Joined: 4/24/2012
Posts: 129
Location: Atlanta, GA
Well, on Normal difficulty, the Stage 3 alien area has many enemies survive with a sliver of health after getting sworded once; maybe they have 40 HP?
I think the important thing is to land while moving away (either by drifting backward halfway or going really deep toward an enemy) so that you can forward-forward at a slight distance.
I think it is unique per enemy and not exclusive to color/difficulty...I'll just make notes sometime in the next few days, I imagine.
Blaze is generally quite slow. Max has his slide, Thunder Tackle, jumping throw and raw damage output. Skate has a ton of mobility in general, his Dash Attack headbutt, and generally strong damage on mooks. Also, I pretty much exclusively use Skate when I play casually, so I'm very familiar with the character.
Blaze and Axel are fun to play, but don't offer that many advantages in terms of speedrunning. They have no way to move around quickly and do moderate damage. I'd still watch if someone made a speed run with them, though...
Yeah, they have 40 HP. Actually, all enemies have starting health which is divisible by 8.
Maybe it's possible to get this combo working regularly, but I'm skeptic. Feel free to prove me wrong. :)
Joined: 4/24/2012
Posts: 129
Location: Atlanta, GA
Getting both hits of Skate's Back Attack deals 40 HP, as well. Might be a nice alternative in RTA if jump-in -> Dash Attack proves too troublesome to do reliably.
Max and Skate are the most entertaining characters to watch IMO.
I'm not really into speed running higher difficulty settings due to more enemies showing up, they have more health, move faster and they have higher A.I. levels. Some enemies have moves that they only do on higher difficulty settings.
For someone who likes to hack SOR2&3, you can always look up the enemy info via Hex Editor.
Joined: 9/2/2008
Posts: 289
Location: United Kingdom
Nearly a week ago. I've produced a "WIP quality" run of the 3DS exclusive Fist of Death mode.
It relied on savestates and 25% speed (figuring out ideas on fast enemy kill routes than fully optimising it).
The game has its own in-game replay save so it doesn't use the traditional citra movie file as I had a rough experience in the past back in 2020 where it could randomly get corrupted (although recent builds does not have this problem anymore).
Link to video