^Yes, the player can go to the Celadon/Saffron area and perform the Fresh Water item underflow trick, which is a number of minutes faster (something like ~14-15 min total). That's why the goal of this submission is to challenge the current categories, a move that I applaud.
A quick summary:
- For a number of years,
this 1 hour 19 minute run was the fastest R/B run, and had very little controversy as the majority of the core gameplay was kept (6/8 badges, defeating the Elite Four normally, etc).
- Then,
this 41 minute run came out, which first began the trend of performing a glitched warp directly into the Hall of Fame. Many saw this as too similar to the Yellow save corruption run as it broke the core gameplay, but it was accepted as an improvement as the main goal of the R/B runs was simply "beat the game without save corruption" which this does.
- The R/B category was eventually improved down to
this 28 minute video, which continues to perform a glitched warp into the Hall of Fame, still with no save corruption of any kind. Around this time, the 1h19m video was deemed different enough and was split into a "no glitched warps" category. Since the gameplay was drastically different as well as the goals, this was a perfectly reasonable decision.
- Now, the Brock Through Walls glitch takes the above distinction and throws it out the window. Using it, both the "no glitched warps" and "no save corruption" goals can be made into one similar movie, only a few minutes apart, not very different, and both well below the current 28m publication. Basically, there is no longer a good reason to keep the two categories as is.
My personal opinion:
- As the "no glitched warps" category is no longer different enough to be its own branch, it should be removed.
- There should be a "no save corruption" goal movie that's basically very similar to this except using item underflow in Saffron to beat the game a few minutes faster. This submission would then be rejected on known suboptimality.
- For those that want a Gen I movie that maintains some semblance of intended gameplay, there's a few solutions:
-- Make a 'glitchless' category defined the same way as real-time speedrunners, banning the use of several glitches (con: obviously some are unavoidable and thus pointless to ban such as the 1/256 miss glitch, making the category hard to concretely define)
-- Keep the 1h19m run as a separate branch. I would heavily dislike this as it would be very arbitrary to define ("no save corruption and no glitched warps, oh, and you can use this WTW glitch but not that one")
-- Make a Yellow version "no glitched warps" branch, which would be quite similar to the 1h18m run with a concise definition. This works solely because Brock skip isn't possible in Yellow.
-- Argue somehow that the Gotta Catch 'Em All branches adequately resemble normal gameplay (??)
