Emulator is BizHawk 2.3.0 with mGBA core.
  • Aims for fastest possible time
  • Collects any items
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Abuses programming errors to save time
  • Manipulates luck
Unlike previous TAS's which prioritize in-game time, this TAS aims for the fastest real time possible. During some door transitions, the door will align itself by moving either up or down, wasting a small amount of time. By jumping through these doors, they can be aligned before entering the transition. For this reason, there are many places where jumping through doors is actually faster in real time than simply running through them. The total real time saved by doing this adds up to around 13 seconds. There is also a small route deviation when leaving Sector 5 which is faster RTA than the usual route.
Another improvement over past submissions is the use of out-of-bounds clips to force Samus into walls. If Samus is directly between a ceiling and a floor (or frozen enemy), she can clip out-of bounds into an adjacent wall by unmorphing and immediately spin-jumping. This allows Samus to ignore walls and traverse rooms very quickly that would otherwise be relatively slow. For example, the SA-X interaction in Sector 6 can be effectively skipped, saving over 15 seconds.
Samus can also clip out-of-bounds when jumping into a door transition. As she exits the door, she can turn around and morph just as the door is closing in order to clip into the wall. This is used to chain together spring ball jumps to ascend walls very quickly. There are only 3 places where this is implemented because it is usually not faster due to obstacles such as enemies in the way.
Picking up 3 missile packs is optimal; it allows for a faster nettori and nightmare fight purely from how much faster missiles do damage than charge beam. It also allows us to completely skip Yakuza's jumping phase by bringing it down to 0 hp in the first phase. Picking up more than 3 missile packs ends up being slower because of the extra time it takes to collect them. In total, 3% item collection is about 24 seconds faster than 0%.
Luck manipulation is a pretty big thing in this TAS. Getting ideal eyedoors and enemy patterns requires delaying room entry 2 frames at a time (because doors are only active every other frame). Sometimes if the room is very unlucky and does not cooperate, I have to settle for a mediocre pattern because delaying room entry ends up wasting more time than a good pattern would save. This was particularly annoying to deal with in the room right before the Yakuza fight; not only did I have to get good rng on the eyedoor, but I also had to get good luck with the space pirate patterns. In the end I had to accept a somewhat slow eyedoor because entering the room later would just make me lose more time in the end.
The most challenging (or at least time-consuming) part of this TAS was probably the Core-x fights after each boss is defeated. There is a specific spot in the room where the Core-x drop will float to after you destroy it. If you destroy the core in this "sweet spot", you can pickup the upgrade immediately. If it is even a few pixels off, the drop will float for a few frames before you can grab it. So in order to get a perfect fight, the Core-X needs to be hit with 2 missiles on the same frame while in this exact spot, AND have Samus positioned as far to the exit of the room as possible. Core-x fights alone took up about 15% of the total time to make the TAS, while they are only about 1% of the total run time.
I'd like to shoutout Biospark and Dragonfangs for baselining many of the strategies used in this TAS.

Samsara: File replaced with a version that trims several minutes of blank input. Also, judging.
Samsara: I initially had some concerns with the optimization in this movie, as there were a few sections that appeared to be noticeably slower than the two currently published runs of Fusion, however those concerns were alleviated by the author's response and some outside discussion with others more familiar with the intricacies of the game. This run is essentially directly comparable to the published 0% run room by room, except for the three collected Missile packs, and given the time save over it even with the routing and emulation differences (BIOS screen, the seconds wasted to collecting the Missile packs, extra lag on door transitions), it's definitely clear this is far more optimized than that run. Comparing to 100% would take an incredible deep dive due to the routing not being 100% comparable at any point, and due to the game's frame-based RNG, any time losses (including one I found very early on) are almost certainly unavoidable without wasting more frames to try and get a better pattern. In short, a proper comparison would likely take another complete TAS, and I don't feel like that's necessary in this case. The overall quality is high enough for acceptance, and the most noticeable "time loss" is easily explained by a trick involving jumping through doors to reduce transition time at the expense of IGT (the end sequence is a half second slower than the published 0% run in IGT, but it's faster in real time).
As for the category, the appeal of 0% is that it skips a Missile pack that's normally meant to be unskippable. The Japanese version even has a special low% end screen that triggers at 1% collection but not 0%, implying that this Missile pack is "mandatory". However, there's a bit of a problem with categorizing 0% in TASvideos terms, and this is the submission that proves it: It is way too similar to any%. Given that Fusion is infamously linear, it's extremely unlikely that a new route will be found to differentiate the two, so I see no reason to have them both published alongside each other. In fact, the "mandatory" missile pack that was such a novel skip for 0% is still skipped in this run (relevant section starts at 26:55 in the encode above, storing a shinespark to bypass that vine), meaning that the primary appeal of the 0% run remains here in this run. There's one last problem that contradicts what I just said, and that's the existence of a skip using memory corruption, cutting out the last half hour of the game. This means two things: One is that there's a third category for this game, since we consider the general scope of memory/save corruption/ACE to be a separate category that only competes with itself. The other is that, as far as I can tell, this would also technically serve as the 0% category. I'm not an expert on Fusion speedrunning, so I could be wrong about this, but it seems like the primary purpose of collecting the extra Missile packs is to kill Yakuza in one phase. This fight is in the last 30 minutes of the game that ends up being skipped by the corruption route, meaning that the extra Missile packs would likely take more time to collect than they would save over the rest of the actual gameplay. Granted, if a save corruption TAS came along instead of this one, it would still be a separate category alongside 0% (this is why I said technically serve after all), but the existence of the corruption route in general means that it's even harder to justify having 0% as a separate category at all, given that any% has always been faster and the only reason we haven't had an any% submission until now is literally because prior TASers just chose not to do it.
All that being said, I'm accepting this to obsolete the 0% TAS. It's more optimized, it's faster, and it still keeps the same trick that warranted 0% being a category in the first place. All in all, excellent work, and I'm looking forward to your next submission!
Spikestuff: Publishing.

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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #7027: Reseren's GBA Metroid Fusion in 1:12:19.31
Spikestuff
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Light Spike to correct the 13100 frames of blank input (without changing the rerecord count). Oh and claiming for publication if it's acceptable.
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/69348626087432347 Forgot about the blank inputs at the end since I finished this quite a while ago. Here's a correct file.
Challenger
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Thanks for the encode. Great run! Those new strategies and skips surprised me. Yes vote.
My homepage --Currently not much motived for TASing as before...-- But I'm still working.
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Gonna do a cutsceneless encode. Watching it on the way! Watched it and I loved the zips. Now that is a broken fusion KEKW EDIT: Here is the cutsceneless encode: Link to video
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w00t, awesome! Finally we got a new Fusion TAS, and it looked exceptional. Great job!
hellagels
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Welcome to TASVideos. I have watched your memory curruption run few months ago, which is faster than this submission. Why don't you submit the faster one?
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First reason is that it doesn’t start from power on so I cant’t submit it without having to redo all the rooms to account for rng. Second reason is that it isn’t as entertaining as a full game TAS, where a lot of tricks take place later in the game such as fast XBox and Yakuza jump skip, not to mention all of the clips. I’ll probably submit it down the line though whenever I have the time to change it.
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Out of curiosity, what time would this count as by RTA standards? I know RTA stops when you go into your ship at the end, whereas TAS ends at last input with the dialogue. Awesome to see an improvement to this. Rather timely, since I've been seeing Oatsandgoats running this game lately.
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
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This was a lot of fun to watch, it was about time we got a new TAS for this game. I did not expect to see out of bounds strats here, those looked really good. I also liked the sheer amount of disrespect you showed towards the enemies and especially the SA-X. Yes vote!
Current project: Gex 3 any% Paused: Gex 64 any% There are no N64 emulators. Just SM64 emulators with hacky support for all the other games.
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I really enjoyed this TAS, those core X fights were outstanding, it's clear to me that a lot of work went into those, I like the spaz movements waiting for navigation room pads etc., but I felt like the luck manipulation delays would have been better if they could have been kept subtle. Of course this is an easy yes vote from me, the clips were all very exciting, there's no clear signs of improvement I can see, but man, that low health beep due to the BOX escape is awful, it's so awful that I think it would have justified getting the energy tank before Arachnus, or wasting a little time getting a health drop from one of the ki-hunters in the first PYR room on the way back from BOX
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Some of the longer delays definitely bothered me too when making it. Some you can hide during item pickup or adam text, but unfortunately most of them are a pain because adding tiny delays in other places messes up the flow of the room or changes the patterns of previous rooms. The other way is to pause but that’s really slow in comparison. And regarding the beeping I think even if you picked up a drop the health would be 29 and the beeping would continue (also waiting for a drop is extremely slow in that room).
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These two health drops cost me 32 frames to grab, which I would definitely argue falls into the time-entertainment tradeoff category Link to video
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Yea I guess you’re right that it doesn't take too much time to get those drops. Definitely overlooked getting a drop from the first enemy in the big room instead of the second. It’s something I’ll keep in mind if I do a 0% TAS in the future.
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Awesome :D I guess I should emphasise that this is by no means a deal breaker, and the submission as is is 100% a yes vote
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I for one kinda prefer to have the beeping than losing unecessary time to get hp. Anyway, amazing run, was really entertained, yes vote!
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mklip2001 wrote:
Out of curiosity, what time would this count as by RTA standards? I know RTA stops when you go into your ship at the end, whereas TAS ends at last input with the dialogue.
It's about a 1:06:30. The current wr is 1:11:46 on JP version. Ignoring the fact that clips aren't possible in JP, that wr equates to a ~1:14:22 on ENG to give you a bit of a comparison between a very good human run and a TAS.
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Really nice work, I loved to see the clips finally put to use. My one question though is whether or not 0% and this essentially no memory corruption branch should remain separate from each other. The difference is only of 3% items and 24 seconds which is far from a lot. I definitely understand them being separate in RTA but with TAS that distinction is much smaller. In the past, it seemed like there was an unofficial agreement to not do any% as it would be so close to 0%. Now that there is an any% TAS, we need to figure out how to actually handle that.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
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As a viewer who does not run this game, I don't feel like I'm losing any entertainment value when watching an any% over a 0% TAS. In this game, low% is not that much more interesting or challenging compared to any% as it is in other Metroid games. So I would be fine with this run obsoleting the current 0% publication.
Current project: Gex 3 any% Paused: Gex 64 any% There are no N64 emulators. Just SM64 emulators with hacky support for all the other games.
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In my opinion Any% is more entertaining because Yakuza's 2nd phase can be skipped. Other than that, there are no significant gameplay differences between it and 0%. The rest of the time saves are mostly Nightmare and Nettori, but the fights are just shorter purely because you have more missiles to do damage faster. In non-TAS runs, 0% is interesting because you have very low health, but that is trivial in a TAS since you don't need more than 99 hp in either category.
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Fusion being Fusion, there are a lot of text and elevator sequences, but the actual gameplay sequences are neat. Easy Yes vote
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Dragonfangs 0% on top, submission on bottom. You end up about a half second slower here on the IGT. Is this due to that jumping through doors timesaver mentioned in the submission text? For further comparison, BioSpark's 100% run is about another half second faster than Dragonfangs here, though I don't know if it's 100% comparable (I was told so but complete confirmation is still needed). There's also 2 rooms in the early section of the game where you lose time to BioSpark, one is a minor 2 frame loss but the other, more noticeable one is in the Quarantine Room, where you lose 8 frames with a slower kill. I couldn't find a better way of showing this, sorry for the awful method of comparison: BioSpark on top, submission on bottom. Note Samus's position/animation frame on the box on the righthand screenshots. The enemy looks to be a pixel further away in the submission, but is that really enough to cause an unavoidable 8 frame loss? Comparing the three runs further would take a much deeper dive and a lot of time investment, so I'd like to make sure whether or not these are valid before I continue. I should mention that the overall quality of the run is good, but it still shouldn't be losing any gameplay time to the published runs unless it absolutely can't be avoided, and less precise movement almost always can be.
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You are correct that the timer shown on the game-screen is lower for my TAS because of jumping through doors. There are 4 "door fixes" done after the countdown is initiated. These are slower in-game time but save real time. These 4 door fixes are some of the most time-saving ones in the game at around 72 frames total. So while the in-game timer shows my countdown sequence time as slower, it is actually more than a second faster in real time. As for the Quarantine room, I went back into TAStudio and tried messing around with it more, attempting to change rng as well as how the beam shots are fired. Until I delayed room entry by 10 frames, I could not kill the hornoad without delaying the initial shot. I suspect this is due to randomness of the hornoad's movement or related to subpixels. Regardless, from what I can tell this time loss is unavoidable without wasting more time to get a better enemy pattern. Now that I think about it though, because this is very early in the game, I could have always started a new TAS to try to get better rng in this room.
Samsara
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That's fair. It also occurred to me that the longer door transitions on BizHawk would, in theory, throw off RNG way too much to even consider comparing things on a frame by frame level, since you mentioned it operates on 2 frame increments and as far as I can tell every transition is 3 frames longer. Alright, thanks for the prompt response!
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Post subject: Movie published
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [4404] GBA Metroid Fusion by Reseren in 1:12:19.31