General info:

Even though this run is about 5 seconds slower than the current publication, we aim to obsolete it by using the hardest difficulty instead of the easiest.

On Mania, if you die, you lose all of your weapons (except for the first two, but then you lose their upgrades), what makes death boosts (used on the last level, as we dont have a shield there) not viable to do here. Also, on Mania, enemies are more agressive and have more health, making so that we need to have more precise movement during the levels and generally looks more entertaining.

Using turbo is faster than holding the shoot button. Also, blue particles mean we aren't dealing damage to the enemy, while orange ones followed by white flashing means we are.

The highest damage possible is hitting all of the bullets form the 4th weapon at the same time on the weak point of the boss, though that's generally not possible without damage boosting, which requires a shield (or playing on easier difficulties to die while sacrificing a single weapon instead of your whole inventory).

Sometimes, using the 4th weapon is not the best choice, so we generally use the 1st or 3rd weapon then.

Of course, because of the differences we talked about earlier, we are expected to be a bit slower. But, by comparing gameplay, it's possible to see we have slightly better optimization, without accounting for new strats, like the second boss, which are much faster.

nymx: Claiming for judging.

nymx: Hello ShgofcTAS,

You’ve made an excellent run here. I’d like to point out one item to consider: you’re aiming to obsolete [7138] Genesis Thunder Force III "normal" by thegugafá in 22:02.519, but per our guidelines, we allow up to three difficulty categories—typically “easiest” and “hardest”.

In the current TAS, the run remains on the “normal” branch and reflects the “easiest” difficulty. However, your run performance meets the criteria for the “hardest” category, which is defined as “mania.” In effect, this broadens the categorization for this game, on our site.

If you have techniques that could further optimize the existing “normal” category, please feel free to apply them. The results will be evaluated against the current "normal" publication.

For now, I'm accepting this run to “Standard” as a new branch of “mania.”

r3gamerz: Processing...

nymx: Replacing with a 160 frame improvement.