batarangs for an upcoming segment (there is no other way to get batarangs back in this game, great game design) then climb up the wall and head inside. RTA will KO the guards so Batman isn't stunned by the shotguns while climbing, but we just don't get stunned here for whatever reason.
  • We climb a ladder and run down some halls. Getting outside, we take out one guard with stealth, then use our respanwed batarangs to blow up some barrels down the way so the guards near them are KOd. We ziptie the first guard so he can't get back up, then wait for the spawning in guard to open the door. He will only open the door if these specific guards we KOd are knocked down and there is no alarm currently activated.
  • We skip another investigation segment and run by some guards an down some halls.
  • We take a right in the mouth room so we can run through a maze of lower sections on our way to the satelitte nuke controls. We disarm the space nukes (there is no hint or anything ingame that leads you to do this but it's required for the good ending) and sit through 40~ seconds of an unskippable computer screen, then head back the way we came in, taking a different hallway to avoid getting stuck on some spawned in guards.
  • We fight the Elite Guards (who are just normal enemy thug AI with buffed health) by throwing in plenty of stray hits and comboing them in sequence, one of the ground and one standing, to get max damage.
  • The boss fight with Ubu is dead simple. We get behind him and do combos. He's immune to stray hit spam, so we have to combo him through the fight. Each time he wakes up, he performs a headbutt attack with a hitbox that encompases his whole body and slightly behind him, sometimes following up with a rear donkey kick. We simply stay behind him and walk him into the walls, bashing him as soon as there is an opening, then finishing him off with a batarang from across the stage just as he is vulnerable again.
  • The final boss fight with Ra's Al Ghul... just as bad as the rest of the boss fights. Standing up and fighting with the sword is a fool's errand, and Ra's will block 99% of the attacks and counter attack you, knocking you to the ground. The RTA method is to crouch, sit still and spam punch until one of you dies. We use this partially during the fight, as our sword has superior reach and speed to punches and won't ""normally"" cause a knockdown (sometimes it just does, so we stop attacking with the sword and perform another attack). We are also able to stunlock him in an extended loop of stray kick attacks, until his health gets below a trigger that causes him to become invincible and perform a flurry of slashes. We finish him off with a combo and that's the game! Our input ends before the combo does, on hit 3, saving us a bit of extra time.