Don't the later transformations cost more tokens than the earlier ones? I remember the walrus being slow, the bee being expensive, and the pumpkin being both of those. The bee was by far my favorite, but I don't think it was used to collect very many jiggies in the 100% speedrun. (Maybe someone should time parts of the 100% speedrun to rank the jiggies by how slow they are to collect, as a rough estimate of something.)
The pumpkin is slow and expensive, but you need it to unlock Rusty Bucket Bay. There are two ways to deal with this:
- Use the pumpkin. It's 20 Mumbo tokens, but you cna get a bunch of extra stuff in Mad Monster Mansion with it.
- Use the Treasure Trove Cove unlock code for Rusty Bucket Bay ("CHEAT WHY NOT TAKE A TRIP INSIDE GRUNTYS RUSTY SHIP"). For speedrun purposes, you could hit the switch to open up the Click Clock Woods puzzle, then go and enter the code AND hit the Click Clock Woods puzzle at the same time. Rusty Bucket Bay's on the way to Click Clock Woods anyway. This way, you don't even need the pumpkin (unless you feel a need to get the stuff in Mad Monster Mansion). But I don't know if Bisqwit et al. would allow that. It would be nice to skip that, anyway.
Strange, I thought the bee got a lot of jiggies... I was thinking of cutting out the walrus, although that only saves 15 tokens.
The bee is only usable in Spring. It lets you get the Witch Switch Jiggy (although you need to get into Winter to hit that anyway) and a bunch of stuff really high up, as well as (not sure) some stuff from the Zubba hive. Not a huge amount of stuff, really.
Not having played the game for about 5 years (and not having watched the speedrun in about a year), I can't remember much, but isn't the pumpkin required to get to a new painting? I vaguely remember breaking a gate, going into a coffin to get something...
Near the entrance to Mad Monster Mansion, there's a little cottage with a hole in the door. In the non-sequence-break fashion, you go in there as the pumpkin so you can hit the switch, which is a series of things toward unlocking Rusty Bucket Bay.
Does the walrus need to go out of level boundaries to gain access to more things? If not, maybe we can safely eliminate him.
There is absolutely nothing outside of Freezeezy Peak that the Walrus is used for. However, it is a prerequisite for 2 Jiggies in there, and a third can only be played once you've done the previous one with the Walrus. You really don't want to get rid of this transformation.
A little transformation synopsis:
1. Mumbo's Mountain - Termite (5 tokens). 2 Jiggies, 6 notes necessary, 6 notes made easier.
2. Bubblegloop Swamp - Alligator (10 tokens). 1 Jiggy, 6 notes necessary, 1 Jinjo and a bunch of notes made easier.
3. Freezeezy Peak - Walrus (15 tokens). 3 (!) Jiggies necessary, 9 notes made easier.
4. Mad Monster Mansion - Pumpkin (20 tokens). 2 Jiggies, 5 notes necessary, quite a few notes made easier. Required (grr) for unlocking Rusty Bucket Bay (?).
5. Click Clock Wood - Bee (25 tokens). 2 (?) Jiggies necessary. Only active in Spring.
The optimum transformations to skip would probably be the Bee, Alligator, and maybe Termite. Without the Termite or the Bee, also, you don't need the Witch Switches in Mumbo's Mountain or Click Clock Wood. That could save you a few seconds as well. You may be able to skip the Pumpkin too. Maybe.
Also, it's interesting to note that if you use the Washing Machine transformation ("WISHY WASHY BANJO" after completing the Bottles puzzles in Banjo's house) then you don't have to pay for transformations at all. If you can get through the game with this, it may save a LOT of time because you only need 25 tokens in total instead of 75 (or even less if you skip the higher-level transformations). And, while you're going to the Click Clock Wood puzzle, you can always return to Treasure Trove Cove to input "NOBONUS" and get rid of the Washing Machine, if you want.
