https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S20NJKzNOM8
Beating the previous Richter All Bosses (previously called All Enemies) by a whopping 6 minutes and 38 seconds (or so the author claims, the full run is cut off in his encodes) due to far superior route planning, boss strategies, and movement optimization, I present a full TAS of Richter All Bosses after a long hiatus.
This turned out alright, but not great. I can't say I'm proud of it at all, but I seriously lack the drive at this point to go back and change much of anything about it. It was started back when psxjin was still the only option, and serious emulator issues bogged down a run I already didn't really like making due to having few ways to manipulate RNG which is still important in several segments, Richter's movement being awkward and just not fun to work with in my opinion, and too few differences from RTA to really make the final product feel special in my eyes. The result is that I didn't implement the tons of review and revision that I had done with other works and I think it shows with minor frame losses and a feeling of less creativity in the run. I hope that others enjoy this work more than I do.
There are several spots where movement is blatantly unoptimal due to severe issues with psxjin that prohibit me from making the inputs I want at specific times and there's even fewer things that can be done about it than in Alucard mode and since this was never meant to be a submitted run anyways I lacked the patience to eliminate it like I did with my other runs. I hope psxhawk eliminates this problem for any others interested in this game or should I ever return, and if it fixes psxjin's serious problems replicating the game's actual lag, that would be even better.
But anyways, to explain some stuff about the run:
Richter's movement is stiff; sliding is his fastest form of transportation, but you are very limited in where you can use it and ways to exit the slide animation are oftentimes awkward. He can do a vault kick out of slide which retains its momentum for a while and can be canceled into air slash by hitting something or by hitting a slope. Air slash, his 8236 > whip special in the air, is more versatile, but travels a fixed difference slightly slower, and causes him to go into a long recovery if it ends on the ground. Richter has no hurtbox during this, and doing it in the air gives Richter several frames to jump as if he were on the ground.His last resort for horizontal movement is running, which is the slowest of the three and mostly only used on difficult terrain or to make minor adjustments for air slashes.
He can go upwards by using the uppercut special 28 > jump, which carries him upwards a set distance fairly quickly but is limited by a cap on the screen's vertical scrolling rate. Thus, delaying chained uppercuts grants more height. Hitting ceilings causes Richter to stall for a fraction of a second, so missing the ceiling or just using his normal jump is almost always better if available. Richter can avoid hard fall recovery by jumping after landing, timing a whip to end right as he lands, or by doing a special move as he lands. Certain actions (vault kick being the main offender) disable Richter's options in the air until he either jumps or finishes a hard fall recovery, which means he cannot influence his horizontal position while falling and always goes into fall recovery upon landing, careful jumps are used to avoid this.
The route is basically the same as the current RTA route. I had done some testing of my own to create a new second castle method during my first go at this, but the RTA guys eventually found the same route that I did independently of me, oh well. Due to late changes to a couple boss strategies as well as a number of lucky heart drops from enemies that could not optimally be accounted for while routing, I ended up with a really strange looking number of hearts at the end. Revenge for getting exactly as many as I needed in Richter any% I suppose.
I use knife crash as an all purpose weapon when neither holy water nor axe provide an advantage for a specific fight. Holy water can be combined with a glitch called damage stacking to do tons of burst damage, but is very slow to startup and is mostly only used when I have time to kill anyways. Axe is generally weak but it is the strongest of the three against enemies you can hit with the very center of the axe spin. Besides that, I usually use the air slash or the quick combo of vault kick > air slash to tack on fast additional damage. The whip cannot crit and is weak and slow, air slashes, vault kicks, and uppercuts can crit though air slash is the most common due to having the highest potential damage (can do upwards of 360 damage with one hit on crit). Each knife of knife crash can crit, holy water cannot, axe can though this is never relevant. Crits are random and also give a randomized damage bonus that can vary wildly. All I have to manipulate luck is the whip which is very slow and map buffer to wait on a better RN, so luck manipulation is ugly.
A good comparison is the RTA WR of 23:54 (Xbox loads + RTA timing lower the time a lot) found here:
http://www.twitch.tv/pksl_/c/6597951
Though if you really want to see the old TAS, it is found in two separate videos for some reason here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbVZvSebelQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGqSSZHvIyo
