Under 17 minutes! This improves on my previous submission. As before, credit goes to Acmlm for his excellent, longstanding record.
Game objectives
- Recorded with FCEUX 2.2.3 (using new PPU)
- Fastest time to reach the ending (any%)
- Uses death as shortcut (just twice)
- (A lot of) Luck manipulation
Improvements
The main change is using wings in Rimuldar instead of deathwarping. This was an easy change to add, with only a few positive ripple effects. Although I buy two extra keys, I actually need less gold. The two keys cost 106 gold. As before, we need 120 gold to buy 5 herbs in Garinham, but we don't halve our gold due to the deathwarp. We need 14 less.
This saves ~13 seconds in a few ways:
- Getting the extra keys and getting/using the wings is 8-9 seconds faster than deathwarping. The deathwarp combat doesn't take too long, but you also have the death music, conversation with the king, and the hike out of Tantegel. Using the wings put you outside Tantegel.
- I save about a second fighting the goldmen because I actually need less gold this way. In this run, my killing move against the second goldman is an excellent move, which is faster than casting hurt. Hurt is a better finishing move when you need max gold, because crits are rare, but hurt always works against goldmen.
- In Garin's Grave, we go into our deathwarp with fewer hp, saving 4 seconds. An enemy can kill us in one move and we don't need to delay as long to find a good combo. Just in terms of the frames needed for text, a Specter is half a second faster than a Wraith Knight. To get my hp down to 10, I walk through an extra swamp when leaving the Swamp Cave. It's also a little easier to find an enemy who can kill us off quickly (meaning fewer delay frames), though my last submission's delay here was only barely longer.
This run takes about a second more to defeat the dragonlord, just because of variability in the delays needed. The submissions get to the dragonlord at different places in the random number sequence.
This wouldn't be much help for a run that doesn't buy herbs in Garinham, like Acmlm's previous record that got Erdrick's armor. It has little gold left over after getting the 4 keys, so it needs extra gold to buy the 2 extra keys. It would need to kill a second goldman, which would take about as much time as it would save by not deathwarping.
Suggested screenshot: in Charlock, by the barriers, a flash from taking damage.
