To sync the run:

• Emulator used: Dolphin 4.0-4222
• No external dsp_*.bin files needed
• No Memory Card
• Game Version: USA
• SHA1 Hash: 70c7ae65cd83c65675e279cd15cbf69cdda29565

Objectives

• Completes Sonic's Story
• Aims for fastest time
• Manipulates luck
• Takes damage to save time
• Abuses glitches

Timing information

• 29:57.55 (frame numbers, with loading times)
• 24:19.72 (VI numbers, without loading times)

Emulator information

Commonly used techniques

TAS Spindashing

Rolling Slope

Homing Attack Cancel

Homing Attack Spindash

Spindash Hover

Pause Hovering

Gravity Control / Gravity Glitch

Wallruns

Rocket Bonk

The Route

• The route used during this TAS is different than the one normally used when you play as a casual player. This route is called the "TAS Route" because it was used for the first time during the first Sonic's Story TAS by Tales98 in 2012. It consists of going to Casinopolis after Emerald Coast. this route is faster because we spend a little less time in the hub, and it allows you to do an additional glitch (the clip to enter the train after casinopolis).
• I also don't take the crystal ring in this TAS, because it's too slow to take it.

Stage by stage comments

Chaos 0

• Before the boss starts, we do a spindash at the end of the cutscene, so that Sonic is right in front of the boss before the first hit.
• Chaos 0 is still picked up by the homing attack, although invulnerable. So for the last hit, with a perfectly timed homing attack, you can ride Sonic to the top of the lights with him, and hit him on the lights.

Emerald Coast

• Act 1 :
  • The whale skip, a strat which saves a second, towards the beginning of the bridge we stop Sonic so that the whale catches up, we jump so that it propels Sonic to the left to reach the end of the second part of the bridge.
  • Then we do the lighthouse wall run which is a second faster.

• Act 2 :
  • Around 35 seconds into the stage, I do a pause hover then a spindash + jump to skip the panels or springs which are normally necessary to reach the top.

Enter Casinopolis

• Here we enter the casino courtyard by getting through the door by a low amount of time, but enough to hit the trigger.
• And to enter Casinopolis I simply clip in the corner of the front door.

Casinopolis

After Casinopolis

Egg Hornet

• The strat here is to spam the A button, and wait for the boss to get up before doing the last hit, so that he gets up faster.
• If you are curious about the glitch in Sonic's running animation that I do at 9 seconds into the boss, there are several ways to create it. one way is to land after a jump, wait 3 frames, and do this manipulation three times: "X" for 1 frame, release "X" for 1 frame, "B" for 1 frame (so you have to do 3 spindash as quickly as possible). the animation cancels if you do a jump, spindash, or if you stop and walk again. I used it in Egg Hornet, Chaos 4, Chaos 6 and Egg Vipper

Windy Valley

• Act 1 :
  • The first only saves a few frames, to have a straighter line.
  • The second is interesting, it consists of using the part of the level which belongs to Gamma, which allows you to skip a good part of Sonic's route.
  • And the last one allows you to skip the animation of Sonic flying up to the tornado.

• Act 3 :
  • At the start of Act 3 we press "Restart" with the pause menu, to go down to the road faster.
  • Then like I said in the "Gravity control / Gravity glitch" explanation, I release a spindash on the edge of the platform, I keep the same angle for 2 seconds, and Sonic can fall with a curved gravity until the end of the stage.

After Windy Valley

• I chose to do a wallrun, to go up the mountain and enter the train from the back instead of the front, it's only 1 frame faster because we cover more distance but we spend less time in the airs.
• Then after the sewers, I do a clip to reach the station entrance trigger. This clip is normally used after Speed ​​Highway, but I also used it here, it's faster even if the door is open

Enter Ice Cap / After Ice Cap

• After taking the train, I make a clip which is normally used in Tails' RTA runs. This consists of using a rock to propel Sonic and clip on the right side of the cave entrance. We do this because there is an invisible wall in front of the entrance to the cave which takes about 3 seconds to be removed, and this wall is a hindrance if we get here as quickly as possible, it is therefore faster to clip, than to wait for the invisible wall to be removed.

• Here is one of the biggest changes of this TAS compared to the old Sonic TASes, here we do the "Ice Key Skip" which consists of not taking the Ice key to open the entrance door to Ice Cap, and clip on the way there and back because the door is logically closed. There are many ways to clip the entrance, the quickest is to run to the ceiling and bump against the top of the door.
• For the cave outlet clip, (new strat) there is simply a hole in the right side of the cave

Ice Cap

Enter Twinkle Park

• After talking to Amy, instead of using the usual route through the hotel, I use the clip that I usually use to enter the train, but this time, I land next to the train, I spindash using the stairs, until reaching the door. Then I release a spindash on the right side of the door to hit the trigger.

• (11:38 in the video submission) Afterwards if you listen carefully, I do a jump and a Homing Attack before spindashing, which may seem strange. When you press X or B next to the NPC, your character will stop and the NPC will speak to the character. And here you can see that there is an NPC right next to Sonic, so I jump, and I press X to talk to the NPC in the air, except that it is not possible to talk to the NPC in the air, so Sonic will stop BUT he will not talk to the NPC. So I jump, except that the jump animation is canceled, and I can immediately do a Homing Attack Spindash.

Twinkle Park

• Act 1 :
  • I used the pink car, the only reason I used this car is because I enter the pink car and at the same time the light blue car is destroyed, which gives a big speed boost, this avoids to have to increase the car's speed from 0.
  • In Twinkle Park the speed of Sonic's car increases every 10 rings, so having 40 rings with the RNG ring capsule is necessary.
  • Then we do the Twinkle Park Skip Skip Skip, about 16 seconds into the level, which consists of skipping more than 50% of the circuit passing above the killplanes to directly fall onto the loppings.

• Act 2 :
  • (new strat) I noticed that it was possible for Sonic to land on the top of the barriers, so I tried to spindash on it and I realized that I could spindash along the entire length of the barrier and reach the capsule. It's about 0.6 faster, because with the basic method you have to do a spindash + jump to go over the barrier, but you have to wait for Sonic to touch the ground before spindashing again, here no need to wait.

Enter Speed Highway

Speed Highway

• Act 1 :
  • About 5 seconds into the level, I do a gravity control as low as possible on the wall, then I pause hover, and I clip the fence. The pause hover here is essential it allows you to go much further in the air.
  • The following strat was found by FusionVaria/itsPersonal, this consists of using the looping acceleration panel, jumping by touching the looping to skip it, then use the 2 platforms that are in the air instead of using the rocket, it's about 0.50s faster.

• Act 2:
  • On the wall only with speed shoes, it's faster to run and move. If you don't move you get 16.00 speed, if you move you get 16.31 speed. So the best way I found is to stick Sonic to the wall to get 16.31.
  • To dodge those fenses, the quickest way was to jump, but if you jump with Sonic stuck to a wall he will jump but only for a few frames (all those little jumps are frame perfect), and being in a spindash is still faster if you don't have the speed shoes.
  • Then at the end of Act 2, putting Sonic stuck to the wall allows you to do a wall run at the end, going down from the wall Sonic's speed increases more and more but when I hit the ground, I lose half of the speed that I had initially built, this happens because there is a gap between the wall and the ground, so it is not possible to keep all of Sonic's speed to release it once on the ground.

• Act 3:
  • Here I simply do the usual clip to skip the entire act.

After Speed Highway

Red Mountain

• Act 1 :
  • (15.11) I do a gravity control, then a wallrun, in another wallrun, and that's the weird part. Because this gravity glitch at 16.55 is very special, normally if you jump after a wallrun, Sonic will go up, but here no, Sonic goes down. Here since Sonic is a little upside down at the time of the jump, he jumps down and his half-reversed gravity is kept for a few seconds.

• Act 2 :
  • A new skip here, the left wall has a gap between the wall and the ground, so here i jump just before hitting the wall, so that the wall pushes Sonic down and i go through the gap.
  • For the end, this time instead of doing a bonk on the rocket, I use the edge of the rocket to do a gravity control and do a wallrun until the end.

Sky Deck

• Act 1 :
  • At the beginning, the fence facing Sonic are solid, but there is a gap between the front and side fence, so if you place yourself far enough from one side of the bridge without touching the side fence, you can pass through this gap.
  • (17.58) here a pretty funny thing, you can hear Sonic say "woohoo!", in fact it happens normally because if you hang on to the ladder, a second later the ladder breaks and Sonic partially falls and that's when Sonic says “woohoo!”. but here I hung on to the ladder but at the very end of it and for a single frame, I used it to give me an extrat jump and did a homing attack cancel to reach the next part faster, and one second later, I was halfway the bridge but Sonic still says "woohoo!", because I touched the ladder earlier.

• Act 2 :
  • During the transitions between acts I used the sides of the rockets:
  • act 1 > 2, I place Sonic to the right of the rocket to fall faster on the ground at the start of act 2.
  • act 2 > 3, the opposite, here I place Sonic on the left to have a higher angle at the start of act 3.
  • For these 2 strats it is necessary to release the spindash at the exact frame of the change of act.

• Act 3 :
  • (39.56) A new clip here, between the yellow pipe and the wall there is a gap, so we can enter directly into the last part of the level and reach the capsule.

After Gamma Fight

• Here you normally have to enter through a door which is at the bottom, then go up to eggman's room from the inside, except that here I reach this room from the outside by clipping the wall on the left and reaching the trigger of the outside door and all this even before the automatic cutscene is triggered.
• Then I use the particles from Sonic's light dash to press the button.

Lost World

• Act 1 :
  • (11.61) A new strat here, I do a gravity control on the side of the snake's structure mouth to then do a wallrun, reach the piller, spindash + jump, and reach the side of the platform, to the left of the spikes. if the spikes had been perfectly aligned at the end of the platform, this strat would not have been possible. This strat is faster by 0.3. It would have been logical for this strat to be slower, because the "snake skip" (using the side of the snake in the water to spindash + jump and reach the end) normally used in RTA runs is technically faster, but in my TAS, I arrive so quickly in the snake room, that the snake hasn't spawned yet, so I have to wait for it to spawn and it's slow, so in the case of a TAS, not using the snake is faster (by 0.3).
  • (15.20 / 30.48) in this game when you "Pause" some object hitboxes are not loaded, this is the case for these 2 doors, you have to pause for 13 frames for the first door, 23 frames for the second.

• Act 2 :
  • (36.31) This is the "Lol skip", the concept of it was find around 2016 and was later optimized by Sora in 2018 with a consistent usable setup. It consists of using one of the small platforms that are throughout this room, to reach the bottom of the looping and reach the end of the stage, this allows you to skip the gravity switch room

Final Egg

• Act 1 :
  • I completely reinvented the way to do the act 1 of Final Egg with 3 new strats :
  • (7.16) The idea is to use the bottom of the stage instead of using the springs which are super slow.
  • (10.68) Here I do a spindash just before hitting the wall, so that the wall pushes Sonic outside. This clip is only usefull if you do the following strat :
  • (11.15) Here for some reason the roof of this room is solid from the outside, so we can use it and do a gravity control to reach this wallrun (12.18). It's very weird that there's a wall here because it's useless, if you casually play this game you won't even see it, and it's even weirder that it's solid, and luckily it is long enough to reach the end of act 1.

• Act 2 :
  • The Act 2 is just falling from the beginning to the end of the act by using 2 clips (14.48 / 18.95).

• Act 3 :
  • As soon as I arrive in the Act 3 I restart, so that I can move and clip the elevator to fall to the end of the stage.

Improvements

Unconfirmed Possible Improvements

• In Red Mountain Act 2 :
  • it is apparently possible to reach the other side of the stage without hitting the lava. A member of the community informed me that he had managed to reach the other side by chance, by doing a normal F : 10 speed spindash, in non-TAS, but he did not record his gameplay and he never managed to reproduce this phenomenon again. I was stuck for more than 3 months in the progression of the TAS while trying to reproduce this phenomenon, but after a hundred hours of failure I never succeeded in reproducing this strat effectively.
  • Here I hacked my F speed by setting it to 13.01 : https://youtu.be/2HUOS2v63DA
  • Here instead of hacking my speed, I went back by conserving my speed going up, to increase it again going down. Here it's slower because going back up wastes a lot more time : https://youtu.be/ziyuAzMFjCE
  • I concluded that this person possibly used an as yet undiscovered mechanism by chance, so instead of continuing to look for a solution to reach this place, I decided to give up on that, and go through the lava. It was a difficult decision because this strat could have saved more than a second to finish the level in less than 30 seconds, but I judged that I had devoted enough time to it, and that it was time for me to continue my project instead of staying stuck.

Confirmed Improvements

• Instead of using the whale in Emerald Coast it was find found in late 2024 that you can skip it by spindashing on the invisible fence (1/2 seconds faster) : https://youtu.be/zaYvrWA3098
• At the beginning of Ice Cap, it was found in late 2023 that you can go through the side of the acceleration panel instead of jumping over it. It is currently used in RTA ILs (~0.2 seconds faster)

Special Thanks To:

• itsPersonal/FusionVaria
• Tales98
• brian_pso
• laze
• ModifiedMonkee
• MakoHNM
• Chad1342
• anicsr

Suggested Screenshots: