Thread necro time!
I'm actually scooty from the OP!
With a current human playthrough clocking at ~18 min for this game, I think it's time it gets the TAS treatment.
speedrun.com mirror
The initial pass for the game is aiming for an any% completion definitely sub-18.
Some interesting notes from research on the first level:
* multi-punching (i.e. one punch hitting multiple enemies) is likely suboptimal as it incurs some pretty harsh input lag (to the tune of 1.25-2x increase in the next available frame for input)
* damage values for attacks are all over the place. I have not determined specifically what's happening, but one punch will hit for 4hp, another for 2, yet another for 3.
* Double smash! is only optimal for certain pairs of enemies that can be 1shot by the attack. The attack itself will regularly 1 shot the "boss-tier" mobs found at the end of each level (not named super villains since they cannot be grabbed, Shriek being the notable exception)
At first glance the largest optimization will come from planning effective use of power hits against multiple enemies. I still have yet to determine if double smashing increments the combo counter that fills the power hit (going to locate the memory addresses for that in the next few days) but if it does, then that might be a viable way to build power hits. I don't think it does though, so double smashes, while fun, will likely have to be eschewed in favor of Punch-Punch-Knee-...-Punch-Punch-Knee combos that quickly fill the meter.
Initially I doubted the viability of this game but that was based on a very unoptimized and not even remotely explored run. The speedrunners of this game have determined an optimal level/character route that bypasses the late-game level that broke me on my first run of this game (police station).
It's yet to be determined if there is an even more optimal route than what the human players are using, but for now using their run as a template will hopefully get the conversation going.