I came up with a route for this game that's pretty similar to the above but saves at water town (and deathwarps there) instead of relying on the initial save location at scuttle town. It seems like this would end up saving a lot of time, mostly because you don't actually have to talk to mimic after completing the fourth labyrinth; you can just warp to oasis and use the spy scope immediately. I'm a little hesitant to start this, though, because it's probably going to be about an hour in length. Is there any interest in a completed run?
also, I managed to get OoB in the fourth labyrinth (
as seen in this video) and with the bird form it seems promising in that you can fly to the boss room in a lot less time than it would take to get the extra keys and go up there normally. The problem is that I can't see any way of getting back in bounds. Strange things also happened when I moved too far out of bounds: most of the time the game froze, but a few times I just died and respawned normally with Shantae flashing back and forth every few frames between her normal appearance and this:
I don't know if it's an emulation glitch or not but it would probably be worth investigating. If anybody's interested I uploaded a
savestate.
edit: you can get back in-bounds the same way you get out and by some great coincidence there's a similar hole near the boss door that saves a big chunk of time in the dungeon itself as well as letting me do without an exit candy.