This is an any% TAS of 'Hachiemon', a Japanese exclusive GBA title in which you play as the titular character and
real-life mascot of the Japanese TV station "Kansai Television" (KTV or Kantele for short). The gameplay involves platforming your way across 22 levels, using Hachiemon's elastic lips to subdue enemies, traverse a variety of different stage types and ultimately solve the mystery of disappearing lips on Hachi Isle.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1
- Complete the game as fast as possible
- Easy difficulty
- Takes damage to save time
First, some explanation on the difficulty and main objectives: the goal of each level is to collect 'Lips' which are scattered across the stage, and reach the end with at least some minimum amount of lips, which differs from level to level. This run plays on 'Easy' difficulty, which has the lowest lip requirements for each level, and lacks many extra enemies which are added in the harder difficulty settings. Despite the low lip requirements, the lip routing for each level was carefully considered and tested for the fastest lips to collect. Sometimes, the route is fairly obvious and works out without any issue, but in many cases there were multiple possible routes which required extensive testing to confirm which was fastest. It should also be noted that collecting any extra lips beyond the minimum required per level loses time, due to extra animations playing at the end of the level, so it is important to only meet and not exceed the minimum requirements (except for the final level, which does not incur this timeloss for extra lips).
ok hi what's up. honestly this game is cool as hell and has surprisingly deep movement for a licensed GBA platformer, and it's all centered around Hachiemon's lip abilities. Here are the main methods and smaller quirks of the movement:
- Lip-Fling: This is the most used method of travel throughout the game, and involves simply pressing B to send your Lips outward, attach to an object, platform, or pacified enemy, and go flying forward once you reach the attachment point. In general this is the fastest way to gain speed from a stopped position, and is the fastest way to traverse a level at any given moment.
- A couple things to note here about the lip tether itself: if you keep B held, you will come to a stop once you reach your attachment point while remaining tethered. From this state, you can either release B to fall down, use the directional pad to Lip-Pogo in any available direction, or press A to jump.
- Lip-Pogo: As mentioned before, you can hold B after using Lip to keep a sustained tether to whatever object you attach to. Once you are completely stopped, you can hold the direction opposite the way you're facing (and either up or down, if the position allows it) to extend Hachi's lips outward again while still keeping the tether and sort of 'pogo' around the attachment point. You can jump out of this state at any point, which ends up being very convenient in a number of situations.
- Roll: Holding down and pressing A from a neutral state (i.e, lip not active, not in hitstun, etc) will activate a roll. The top speed of the roll is the fastest method of travel aside from Lip-Fling, although it has a slow initial start up. Note that although activating a roll immediately after a Lip-Fling does conserve your immediate fling speed, you will still slow down due to air resistance before going back up to top roll speed. Despite this, Lip-Fling --> mid-air roll is used quite often, as it's the fastest method of air travel when there is no other tether point immediately available after a Lip-Fling.
- Additionally, being in a roll gives you an active hitbox and grants immunity to most forms of damage. Staying in roll for too long will cause Hachiemon to become temporarily stunned. You can cancel a roll by pressing B, but only as early as 25 frames after activating it.
There are more nuances of this movement and it's limitations which I will try and explain as they come up, in the
Stage 1: That Dumb Thing with the Red Lips
Despite being the first stage, the varied terrain and obstacles here were a great training ground for learning how to optimize movement in a number of different situations, starting with the triple lip grab at the very beginning, immediately satisfying the lip requirement. The white and blue 'lip blocks' are solid objects that can only be broken with roll. This level demonstrates how you can 'pacify' many enemies by hitting them with lip (kissing them ;v:), and once pacified, they become basically benign platforms that you are able to stand on top and fling off of.
Speaking of platforms, I should mention that there are two different kinds; solid and semi-solid. Solid objects, such as lip blocks, are fully solid, meaning that you can tether to them, but they block Hachiemon from physically moving through them on all sides. Semi-solid objects, such as the platforms at the very start of the stage or pacified enemies, are able to be tethered to from all sides, but also allow Hachiemon to pass through from all directions except for top-down. This is obviously much more convenient for movement, as it opens up a much wider variety of possibilities for traversal than solid objects.
One of the challenges in this level was figuring out how to optimally overcome vertical obstacles like the brown poles in the later half of the stage, which can often be awkward with no easy way to simply fling past. The solution I came up with is to quickly get height from a lip-pogo and/or jump, while not being too close to the pole, so you have room to tether and fling off the top of it. I should mention here that, as you might expect, the longer of a tether you have, the farther and faster you will go from a fling. There is often a balance to strike in deciding how long to make certain tethers, as simply going for the longest lip distance every time is not always the fastest option overall, depending on what sorts of obstacles come immediately before and after.
We're also introduced here to the 'Hachi Slots' at the end of each stage, where you generate semi-random sentences that combine to determine how many bonus points you get. You would think that getting minimum bonus would be the fastest, but you are actually forced to wait a minimum amount of time until you can advance past the slot screen after you've selected your bonus, so most of the possible combinations end up being the same speed. The 2 exceptions are the largest bonuses that give you over 100 bonus points, and take longer than the minimum amount of time to finish tallying up. So I make sure to just avoid these two bonuses throughout the run.
Stage 2: Muscular
Mostly the same sort of environment as the first stage, with a few new concepts. One of the lips collected here is contained inside of a lip block; destroying the block reveals the lip, which then takes some time to actually become tangible, so we use that time to set up for a optimal fling off the platform above. The bird that we roll-jump over is a bit of a unique obstacle, as touching it at all will take us to a 'bonus area', so we take care to avoid it. The white dot ring checkpoint near the end of the level is something we want to avoid as well, as it temporarily stops Hachi and plays a short animation.
This stage features the first boss fight of the game. His head takes double damage, so 3 lip headshots finish him off quickly (the last hit seems delayed because he is invulnerable while flexing). In general for bossfights, I manipulate the position of the boss and Hachi to be closest to the locations where they both need to be standing for the next cutscene to play (in this case, Hachi on the left, and Muscle Hachi on the right). The way this fight works out doesn't really allow for ideal positioning unfortunately, as you cannot manipulate a different first attack, and the fastest kill will always see Muscle Hachi in the opposite corner.
A note about the overworld traveling: you can hold L to travel between levels faster. The 'blue levels' in between red stages are all cutscenes that I skip.
Stage 3: Before Going to Osaka
The first underwater level. Hachi takes longer to fall and is generally more sluggish, so we try to lip-fling as much as possible here and make good use of pacified enemies despite some awkward sections. The first instance of revealing and then flinging off of an invisible block appears in this stage as well.
Stage 4: Something Scarier Than Grandma
Fairly straightforward level which begins to showcase the usefulness of well spaced semi-solid platforms to fling off of in style. The end of this stage also features another boss fight, where we first see Hachiemon's boomerang ability put to use, in this case to deliver the final hit while as far to the left as possible, so that the camera has a minimal amount of scrolling to do before the next cutscene.
Stage 5: Burn the Ice! Lips of Justice
Ice stage type beat. We see here the first instance of a takoyaki power up, which bestows Hachiemon with a special stage-specific ability, though we actually skip it here because it is slow to activate and not useful (the 'Penguin Hachi' takoyaki gives Hachiemon better traction on ice). More convenient semi-solid platforms get us to the end quickly.
Stage 6: So Smooth! Wow!
Another ice stage, with some barely-made platform cycles and a bit of an awkward lipped wall to overcome at the end.
Stage 7: Back Home to Hachi
Forest level! Pretty straightforward platforming with a couple tricky bits, for example to not get stuck in front of that lip block in the middle section after the vines. The ending here is an example of how actually triggering the level end can be a bit strange; usually its faster to lip-fling down to the ground when you're approaching the level-end house from the air, but in this case it was actually faster to just finish a roll into it because it ends up putting you in the exact right position faster than a lip fling would.
Stage 8: It Hurts to be Poked
This is a pretty unique stage that's a bit more confined and built more like a maze, requiring you to find the correct path to the ending using a variety of 'Hachi Throat Warps' (???). We use downward lip flings to help us fall faster at certain points, and also turn around just before hitting some spikes in order to sort of damage boost in the direction we want to go. All of the lips we collect in this level are hidden lips, which require you to reveal them by hitting them with lip first before they can be collected (the way you usually find these hidden lips is by pressing L to use Hachiemon's 'Kantere' ability, which temporarily freezes him and reveals nearby hidden objects).
The boss fight at the end is the most complex so far, mostly because it actually involves some RNG manipulation. The ending cutscene will always see the Queen Bee get carried to the center honeycomb, so I make sure to manipulate the initial spawning location of the Queen to be in that same center cell, instead of on the left or right side. All of the RNG for this (and most all) boss spawn positions and attack patterns are determined when you first touch the 'boss arena barrier', so there is no way to manipulate anything except by changing when you enter. This makes RNG manipulation fairly limited, since there is no way to influence it during the fight at all. I also deliver the last hit to the boss while I am standing in the exact position that you are warped to before the cutscene, saving camera scroll time.
Stage 9: If There's a Hole, I Want to Enter It
This stage features the first takoyaki we actually use, which is Mole Hachi, that grants us the ability to break the brown lip blocks that cover most of the level. This is mostly just navigating an underground maze, while being careful to collect on the fastest lips, including one that we collect with the lip boomerang while still moving forward.
Stage 10: The Moles Who Dig Deeper and Deeper
Two different takoyaki in one stage, including the only instance of Mini Hachi, who loses the ability to use lip but is required to navigate the first section. Another level where the exact lip route was carefully considered and tested.
Stage 11: If There's a Hole, I Want to Dig Deeper
Definitely the most awkward stage so far, given that the first half of it requires you to move downwards as fast as possible in a low-gravity underwater environment. Still, we use downward lip-flings and convenient enemy/wall placements to help us along pretty fast. The second segment of this stage introduces Dolphin Hachi, who has unlimited jumps underwater, and is required to traverse the platform-less water between here and the final section of the stage.
Stage 12: Mother Nature and Hachiemon
Pretty cool level featuring sparse platforms in the air and dangerous water underneath. The great distance between some platforms requires us to execute some tight pogo jumps in order to reach the closest tether-able object. The lip route here also went through a few variations.
Stage 13: A Couple With Each Other
One of the few instances in this whole run of a platform cycle we actually can't do anything about is right at the beginning here. We skip most of the other platform rides and rush to the end to fight the boss of this area, a fish couple. This fight probably has the most room for theoretical improvement, as optimally you would want them to do the fastest attack (water gun) every time (9 times in a row). I don't know how feasible this even is in theory; I tried multiple different attack patterns (which, again, you can only change by losing time on purpose before entering the fight), but they were all much slower than the one you see here, which has 6/9 water guns, which is pretty good.
Stage 14: Fight! First Try Mountain Climb
The first level which introduces the unique challenge of ascending a mountain face. Extended pogo-jumps really come in handy here, and allow us to gain height quickly in places that would otherwise be very awkward. At the top of the first mountain here we also see the first of one of the more annoying enemies in this game, which are the tiny orange Hachis that run back and forth. These guys are unique in that they do no damage but completely stunlock Hachiemon if you touch them at all, and are immune to being pacified, so you simply have to roll through (slow, in this case) or lip around them.
Stage 15: There's a Mountain There, So I Will Climb It
Another mountain climbing stage, featuring more quick ascending pogo jumps and some pretty swag back-and-forth lip flinging off of the conveniently placed ropes hanging around.
Stage 16: The Sky, Wings, and Hachiemon
Sky level! The way you normally complete this level is to travel all the way to the bottom to collect the 'Wing Hachi' takoyaki, and then fly around for lips and finally to the level-end house at the top center. We forgo this by using some clever lip-fling platforming to navigate and quickly collect our required 4 lips before zipping right to the level-end.
Stage 17: Lightning, Narcissists, and Hachiemon
This sky level requires us to pick up Wing Hachi, as there is a great distance at the end of the level that is un-traversable without it. It also helps us make short work of the boss, doing easy roll damage to all the segments of the flying hachi-pede and allowing us to keep pace with its fast moving final form.
Stage 18: Beyond Black and Red
Pretty linear stage involving making our way down a few floors of an office building. I should note here that the flames created by the red hachi enemies cannot be rolled through, so you have to pacify the hachi behind the flame first before you can move past it (or go around, in the case of the final set of enemies).
Stage 19: Escape
Hachiemon makes an epic rooftop escape. Of some sort. The platforms in the last screen were a bit awkward to find an optimal path through but it ended up working out.
Stage 20: The Battlefield Is...
Probably the most linear level in the game. Basically just lipping straight across to the end, only making quick detours up/down to avoid some barrels which block your path.
Stage 21
A western/desert level reminiscent of the first couple grass stages in terms of layout. I feel like this level could have been really annoying, but all of the enemy cycle timings and movement worked out really well on the first pass. We pick up the Fire Hachi takoyaki just before the boss fight, as it does double damage to the boss here, even though we lose the ability to lip.
Stage 22: Hachi's Repayment: The Annoying One With a Fiery Heart
This is it, the final level, featuring a long, five-part boss fight with the 8-Tailed Beast.. Before that though, we have to climb some poles to grab the minimum 4 lips. The first phase of the boss involves defeating two of the beast's tails simultaneously, using the center pole to minimize the amount of time we have to wait between hits. Again, the head is the weak point here for all of these tails. The second phase takes place while we are falling mid-air, where we make short work of another tail. The final hit to this one is purposely delayed by a few frames, in order to manipulate an optimal pattern for the next tail (who, otherwise, ended up lingering under the rail car in a place we could not reach for too long). The final boss area first sees another two tails attacking together, which we defeat quickly. A third tail is sent out solo, and then the final tail appears as a sort of dragon, making Mother Brain-like head/neck attacks while spitting fire. A nice lip pogo lets us barely poke the final tail's head right when it becomes vulnerable for the third hit, ending the fight in style.
And that's it! That's Hachiemon. There's some more cutscenes and text to get through before the movie file ends and the (very short) credits roll.
I think this is a really charming game, unfortunately a lot of that charm is lost in the TAS because you skip most of the cutscenes, but if you do decide to play this game and would like to 'read along' with what's going (since there is no English patch afaik), you can read a complete transcription of the game's dialogue and other text
here.
As mentioned, there are other difficulties for this game, and completing them (as well as collecting all the lips for each level) net you unique trophies, and an alternate title screen, respectively. So there's definitely a reason for someone to go for a Hard Mode, All Lips TAS.
I think it's also cute that the original Namco website for this game is
still online :p
Many thanks to the great Kaztalek for putting me on to this game and offering some useful feedback on my WIPs along the way.
Thank you also to Trysdyn, for the wonderful RTA run that I used as a reference for some strats and level traversal.
Thanks to Brewski for the excellent translation, as well as samplename for commissioning it
Thank uuuuuu for checking this out <3
Darkman425: Love me a good grapple hook style game. Everything looks well optimized and planned out in terms of lips gathered to complete levels. Nice work!
Something I needed an explanation on was the difficulty differences. Thanks to
the author's response, I was able to learn the changes between difficulties. What Google Translate gave me as "Ordinary" difficulty (which the SRC board for this game calls "Normal") has a lower lips quota which does make the routing a bit different from "Difficult" and "Super Hard" (again, Google Translate so this might not quite match). That is distinct enough for me to say that the lowest difficulty can be a branch by itself. I'm not if the differences between "Normal" and "Difficult" is distinct enough to separate for future 100% runs but that's a problem for later.
Accepting to Standard under the easiest difficulty. I'll leave it to the publisher on how to name the difficulty branch name, although I'm leaning towards "Normal" personally.
