Nice work. I was interested in seeing a TAS for this game and it has now happened. I decided to take a little look at this game myself and I figured out a few things. If you walk off a platform, stop moving and then move again, you can reset the falling timing to walk on air and jump when you are done. You can even mash a direction to slowly descend. I figured out that with this exploit, you can get the keys early on level 1, saving a lot of time.
I have made an improvement incorporating this skip. This saves 45 seconds (the reason it is longer is because it includes the DS BIOS and goes to the credits). The rest of the run is the same outside of a few sync adjustments in certain areas. The run definitely has potential to be optimised further. I imagine air walking can be used in more places to save time and there are a couple of other general optimisations which could be implemented throughout the run.
1. The game lags for a bit while it loads a textbox so textboxes should be avoided whenever possible and fast
2. If you climb just below the top of a ladder, stop moving and then move up for one frame on the next frame, you can climb up the ladder without that significant height gain.
User movie #639145398215885272