Mega Man 2 is not a game that can be beaten Buster Only -- it's not "true blue," as they say in the scene. Much digital ink has been spilled over which weapons can be used, where, and how many. This run avoids all these questions and plays the game true blue to the fullest extent.
Game objectives
- Beat as much of the game as possible with only the default weapon
- This is not a start button challenge; pause glitches are allowed
- This is also not a true Low%; energy drops and E-tanks would be allowed if they were somehow useful
Table of contents
Stage by Stage Notes
Wood
It's just barely possible to kill this guy without jumping.
The bats wake up based on RNG. If the middle bat happens to wake up, it can actually get you if you're doing frame perfect movement. You would have to jump slightly earlier and higher than necessary in order to lure it ever so slightly up and dodge it. Luckily, that didn't come up in this movie.
Your X subpixel determines RNG. This ladder is a great spot to manipulate that because you always snap to the same coordinate but keep your subpixels when grabbing it. What am I manipulating RNG for here? The length of the fire snake. Things get real laggy real fast if you don't get the short one. There's also the issue of loot drops from the doggy, but that's a problem for future Cabin (1.5 seconds in the future).
Jumping against these guys actually makes it harder to shoot them. I do it for the sole purpose of slowing down without letting go of right. You can see I needed some quantum shots against all but the first monkey and bird.
These guys spawn based on your height and jump based on when they hit the ground. I wouldn't be able to jump over them if I didn't manipulate them with a few well-timed 1-frame jumps.
While it may look like I'm carefully timing shots between the leaves of Woodman's shield, the shield is in fact a solid square hitbox. It's just a matter of hitbox overlap priority (Woodman himself is not invincible). There's a ~4 pixel window where this works 100% of the time, and a ~2 pixel window where it works 50% of the time because the lemon exists for 1 frame overlapping the shield but not the boss (quantum shots be like). In fact, Crash bombs can even penetrate from a distance.
Heat
Escaping this zip involves a frame perfect jump, so you don't see it in realtime runs.
iirc, I couldn't actually steal this section from Any% this time because there's no Item 3 trick.
Double death, woo! Remember, these actually save time because you want to end the fight as high up as possible.
Air
I was able to copy much of the cloudy guy section from the old route for zipless. Tbh, I haven't revisited this section in years, so I may be able to shave off a few frames here and there.
This section is a bit sloppy, especially after all my musical flexing. This is to sync up subpixels and make a delay scroll work; I couldn't get it working any sooner. This is the only delay scroll I've ever seen Buster Only.
Framerules/lag lined up for the aggressive despawn.
I don't recall the exact circumstances, but Shinryruu helped me save one or two frames around the delay scroll, but I didn't feel like redoing the rest of the run, so I wasted some time in the menu and ended up losing lag frames overall. Call it a time/time tradeoff, I guess.
Bubble
It's been 20 years, but this zip actually used to be in Any%. Can you believe that? It took me five pauses, same as them. But if you look closely, you can see I am 2 pixels further to the left than them. In fact, this is 1 pixel too far left for the zip to work normally without a bizarre frame perfect tiptoe. And it is frame perfect; you can't buffer it during the screen scroll or it doesn't work. I guess the input code is differentiating between a full and a half right press. This is the only time I've ever run into this in this game.
I initiate the zip without jumping, which wastes a frame. This is on purpose; I need that for RNG manip on the shrimp. While there is some opportunity to manip subpixels in the spike gap before spawning the shrimp, I got unlucky and needed to wait a frame. I'm OK with that because it's funnier when you can see Mega Man's legs sticking down from the top of the screen.
Frog babies are laggy, and killing them only leads to more frog babies. As such, I keep a little friend around to prevent the second mama frog from barfing out any more. Now that I think about it, that frog prooooobably doesn't want to be my friend considering what I did to its family...
This is one of two dance type fights, where I can't stay in firing range constantly and end up doing a fun little waltz with the boss. I'm sure it's possible to save some time here, but I'll save that for a future submission. I actually lose time on the final shot to set up the double death, but it's worth it overall. This double death is huge.
Quick
Identical to Zipless. I've since found improvements to this fight (quantum manipulation) which you can look forward to in the new Zipless submission, whenever that may be.
Metal
Mostly identical to Zipless, except I can't switch to Q for the springers. I've since discovered a glitch called walkies through blockies that would save maybe 10 frames in this run (not the full 23 because P has a longer range than Q), but I don't feel like resyncing everything.
Here I make a point of doing what no sane player would ever do and get right up in Metal Man's face, as close as I can without provoking the personal space jump.
Flash
Identical to Any%.
Note that walkies through blockies does not work here because you need to scroll the blocky off the edge of the screen.
Crash
I actually discovered this zip at AGDQ 2020. Feels like a lifetime ago. It's actually way slower than Zipless strats, but saves a hefty 30 seconds over waiting on the stupid moving platforms. This trick is now commonly used in realtime runs.
Pressing up+down lets me snap to the ladders, saving 8 pixels each each time at the cost of some air fames.
See how I grab the ladder here? Veteran Mega Man 2 runners will know that grabbing a ladder changes your direction, so I should secretly be facing left now. Yet, on the next screen, I am clearly facing right to spawn the bird on the right side. How did I do that? Well, if you hold B when grabbing a ladder, you don't get that weird direction flip. It came in handy here, saving a frame or two over a turnaround. In realtime runs, ladder turnarounds are kind of a hard habit to break, plus you might waste Item energy in other categories, so you don't really see this from human players.
This cheeky pausefall isn't actually faster than just taking a hit, except that it lets me absorb the health refill on the next screen for free.
Is this really the first ladder zip of the run? Damn. It's the same up+down tech as the cheeky ladder snap during the zip, plus the same frame-perfect jump as mentioned in Heat Man. This can also be achieved with a simultaneous B+down press (the down press must be exactly 1 frame; the B press can be longer), but that loses a frame, and would be illegal if you didn't have Buster out. But why wouldn't I?
The other dance type fight. Crash Man jumps when you press B (whether a projectile comes out or not), so the name of the game is shooting him just before he lands and manipping him to jump exactly when you want him to. I open the fight with a special frame-perfect shot that he doesn't react to. RTA runners typically appraise their fights based on how many shots they get between bombs. 4 is considered ideal; I consistently get 5.
Wily 1
This is the end of the road, unfortunately. It's just not possible to proceed any further without the Items, and so this Buster Only run is complete.
Or is it?
You can delay scroll into this stage from the end of the Heat fight (whether this can be done Buster Only remains to be seen). If you do, the collision is super glitchy, and you can sort of wall jump on this building. With this tech, you can make it quite a bit further. But even if you could make it all the way to the dragon and survive its giant fart, it would just count as defeating Heat Man. Plus, I don't know of a way to load the real Wily 1 in this state, but I do know this cool softlock. So... yeah.
Potential Improvements
- 2 frames saved at the beginning of Wood, but it doesn't save a framerule
- Clean up the time/time tradeoff in Air
- Shrimp RNG
- Replay the dance fights (Bubble & Crash)
- Quick fight improvements from zipless
- Walkies through Blockies (Metal & Crash)
Darkman425: The purest essence of jump and shoot for me, thanks.