Only necessary items to complete the game as fast as possible
Takes damage to save time
I'm pretty sure this is the fastest route through Mega Man X 3.
It defeats the 8 bosses in weapon weakness order, starting from
Blizzard Buffalo, gets the Air Dash to save time overall, leaves
Bit alive so the Bit/Byte hybrid is fought instead of the waste
dispenser, and kills Vile for the Beam Sabre.
I'm pretty sure for every battle after the Beam Sabre,
the explosion animations take longer than the actual fighting ;)
Overall this run is pretty well optimized. Bosses are hit as soon
as their vulnerable again, nearly all of the minibosses die in less
than a second (I'm especially proud of the Neon Tiger miniboss),
and X is constantly moving as fast as possible of course.
It was really fun to make, hopefully it's fun to watch, too!
Bisqwit: Moving as fast as possible... maybe.
Progressing as fast as possible? Possible that not.
I think it moves sometimes too much.
I'm not going to reject this submission, but I'll give
it some time and wait to see if someone beats it :)
Wow, I really like what you have so far, the run looks a lot more fluid, precise, and less jerky than it used to be.
Thanks :)
However, there are some things I still noticed.
-I don't really care about this, but you should probably hide the shots you use to charge up your buster by charging it while going through a door, or make sure the shot you use to charge hits an enemy.
Hm, maybe. Some of them I can't really do anything about, like at Blizzard Buffalo where a shot is going to have to miss or hit him while he's flashing anyway, but I'll keep that in mind.
-In the very beginning, would it be faster to kill the first enemy and then climb up the wall using dash jumps?
I think I timed it so that I hit the ledge as soon as possible, so I could dash as soon as possible... but yeah, it might save 1-2 frames to do that.
-I really liked that hit you took with Zero, is there any way you can do it more?
I took a hit similar to it in the last run in Volt Catfish's stage, so I might end up doing that again. In general, I think it's just that if you get hit during the couple frames you're attached to a wall, you don't really go into a hitstun or anything. So I'll see if there's any other opportunities to use that. Hopefully I'll be able to exploit this while climbing "the wall" in Doppler Stage 2.
-After you freed X from Mac your positioning was a little off and the game automatically forced you to walk a bit to the right before the cutscene was triggered. Also, wouldn't two shots take an extra frame to kill the robot holding X? Maybe you should use a charged shot.
Ah, good points.
-In the beginning of Blizzard Buffalo's stage is there a way to kill the enemies and jump higher off the first slope, so that you land right on the second slope?
Yeah, probably. Again, another good find.
-In toxic Seahorse's stage the first time you go up with the vertical air dash, why doesn't the little flying robot notice you? Is it because you are too low? (this isn't a criticism, more of a speedrunning question)
Yeah, I think I was just too low. I didn't do any special manipulation to make him avoid me.
-Is it slightly faster to climb up walls using non-dash jumps? Also, those stutter jumps are used to gain height, right? (again, not a criticism a speedrunning question)
From what I can tell, climbing walls with dash and non-dash jumps are equally fast. I think I prefer non-dash jumps when just climbing because dash wall jumps look pretty jerky, but that's just personal preference. And yeah, the stutter jumps are for gaining height.
-It looked like you chose good places to air dash in Toxic Searhorse's stage, nice work.
Thanks!
-When you fall down from the ladder just before Toxic Searhorse would it be faster to air dash or dash jump off the left wall before hitting the ground?
I tried air dashing and ended up getting to the exit door later than just falling, then dashing. I probably screwed up on that somehow, though, since yeah, it would make sense for a partial airdash-then-fall to be faster.
-All I have to say against Toxic Seahorse is wow, I'm guessing he goes into hit stun after a while, which means you can't kill him in one barrage of frost shields. BTW, is this doable (at a slower rate obviously) at full speed with no rerecords?
I really don't know what's up with Toxic Seahorse, honestly. It might seem like I'm just spamming autofire on him, but IIRC I'm actually waiting 3 then 5 frames between pressing the fire button. I actually ended up having to make of the chart of the frames that he'd take damage. And even then there were patterns to when he would take damage, i.e. if you shot him at frames xx417 then xx419, he wouldn't be vulnerable until xx428, but if you shot him ant xx417 then xx420 he'd be vulnerable at xx425 and xx427.
But yeah, at full speed just spamming auto-fire into him will work wonders.
-I liked what you did against the drill boss, even if it is slower it looks a lot better than your last run IMO.
Thanks again.
-About manipulating Tunnel Rhino, it seems like he doesn't use the invincible dash when he shoots a lot of drills, try to make him shoot drills before you hit him with the shot that will trigger the invincible dash (hopefully you know he will charge with an invincible dash when his life gets low enough).
Thanks for the tip, I'll have to experiment with him more.
Stuff for the future:
-You did a decent job of manipulating Volt Catfish in your last run, but it seems like the best possible final pattern to get out of him before he goes invincible would be: jump, jump with bouncing, then the triple spark attack. You got jump then triple spark in your last run.
I'll keep that in mind, thanks.
-You should try out and see if you can take damage and climb up the wall with zero waiting in Doppler stage 2.
Of course! If I hadn't seen you taking damage to skip most of the spikes in your SDA run, I don't think I'd even be remaking this time attack ;)
-I never thought of this until now, but the explosion animation when you kill Byte takes really long, would it be shorter to hit him with buster shots? You would still get Godkarmachine (Bit, Byte fusion) if you did this.
Yeah, this is something someone mentioned on the first page of this thread, I think, and yes, it'll probably be faster.
You should also try out if that new method of killing Toxic Seahorse is faster than Beam Sabering him, if nothing else, it looks faster.
Yeah, haha, pretty strange, but it might be true. I'll have to test it out.
Don't be discouraged, I really like the improvements you made to this run. Slightly over a minute faster only this far is impressive and it looks like a sub-40 minute time is possible. You might not want to optimize this fully and make this a test version so you don't stress yourself out too much, then make a final version with everything optimized.
Thanks, though keep in mind that in the first run Bit was in Tunnel Rhino's stage, so it's more like ~30 seconds of improvement so far. Sub-40 is definitely possible though, especially considering that Doppler Stage 2 will be improved by at least 40 seconds, most likely.
As for optimization, well, I'd consider the run already published to be the test run for this :P I don't think I'll be redoing anything before the Tunnel Rhino battle. I really do appreciate your input, but scrapping what I have so far for minor improvements would be a pretty quick way to demotivate me and NEVER get the run done :P Just make sure whoever does version 3 looks at this thread before they make it!
EDIT: I tried out the Toxic Seahorse glitch at 100% speed, it works and I can take off roughly half his life doing it. Nice find Prower :D. I really want to see more from your new run because I want to see what else I can improve over my existing run.
Cool, I look forward to seeing it in more of your unassisted X3 runs :)
I hope you didn't quit on this Prower, I want to see more! Or at the very least give me a status update, because this is a time attack I am really anticipating.
About the minor mistakes, it's cool that you don't want to improve them, because the overall quality of the WIP looks very high in general. About my Zero question, I was actually asking whether you could get hit by another spiked ball as Zero, not other areas where you could perform that trick (though that is useful too).