Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for Genesis is a platformer with some puzzle elements, where you follow the story of the book, playing as The Creature.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1
- Aims for fastest time
- Takes intentional damage
Game mechanics
- L/R to move
- D to crouch, you crouch to pick up items and open chests
- U to enter doors, or ctivate mechanisms
- B to jump
- D + B to roll
- A to attack
- A + U to attack in an arc, this attack has a shorter animation so it's preffered on the ground
- C to use the special attack, an orb of lightning that can be thrown, it uses energy, which is also our health
- S to open the inventory menu, this is used to combine and use items
- If you attack a torch, the creature's stick will catch on fire, which will deal more damage, not bosses tho, in The Crypt it also lights up the level
- There's energy potions that can be picked up in some levels, these refill energy when below 0
- There's also some spots in levels where if you stand on them lightning will hit you, completely filling up the energy
Tech and Glitches
Avoid animations
Turning around on the ground, getting hit on the ground, jumping from a standstill and landing on the ground have animations that stop you in place for an amount of frames, so avoiding these when possible is important.
For example, turning around can be buffered while entering a door, so the creature does it while in the fade out.
Roll Clip
In the game, there's certain walls that are supposed to be moved out of the way by activating some kind of mechanism, these walls, and only these, can be clipped through with the roll clip.
To do so, all you need to do is roll into the wall while pressing the opposite direction key, very silly stuff.
Walk in air
This glitch isn't used in the TAS, unfortunately I didn't find a use for it.
It's done by performing a roll clip on a wall that has a drop very near it, if the roll ends while the creature is still inside the wall, and the game pushes it into the drop, the unroll animation will happen while falling, this makes it so now the creature can't fall, letting you walk in the plane of where you fall, there is still collision tho.
Ingolstadt
The main objective in this level is to collect three items, Knowledge of Physics, Length of rope and Rusty pulley wheel to combine them into a working block and tackle, which is used to open a door to the end of the level, this skips a bossfight where you fight waves of city guards, which is slower.
These items are spread around the level, so a bunch of mechanisms need to be activated to progress, tho a few, which deactivate walls, are bypassed with the roll clip.
The Crypt
This level is more puzzle oriented, with many mechanism all around, it also introduces movable blocks that have to be moved into slots on the ground to activate mechanims. Thankfully, most is skipped with a few more roll clips.
There's also one point in this level, where the walk in air is almost usefull, but the ledge you'd need to jump to is barely out of the way, very sad.
In this level an energy potion is taken, while entering a door so no frames are lost, for later use.
At the end of the level, we have the first boss, a big spider, which is a simple fight, it spawns a bunch of small spiders, after killing them, the spider comes down, and four hits from the special attack, making sure both the ball held and the ball thrown deal damage, after that, a platform appears and we make our way to the end of the level. It is possible killing the spiders on the left first could be slightly faster, but if you kill the small spiders while on the left, more will spawn, which will make the big spider go up prematurely.
It is possible to skip the spider boss by collecting some items around the level to open a door, it is slower overall tho.
The level is also dark, but the torch is not in the path anyway.
The Woodlands
This level is much more straightforward, with no puzzles or mechanism, tho it does introduce bear traps, which deal damage and stops movement for a bit if you step on them.
At the end of the level there's another boss, the slug, small slugs will appear periodically on the center of the screen, and at certain intervals the slug will become vulnerable, where you can hit him 7 times, there is a small window each time where he's vulnerable but I'm not hitting him, but that's because even if I do stay to try and hit more times you can't land an 8th hit, fyi, the slug is inmine to the special attack.
This level also has the best music.
Frankenstein Mansion
The main premise in this level is to go through the top path of each room, if you fall, you'll have to make your way to the end of the lower path, where a door will take you back to the start of the room. The stick is lit at the start of the level mainly to kill one specific enemy, with the extra damage, so he doesn't throw a second bomb at us, which would mean jumping one extra time, losing frames to the landing animation.
Appart from that, its a simple level, tho there's so many enemies that to damage through them the energy potion is used up.
At the end of the level, there's another boss, a bunch of potions, after smashing the Elizabeth Frankenstein bursts in flames tho.
I suspect there's probably some optimizations in this bossfight, I couldn't find a better route tho.
The Arctic
Simplest level yet, just some platforming to the right. The main way of optimizing this level comes from avoiding landing animations, which is the reason the creature takes an ice bath.
The Alexander Nevsky (It's the name of the ship)
This level finally introduces back some puzzle elements, with mechanisms that are used to open walls, which are all skipped with more roll clips.
The boss in this level, the sailor, is probably the more complex one in the game, it has three phases, one where he tries to stab the creature with his stick, the second where he stands on the right while periodically throwing knifes, and a third one, where he'll periodically throw knifes, while also running from one corner to the other. To transition from one phase to the next you have to hit him 16 times, which is tracked with a counter, after reaching 0, it resets to 16 and the next phase starts, when it reaches 0 on phase 3, the fight, and game, ends.
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: I took a bit of time to look at this, since there were a lot of comments on it. Seems that there are some differences on what strategies should have been done, but the outcome shows that the run proves itself. Yeah...some parts seem to be slow, but those same issues are mirrored in the WR speedrun. My final thoughts...this is a pretty dominating run, over human efforts.
Accepting as "Fastest Completion".
