That's my bad. I had been up nearly 24 hours when I first posted and then never updated any further so I apologize for that. As stated before, not much is known about the full screen 9999 hitbox still sadly. Some things that effect it are how long you charged the imp and what type of whip you did (standing, jumping, crouching). Normally I know TASVideos doesn't factor in the language difference for improvements but it seems a lot more varied there so it's not known for sure if that could potentially do things any faster. I doubt it would be that big of a difference though so it'd probably be the best to continue using the US version. You can set it up anywhere as long as you have cards. You can do so as mentioned before with the falling platforms, a frozen enemy, or by doing a Bone Float. After that you activate the Quick Draw (Mars + Griffin) and hold B for a second. If the green circles stay around Nathan and you can move around, then it's good. Next you switch to the Imp (Saturn + Black Dog) and charge it by holding B. Lastly you let go of B and whip again. This is the part that is a bit random/finnicky right now. A lot of the time it'll do 1 damage, or sometimes normal whip damage but after about 5 seconds or so is where it was starting to 9999 in my testing. If you want to make the hitbox permanent, you have to do a jump whip instead and leave the screen the same frame it were to hit everything. Then once it's activated, you turn off your cards and whip. Hold B on this until the whip starts spinning and it will make the sword charge animation loop and never finish. You will have to repeat this any time you whip or else the animation will finish and you'll lose the effect. Once the glitch is activated, the strength of it is set at that point. So any equipment, all the level ups, ect that happen afterwards are completely irrelevant. It's also worth noting that if you get hit, you lose the glitch as well. This only matters for the Ghosts that can spawn on top of you. Hopefully I didn't forget anything. Feel free to let me know if you need any help!
so uh I'm about to head to bed but figured I'd share some things here from what was going on yesterday/today. There was a new glitch discovered by halgorithm that makes things a lot faster. There's way too much to explain now but tl;dr: the weapon/familar you can charge up are broken in combination. We don't really know why it occurs still which was what I was originally going to test. Both Simply and I had the idea to do rough draft any% magician TAS with this to see what sort of time was possible with it. They finished theirs cause I started messing around but I managed to find another application to break the game even further.
This was fantastic, a very elegant experience indeed. I'd love to know, comparatively, how much faster this run would be than the current one if the conditions were the same? Though I reckon the current run would also be much faster if it didn't skip the second Manticore orb.
I never actually got around to test this in my 100% runs (I only really thought of it after finishing them), but wouldn't it be faster to cancel Headhunter's second form falling animation with one of those platforms?
I always thought it counted as a separate entity which could be killed to make the fight easier. Maybe this could save time in the 100% run...? Although probably not enough to make me want to redo it.