| Level | Comments |
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| | World 1 |
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| 1-1 | Right off the bat, we manipulate RNG for the first boss in this stage. Delaying the first roll here affects the RNG, and ~5 frames were sacrificed to manipulate the egg. I could not find any other viable method to manipulate RNG, so this was all we could do. What you will immediately notice, is that you can continuously roll without any loss of speed. This means that rolling patterns compared to the SNES version will be completely different in almost all the stages. When you jump, as well, you want to avoid holding the B button, because as soon as you hold the B button in the air, your speed snaps to 656, while if you delay holding the B button, your speed will gradually decrease to 400. You will want to hold the B button as soon as the speed reaches 676 or 656 (it won't make a difference). At the end of the stage, you want to hit the goal as far left as possible. Doing this gives you more speed when going back to the right because the game has to push you harder to bring you to the intended spot, which sometimes saves a frame. Sometimes it won't save any time. |
| 1-2 | The ending abuses a duck while falling and then unducking in the middle of the air, which let's you hit the goal without triggering the long boombox event. Presumably this is because when you unduck your height might be "reset"(needs better wording) and the game will only consider how high you were starting from the moment you unduck, and since you unduck right before hitting the goal, it won't hit the event. |
| 1-3 | Simple jumping and getting into the warp barrel. Nothing interesting. |
| 1-4 | Immediately rolling lets you roll straight to the barrel without losing much height or speed. This is faster by a couple frames than waiting until you are on the ground to roll, however jumping into the Warp Barrel becomes a 2 frame jump, making the trick unrecommended for RTA speedruns. |
| 1-5 | By dropping off the rope on the last frame possible, you can immediately hit the goal. It is frame perfect. |
| 1-B | This boss was hard to TAS. For the first egg, you want to wait with hitting the egg and instead face left when you hit the egg, while avoiding getting hit by Krow. This first hit is very hard and saves around 30 frames over the first WIP of this boss. For the second egg, you want to get on top of the nest. This is possible by repeatedly getting knocked back by Krow while he is still rising, ultimately bringing you to his nest. Depending on where you are, he will drop the egg far sooner than if you were on the ground. Facing to the right to bring you closer to Krow again, and down goes the second hit. The third and fourth eggs are pure RNG. In this phase, Krow will send off either fake eggs or a real egg. (Note: on the GBA version, you can only get up to 3 fake eggs per hit.) The third egg was manipulated by delaying the first roll in the first level. The fourth egg is luckily very easily manipulatable by delaying hitting Krow. After the final blow, we manipulate the camera and position in such a way that Cranky walks the minimum required distance. |
| | World 2 |
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| 2-1 | Simple stage. Throwing late is better than early. |
| 2-2 | It was originally thought that it was not possible to skip the TNT Barrel, however with very precise positioning and timing, it is possible to land next to the Kruncha and roll off of it. This is not RTA viable. |
| 2-3 | This uses a difficult route which avoids teaming up, saving around 20 frames. [This is a risky route for RTA with ~10 seconds penalty if you mess it up.] This level also shows the introduction of ledge boosts. We don't exactly know why it works, but if you jump on the first frame your true Y Speed drops to 0 (your Y Speed is a constant 356(?), probably to keep the kong snapped to the grond), your speed goes from the usual 896 rolling speed to a 1280 speed. This saves several frames and is used whenever you have to jump after a ledge. It is often better to jump earlier but have this speed than to jump later to jump during a roll. Your X speed immediately gradually starts dropping to 400, so we hold the B button as soon as the X speed reaches 660. Ledge boosts seem to only work with max rolling speed as either Dixie or Diddy. |
| 2-4 | It is faster to grab the barrel and kill the Kruncha. At the end, the same duck-and-unduck trick is used from 1-2. The big difference here, however, is that it is normally impossible to fall off a balloon. With very precise positioning, however, it is possible to jump, land and immediately fall again, letting you duck while falling and thus pull the trick off anyway, saving about 20 frames from the traditional method. Not RTA viable. |
| 2-5 | Nothing special. |
| 2-B | RNG can determine where each cannonball lands, it’s usually better to have it spawn as close to Kleever as possible so throwing time doesn’t take as long. Of course if you can run to the boss while holding a cannon ball, that’s faster than throwing it. A difference between the snes version is once the 2nd phase starts, the hooks will spawn right away, rather than only spawning as soon as Kleever lunches at you. However we still make him lunge because he needs to do it at least 2 times for the first cannon ball can spawn, and each time after that a cannonball will spawn with each lunge. Since Cranky can only come from one side, we can easily roll to him after collecting the KremKoin, shortening the walking time for Cranky. |
| | World 3 |
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| 3-1 | We don't use Rambi in this stage because he’s slower in this version and his charge takes longer to set up. Also, not holding any directional button after a barrel fires you allows you to preserve the speed gained from that barrel blast. |
| 3-2 | We had to redo this stage whenever we'd find improvements prior to here. Because saving time always changed rng and it affected to lag pattern. In fact, 3-2 is one of laggy stage and We had to try many swimming patterns. |
| 3-3 | Precise movement, fun stage. |
| 3-4 | This stage is very straightforward. Just hop your way to the end without every slowing down! [Not sure if more needs to be added] |
| 3-5 | A lot of climbing in this stage. Notable is that we slow down right after the second bee. It is faster to slow down then roll into the mosquito than to just immediately roll off the ledge and not hit the mosquito. |
| 3-6 | This stage is, for the most part, simple to TAS. Pressing the A button on the first frame possible in the barrels makes it a fast level. |
| 3-B | Believe it or not, this boss actually has a level of RNG to him. every time we improved a previous stage, this boss would always cause desyncs because the location that he would fall would always be off by a few pixels or more, meaning it would have to be redone each time. Other than that, there's not much to explain, we simply hit him with the TNT barrel as soon as we can. |
| | World 4 |
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| 4-1 | First appearance of wall climbing stage, vertical speed with honey wall is much faster than rope climbing actually. I originally thought several seconds waiting for zinger after rolling into two spinies (16:18 in video). But delaying rolling brought cutting the waiting completely. |
| 4-2 | This level is fairly straightforward, the only challenge is getting in the carts as quick as possible. |
| 4-3 | This stage sees a lot of Squawks. As soon as we get on him, we go as far to the right as possible to then go left, this to have more speed when we get up. Tightly cutting corners allows us to save frames. It is faster to take the Squitter route over going the usual route by ~15 frames. The rest is simple maneuvering and cutting some more corners. |
| 4-4 | Like SNES version, getting boost barrel is faster. Coaster is halted for a frame each time it lands on rail so each jumpings cost time (same as in 5-2). But coaster speed decays when it reaches any type of slopes, jumping them to maintain speed is very important. |
| 4-5 | This level probably has a faster route than what we did. There are a lot of things you could consider doing with the birds before the midway barrel. A notable thing we found during this stage is that you can roll on top of a barrel or chest if you press B right before landing for one single frame, so they don't slow us down luckily. No lag reduction was needed despite the amount of birds on screen. Everything else is fairly straightforward. |
| 4-6 | More fast honeyclimbing. It is faster to charge with Rambi than to not charge, even though his charging is so slow. |
| 4-B | The main challenge here is to hit him as soon as possible while trying to keep it entertaining. Once the first phase is over, King Zing will spawn 4 yellow bees around him. However, if we kill the first bee before he spawns the second bee, the game will think all 4 bees was killed, thus skipping the second phase. The main challenge during the fourth phase is to make sure King Zing is out of bounds when you hit him a final time. If he is out of bounds, he will instantly despawn and thus we can collect the Kremkoin sooner. |
| | World 5 (Entirely done by illayaya with input by others) |
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| 5-1 | Rolling, a lot of tight optimizations. At 24:35 in the Temp Encode, the game put our true Y Speed at 0 while going down, so we were able to get a ledge boost even though there was no ledge here. |
| 5-2 | Unlike 4-4, you can't boost speed by inputs. Instead, we used slopes to gain speed. For uphill slope, it only decreases speed so we did multiple jumps not to lose speed as much as possible. For downhill slope, it also decreases speed if running on rail. But landing on near end of the slope can give speed if previous speed isn't maxed. (max speed is 848 here as far as we know) |
| 5-3 | Jumping + tailwind is faster than rolling on ground. So Longer jumping becomes faster in some places. The wind doesn't affect at all if Kongs are on ground. In other words, rolling can benefit from wind in midair. |
| 5-4 | This is the laggiest level of the game. We tried doing play-around, however we saved over an entire second from simply not doing play-around, thanks to lag. The general goal is to fall to the stage without getting hit. |
| 5-5 | This stage is simple. Once you reach Squitter, nothing can really be done to speed up the level. Just hold B and Right the entire time. A notable strat at the end is we use the a Web platform to drop to the goal, saving a couple frames. |
| 5-B | With a bit of manipulation in previous stages, we can get the barrels to spawn directly under Krow, which makes each hit happen immediately. There's a glitch where the hitbox of a Necky will be active but show no sprite, and the hitbox for whatever reason will appear in the middle of the stage, so we can bounce on that to make the barrel spawn faster. also for whatever reason if you move to the cannon barrel fast enough, you will actually hit Crow since his sprite hasn't reached the next level yet. |
| | World 6 |
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| 6-1 | Enguarde's both horizontal/vertical speed are fixed during piercing attack. delaying attack was needed to move up/down faster not to hit walls. Bonking walls set his speed to 0. You can see he sped up on ice. You can regain his super dash speed without dpad input after touching water surface. |
| 6-2 | Auto-scroller with almost no lag. It is faster by about 300 frames NOT to take Rambi's bonus, and faster by about 270 frames to take Squawks' bonus. Playaround done by EZGames69. |
| 6-3 | This level uses a trick that we call "Clapper Zip". This is the only glitch used in the run, and it is a GBA exclusive glitch. What we first do is we use a trick often used in DKC3 GBA: timestop. The way this is done is as soon as we reach a ledge and are about to fall, we want to team up. We team up and then we land into the water. Landing into the water interrupts the team up animation, and because time is frozen while teaming up and we never let the game finish the animation, time stays frozen. We have to do an animation that freezes and unfreezes time in order to unfreeze time, so we have to switch Kongs to do that as we can not team up. We hit the clapper, which freezes the water and snaps us to the surface. Water rises because we got into the barrel, and we then get snapped even further above to the midway barrel! We have to move carefully here, however, as it is possible to get warped back underwater. Doing this trick saves 50 frames compared to doing it normally. The rest is some more movement optimization. |
| 6-4 | The best way to enter a flying zone is to jump as low as possible without dropping. This reduces the amount of downward speed you have, thus allowing you to enter upward speed much quicker. A couple of team ups to skip flights or a part of the level, jumping on enemies to leave the flight sooner... And at the end, we stay to the right to keep the camera unlocked: this allows us to get on the ground near the goal post sooner. |
| 6-5 | This stage has a lot of climbing, obviously. Sometimes, if you climb the quickest way possible, you will get stuck at the end of the rope where the vertical rope meets a horizontal rope. So we must climb in such a way that we slightly lose height to optimally jump off a vertical rope and onto a horizontal rope without getting stuck. |
| 6-6 | This stage is fairly straightforward. With Rattly, it is possible to instantly charge up a Super Jump. If you press the R button to start charging, release it then immediately press the A button, you will jump as if you charged it normally. Squawks is fairly straight forward, so is Squitter. |
| 6-B | This boss is GBA exclusive, it replaces the scene where Diddy finds Donkey Kong but is taken away by K Rool to reveal more stages that need to be done. The first phase involves you hitting two Kleever swords, it doesn't seem to matter which one you hit first as they seem to take the same amount of time, so I chose to do the more entertaining way of killing them. Casually, this boss was hard because sometimes he'll breath fire right where a cannon ball lands, and you get hit right away. Luckily in a tas, if we hit the boss quick enough, we wont get hit by his fire breathing. The last hit in question we have to wait for the fire on the ground to go away before we can hit the boss again, as if we hit him too early, we would take damage on the ground |
| | World 7 |
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| 7-1 | Relatively straightforward level. |
| 7-B | K. Rool has some pretty long phases, they’re slightly longer on GBA for whatever reason. The only major instance of RNG comes from the 3rd hit of the 1st Phase, were it’s best to have the right most cannon ball retract its spikes, getting this manipulated was done by purposely losing 2 frames in 7-1. One major time save that was found was during the last hit of the 3rd phase, to purposely get hit by K Rool, getting hit is about 65 frames faster than his regular suction animation, meaning it’s faster to finish the game using Dixie after we haven't used her that much throughout the run. |
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