With some newly found glitches and improvement of route design, this movie improved the
current published movie by 2871 frames.
Major improvements
Level up skip
Normally, the game is paused during the level up animation. However, by opening the mini-map just before leveling up, the game won't pause, and this can save a couple of frames every time. This was found by Chewy4u.
Soul acquiring skip & Area name skip
When acquiring a new soul, a dialog will pop up showing the description of the soul. But if the soul is acquired during the level up animation, the dialog will automatically disappear after the level up animation ends. In previous
runs this was done by getting soul and leveling up at the same frame, but the level up skip glitch make it easier to archive (or harder, because we need to manipulate the path of the soul flying so that Soma acquires the soul as late as possible before the level up animation ends).
However, this is not the whole story of this glitch. The dialog just disappears, not being closed. The dialog still remains there waiting to be closed, though it's invisible. We can change the key configuration to avoid pressing A or B during moving, and the dialog will never be closed. If Soma acquires another new soul in this state, we can close the old dialog to immediately skip the new dialog, and this makes the new dialog invisible and the glitch remains.
We can also close the dialog when visiting a new area. This will unpause the game when displaying the area name, saving about 4 seconds every time.
Graham phase 2 skip & Chaos phase 2 eyes skip
Like Julius doing the double orb glitch in
these runs, Soma can also do this glitch by down kicking (or sliding) + red soul attack. This can skip the 2nd phase of Graham, and lowering the defense of the Chaos core 4 times by only destroying 2 eyes.
New route to Julius Boss
Going though the whole Clock Tower turns out to be faster than the route used in the current run.
Julius phase 2 skip
Julius will instantly use Grand Cross after his HP is less than 2000, and enter the 2nd phase. But before that, if he was too far from the center of the room, he would use Omnia Vanitas to go back to the center. This gives us enough time to beat him before he can use Grand Cross.
Samsara: At this point I'm convinced Aria of Sorrow will never have a run without multiple wild, inventive improvements. The pause skips, the double-hits to break Graham and Chaos, the Grand Cross skip... I think I know this game well and yet each new TAS legitimately surprises me with what it comes up with. Absolutely stellar work!
