Zook Hero Z in 31:54.85 by Noxxa

Game objectives

• Emulator used: BizHawk 1.8.2 (first half), then BizHawk 1.11.3 (second half), then lsnes rr2-β23 (submission)
• Aims for fastest time
• Any% (same as 100% in this game, as all items are required to be able to beat the game)
• Abuses a whole lot of movement glitches
• Takes damage to save time
• Abuses death to save time
• Manipulates luck
• Finishes a tetralogy of April Fools' Zook Hero Z submissions

About the game

Story

Story

• Zook / Luke / Rock (the main, playable character)
• Zook Hero Z / Luke the Hero (Z) / Rock Hero (the game name or series name, also sometimes used to refer to the main character)
• Dr. Mitt / Dr. Mean (the evil doctor)
• Dr. Steve / Dr. Stevens / Dr. Meki (the good doctor)

About the run

Tricks

Movement

Things Zook can do:

• Stand

• Walk

• Jump

• Shoot

• Slide

• Dash

• Slide-jump / Dash jump

• Climb ladders

• Wall jump

• Air stall ^[1]

Things Zook can do with the Foot upgrade:

• Air dash forward

• Air dash upward ("High Jump")

• Air slide ^[1]

• Air dash stall ^[1]

• Air stand ^[1]

Glitches

• Air stall

• Screen out-of-bounds

• • Miniboss skip

• • • Miniboss death-warp skip

• Room skip

• Ladder crash

• Charge glitch

• Wall vertical zipping

• Capsule animation skip

• Timing glitch

• Wall rapid jump

• Aerial rapid jump

• Leg upgrade glitches

• • Air slide

• • Air dash stall

• • Air dash ladder cancel

Boss notes

• Cannon - Grass
• Earth - Water
• Ice - Water
• Fire - Water
• Water - Grass
• Grass - Fire
• Fortress 4 - Water
• Fortress 5 - Water
• Fortress 6 - Water

Minibosses

Boss refights

Weapons

Zook Buster ("Energy Grenade Launcher")

Cannon ("Revolving Spiked Ball")

• Uncharged: Shoots a large spiky ball which arcs forwards and then boomerangs back. Kind of like the Quick Boomerang from Mega Man 2, except much, much slower. Is intended to be used to destroy a wall in Earth's stage to collect the Head upgrade, but this is glitched past instead so the weapon is never used in the run.
• Charged: Shoots an even larger spiky ball which circles around Zook for one round. Also never used in the run.

Earth ("Rock Protector")

• Uncharged: Summons three rocks around Zook in a triangle pattern, which then move outward. Used once in Water's stage to collect the Hand upgrade.
• Charged: Summons a rock shield in front of Zook, which is held out until B is pressed again to launch it forward. Never used in the run.

Ice ("Frost Flinger")

• Uncharged: Shoots out three snowflakes in a spread pattern. Used once in the Fire stage to access the Body upgrade.
• Charged: Shoots out a projectile which moves forward for a bit, and then splits into four snowflakes in an X pattern. Was considered for use while routing to get multiple hits on bosses at once, but this turned out to be largely ineffective. Only used once, because I happened to have the weapon active and the angle of one of the snowflakes was just right to hit a particular enemy with it.

Fire ("Flame Thrower")

• Uncharged: Shoots out three small fireballs from behind Zook, which converge on the ground in front of Zook and form a pillar of fire. Only used once while playing around in the Grass boss refight, as only charged shots are used to hit the boss.
• Charged: Same as uncharged, except the pillar of fire is replaced by a wave of fire that moves along the ground for a little while. Used against the Grass boss during the refight.

Water ("Super Foam")

• Uncharged: Shoots two bubbles forward which float up (sort of like the Air Shooter in Mega Man 2, except it's only 2 shots here). A very effective weapon for clearing out enemies in the way. Its only downside is it uses up ammo relatively quickly.
• Charged: This is the boss killer. The majority of bosses with a lifebar are weak to this weapon: this includes Earth, Fire, Ice, the Fortress 4, Fortress 5 and Fortress 6 bosses. The weapon itself is a shield formed around Zook. It looks like the Rolling Shield from Mega Man X in appearance, but is less useful: it doesn't protect Zook from taking damage, and disappears on any single hit on an enemy or boss. Of note is that the hitbox for this weapon is kind of uneven: it's practically impossible to hit an enemy from the right without getting hit, whereas it is much easier to hit an enemy from the left without getting hit. For this reason, in most bossfights where you see me use this weapon, I almost always hit the enemy from the left side.

Grass ("Saucer Launcher")

• Uncharged: Shoots a slow-moving leaf projectile that zigzags in front of the player. Used for a few hits.
• Charged: This is the mini-boss killer, used in Fortress 1, 2, 3, 7 and 9 to defeat the minibosses and final bosses as fast as possible, and also used against the Canno and Water bosses to defeat them as fast as possible, as it is their weakness. It shoots two slightly bigger slow-moving leaf projectiles that zigzag in front of the player. Because it consists of two slow-moving projectiles, it is easy to get multiple hits on the large miniboss enemies, which allows me to get barrages of charged shots in to output as much damage as possible.

Stage-by-stage comments

Routing

1. Cannon ~ get Foot upgrade
2. Earth ~ defeat boss
3. Water ~ get Hand upgrade
4. Grass ~ defeat boss
5. Water ~ defeat boss
6. (Intermission - Fortress stage 1)
7. (Intermission - Fortress stage 2)
8. (Intermission - Fortress stage 3)
9. Cannon ~ defeat boss
10. Earth ~ get Head upgrade
11. Ice ~ defeat boss
12. Fire ~ get Body upgrade
13. Fire ~ defeat boss
14. (Fortress stage 4)
15. (Fortress stage 5)
16. (Fortress stage 6)
17. (Fortress stage 7)
18. (Fortress stage 8)
19. (Fortress stage 9)

• The first objective is to get the Foot upgrade for overall superior movement throughout the stages. It makes no particularly major difference, but being able to use airdashes, air sliding and high jumping allows for cleaner movement throughout the stages, saving frames here and there. Getting the Foot upgrade does not require any other weapon or upgrade (it's supposed to require the Grass weapon, but I can skip past this requirement), so there is no particular reason not to start off with it.
• Next up, I want to get the Hand upgrade to speed up boss fights. Without it, bosses take 8 hits with the Zook buster, or 6 hits with their weakness weapon. The Hand upgrade reduces this to 6 and 4 hits respectively. Since bosses have a long invincibility time (over three seconds per hit), saving over six seconds per boss battle is really major. However, I need the Earth weapon to be able to obtain the Hand upgrade, as I can't bypass that restriction this time around. So, defeating the Earth boss is my next step, followed by getting the Hand upgrade.
• After getting the Hand upgrade, I still need to get some weapons that bosses are actually weak to (as no boss is weak to Earth's weapon). The options for weakness weapons I have are Fire (effective against Grass), Grass (effective against Water and Cannon), and Water (effective against Fire and Ice). Since these weapons form a triangle, I will have face one of the three without their weakness weapon anyway. I opted to go with Grass first and Water next; this is because the Grass weapon is required for the intermission fortress stages (to kill the mini-bosses in there fast). After Grass, I had the options of Cannon and Water; Water's weapon has far more utility than Cannon's weapon, so that one goes next. Fire, then Grass was also a possible option, but since the Fire weapon is also practically useless, I deemed that option inferior. Really, Grass and Water are the only weapons I really need, so taking those two weapons to the intermission fortress was certainly the most optimal pick.
• After the intermission fortress, I can basically do the next stages in practically any order, as I don't need any of their boss weapons and I don't need any of their upgrades either. The only notable requirement was that I end the next set of stages on a boss, as defeating all bosses without having collected all upgrades yet will trigger a cutscene with Dr. Steve every time after I leave a stage. The only other requirement was that I defeat Ice before getting the Body upgrade, as I need the Ice weapon to be able to get that upgrade.
• I opted to go with the Cannon stage revisit first, and then Earth again, just to mirror the beginning of the run.
• Since I need to defeat the Ice boss before the body upgrade, and get the body upgrade before defeating the last boss, that fixes the rest of the stage order to Ice boss - Body upgrade - Fire boss.
• From there on, it's straight-forward level-to-level gameplay in the fortress again.

Cannon (1) ~ Foot upgrade

• Let's have a nice, short and easy stage to start with, shall we? This stage is noticeably shorter than the rest of the primary stages, both to reach the boss (which we'll do later on in the run) and to get the Foot upgrade, which we are going to do now.
• In the first room, there is a glitchy enemy. This glitchy enemy is exclusive to the Rockman DX6 release of the game (the re-release by Li Cheng), which is the version I'm using because it is the only dumped one so far. The enemy is very quickly destroyed anyway, so it doesn't matter much in the end.
• At the end of room five, there's a green block which is blocking the route below. It's supposed to be destroyed by using the Grass weapon. However, I instead clip through it (by being far enough to the right of the screen) to grab the ladder below and then clip through the wall from there.
• Room 8 (with two torpedo/shark/propellor enemies) required a very precise sequence of movements to weave between the two without getting hit by either of them.
• By the end of room 9, I spend a few frames scrolling the screen further to the right, as scrolling down requires the screen to be fully scrolled to the edge (otherwise Zook just falls and dies). Similar situations appear a few times later in the run.
• I take damage right before the end to skip a part of the teleporter animation. This saves about a second.

• [02:04:44] <natt> YOU GET FOOT ARM
• The Foot upgrade (known as Leg Booster in the manual, or Foot Arm in the game itself, comically enough) enables the air dash, which allows for a lot of useful tricks (elaborated on in the Tricks section). This is why I get this upgrade first off.

Earth (1) ~ Boss

• Best music in the game. Let's just get that out there first.
• This stage is one of the longer ones in the game. It feels kind of repetitive too, so it just kind of drags on. The music makes up for it, though.
• Reaching the right edge of the screen before the stage goes down allows for some wall shenanigans again. Due to how the stage is structured, I do this twice throughout the stage.

• For real, these instruction manual biographies are hilarious. They are all so corny and so silly, even when they try to be serious.
• This is the only boss battle for which I will have neither the arm upgrade nor a weakness weapon, which means I can only do 2 points of damage at a time. This makes this boss battle the longest one in the game. Things will go significantly faster from here on.

Water (1) ~ Hand upgrade

• Is it just me, or does "control the city's population" sound far more morbid than they actually intended it to be?
• By clipping into the wall at the end of the first room, I go through a comically long sequence of screen scrolling with very little movement as I scroll down three screens, then left and up, all with Zook hardly doing anything other than falling or doing some very short movement. Note that screen scrolling edges are fixed for every room, and it's not possible to go right any earlier than I do, even though the shape of the stage looks like it would allow doing so.
• At the room with the rotating spike floors, I manage to clip into the wall with the wall vertical zip trick, while also somehow taking damage from the spike floor without having any hitstun. This just seems to be something weird with these spike floors.
• This is the first and only miniboss you'll see in either of the Zook Z games. And I bypass it instead of defeating it (as that would take too long). I use the room skip glitch to glitch myself into the room after the miniboss room, and kill myself on a mysterious spike that somehow is around here. The room after the boss room doubles as a checkpoint, so I respawn in the room after the miniboss, without having had to defeat the miniboss.
• There's a boss door right before the Hand Arm for some reason. Going through boss doors is slow, so I clip through the wall above it instead.

• Also a very useful upgrade, which is why I prioritized getting this second (after the Leg upgrade). Being able to charge up the Zook Buster an extra level, and being able to charge up boss weapons speeds up boss battles significantly.

Grass ~ Boss

• I do another miniboss skip by deathwarping here, although this time you won't see the miniboss being loaded. This is because I avoid loading it by being close enough to the bottom of the screen (and room-skipping into the next room, which is again a checkpoint room), but this results in dying anyway. It's still the fastest method to avoid and bypass the miniboss.
• The springs in the second part of the stage are very convenient, as they allow Zook to continue moving on at full speed without getting slowed down by having to slide and jump on the ground and such things. Crossing them this way also looks pretty cool.
• I switch to the Earth weapon to destroy a block that otherwise would prevent Zook from reaching the Hand upgrade area. I have not found any way to get around this.
• Right before the boss door, I slow down movement a bit so that I can get Zook Z further to the right of the screen before reaching the boss door. This way, I can clip through the boss door instead of enter it normally, which is, again, much faster.

• Wait, are these "monsters" supposed to be robots or not? If they're robots, where did they come from? If they're not robots, where did they come from??
• Since I don't have this boss' weakness weapon yet (Fire), I still have to make do with the good ol' Zook Buster. As I have the Arm upgrade now, I can do up to 3 damage per shot, which means I can down it in 6 shots. I will have boss weakness weapons for the next fights from here on, so expect those battles to be even shorter.

Water (2) ~ Boss

• Most of the stage goes pretty much exactly the same as the last time. The only major difference (before the route branches off) is using the Grass weapon instead of selecting the Earth weapon, because I will use Grass for the boss instead of Earth for the block.
• I managed to get the miniboss music to go off-beat somehow when entering the miniboss. I have no idea how this happened, but it was funny.
• As the room right before the boss door (where I last time went down for the Hand upgrade) is a single screen and the boss door is on the right of it, I can Room Skip that room and skip the boss door that way. It's one of the more obvious uses of Room Skip, as the boss corridor is quite different from the room that precedes it.

• Okay, that defintely does not sound like a robot. Although it's still supposed to be. Or so I thought. I don't know what these things are supposed to be anymore.
• The boss room has a conveyor belt on the floor for some weird reason. It moves you left on the left side, and right on the right side.
• Annoyingly, this boss has an animation where he forms a bubble and enters it, during which it is briefly invincible. It also happens to do this right when his mercy invincibility from being hit is supposed to end. I found out about the timing glitch to get around this by the time I reached the boss refight, but was not able to apply it here yet.

• So the instruction manual calls it a "spacecraft". I'm still going to call it a fortress, though. The instruction manual is correct though, in that these levels are a bit of a difficulty spike compared to the robot master stages we've had so far.

Fortress 1

• When the intermission fortress is available, it will automatically be entered after some time. During this time, it's not possible to have any control over the stage select screen. It looks like I'm just being slow with pressing the start button, but in fact there is no control at all during this part.
• I switch to the Water weapon midway through the stage because it's the only way to deal with that enemy in that same room. Other ways to try and get past it would take even more time.
• During the elevator section, the elevator will go up every time after a certain amount of frames have passed and Zook is standing or moving on the elevator.
• This is the first time in this game that I'm faced with a miniboss-style enemy and actually have to defeat it. There will be a few more like this in this game.
• Entering the miniboss room the way I did causes the miniboss tile graphic to be offset about half a screen to the left for some unknown reason. I have no idea why it does this, but it doesn't have any effect on gameplay; its hitboxes are still in the same spot as normal.
• Because charged Grass takes more ammo to kill a miniboss than is available, I have to use a weapon energy restoring tank to restore Grass weapon energy midway through the fight. This will also happen some more times later on.
• I spent a ton of time optimizing this boss fight. Miniboss battles like these are some of the most random in the game, and it is very easy to lose random frames out of nowhere. This one was the worst. What didn't help is that this miniboss in particular had a significantly smaller hitbox than it appears to have. Other minibosses have that too, but not as bad as this one.

Fortress 2

• Thanks to wall rapid jumping and the general layout of the first part of this stage, I get to show off a nice bit of clipping through ceilings here.
• Again, I need to use the Water weapon to deal with some of the enemies here.
• I take damage once during the miniboss fight because I needed to stay high up to hit the miniboss with multiple charged Grass attacks in quick succession.
• Dr. Mitt shows up at the end of this miniboss battle. Why he appears in this one, and not the next one (or the final boss one for that matter), I have no idea. The game does still allow control during his little "cutscene" so I have some fun with it in the meantime.

Fortress 3

• The fun thing with those areas where there are two vertical routes with ladders is being able to zip through ceilings to switch between the routes. It's just so fun how you're not intended to go there, but do it anyway because it happens to be the more straightforward way to go.
• I take damage during the miniboss fight in order to get to the right of the miniboss' hitbox. I need to do this to be able to double-hit it with charged Grass shots while it is moving to the left.

Cannon (2) ~ Boss

• The beginning of the stage is different, because now I have the ability to use high jumps and air dashes for more effective movement strategies. In particular, the strategy in room 3 is not possible at all without the Foot upgrade.
• In that same room, I end up sliding left/right in place for a while because I had to raise my x position (relative to the camera) up high enough to clip through that wall, but then had to let the screen scroll right again so that I could go up the ladder without triggering the ladder game crash.
• The first shark torpedo propeller enemy was very hard to get past. The strategy I use now looks kind of slow, but it was still the best way to get past it. These enemies are immune to attacks from the front - this even includes trying to hit it with Water bubbles from below. Air sliding above it was practically the only way to get past it.

• Overly dramatic much?
• Like the Water boss, this boss has a part of his attack pattern where he is invincible for a brief time, and just like the Water boss, he does this right when his invincibility is supposed to run out. I managed to get around this with the timing glitch, though.

Earth (2) ~ Head upgrade

• Once again we're revisiting a stage from before, and the run is basically identical to the previous one again up until the separation point.
• The intended way to get past the vertical bar blocking your way to the alternate set of stairs is to destroy it with the Cannon weapon. However, that is slower than the alternative strategy of slightly slowing down to scroll further past the camera, clip into the vertical bar, and reach the stairs from there.
• The method of taking damage in the last room looks a bit inefficient, but it's the best way I could possibly get taking damage from that enemy, and it gives me just barely enough time to make it to the upgrade capsule and still trigger the animation skip.

• Basically, the Head upgrade allows Zook to break certain blocks with his head much like the Head upgrade in Mega Man X. There are very few of these blocks in the game though. The only ones I can recall off-hand are in Fortress 8.

Ice ~ Boss

• This stage is long. It's definitely the longest level by some distance, and goes in basically every direction at some point. It takes the TAS more than two full minutes (a lot of which is just screen scrolling time, but still) just to get through the stage portion and reach the boss doors. (Now imagine if I didn't skip the miniboss battle).
• I switch to the Water weapon relatively early on because of a very annoyingly placed enemy that I could only get rid of with charged Water. The Water weapon does help a whole lot throughout the rest of the stage as well, to the point I have to luck manipulate for weapon refills a bunch of times because I'm using a whole lot of it.
• After the room where I switch to Water, I do a fancy clip into the floor so that I can start dropping into the next shaft being inside the left wall.
• Inside that shaft, I use an interesting strategy: I wall-cling into the platform there to avoid getting killed by the spikes below it, and then move right again once I'm below the spike. The rest of the (lengthy) shaft is cleared in more conventional ways.
• At the bottom of the same shaft, there is yet another annoying enemy that requires a charged Water, and right after that there's an annoying enemy which is just far enough out that the Water bubble wouldn't hit it normally. I do a small jump to wedge myself into the wall just a bit further, and then the Water bubble can hit it.
• The latter bit of the stage has rooms with vertical fans, which cause Zook to rise when he's above them. This rise goes at a fixed speed of 1 pixel per frame, and basically I can't speed this rise up at all. So to move upwards faster, I actually have to find ways to avoid the fan effect. This results in some interesting movement options.
• The slowdown/scroll Zook further ahead trick is used yet again to clip into the boss door instead of entering it normally to save time.

• I love the way they tried to give these bosses personalities. It just comes across as so weird.
• Also, "Ice Medusa"? What is that even supposed to be?

Fire (1) ~ Body upgrade

• Again with the "control the city's population". It still sounds unintentionally morbid.
• After the first couple of rooms, I jam myself into a wall again to go down the shaft faster. I'm basically just far enough to the right of the screen that collision starts getting messed up. Sometimes this allows going down all the way, and sometimes Zook will land on some platform. In this particular shaft, it allows me to move through the first platform, but the second one would have me land, so I have to go down in the conventional way from there on.
• I switch to Ice where I did because I would be needing the Ice weapon later anyway, but mostly because charged Ice was just a convenient weapon to hit the enemy there with. I had to kill that enemy as fast as possible because otherwise it would start shooting projectiles which I would not be able to dodge in the narrow corridor. I actually spent a significant amount of time in this area, just because that enemy was such a pain.
• The room after that was also a pain because I needed to make sure I that the fire bird would attack at just the right frame (it's triggered by hitting it with an Ice shot), while also making sure the Ice spread shots hit both the bird and the block that was in the way of the stairs. I went through a lot of iterations with that Ice shot, until I couldn't squeeze any more frames out of it.
• For extra bonus points, the way I had to take damage with the bird also left a pretty tight frame window to enter the upgrade capsule within the animation skip window.

• I'm not sure if the Body part actually even does anything. I don't recall it making any significant change to damage taken. Then again, I don't take damage a whole lot throughout the run, so maybe it does work and I just haven't tried it enough.

Fire (2) ~ Boss

• The first part is, again, effectively the same as what we have just gone through. Since we just entered this stage the previous time, it's still fresh in memory.
• There's one section with some enemies that are like missiles on carts, and when they're destroyed, the missile starts flying forward. For extra fun, this is in an area with very small two-tile high corridors, with some spikes to boot. So how do I possibly dodge the missile? By using aerial rapid jumping to wedge myself into the ceiling, of course!

• I'm not sure whether I am supposed to find these backstories utterly dramatic or absolutely hilarious. I'll go with the absolutely hilarious.

Fortress 4

• Here's where the game starts to get less subtle about the fact that its sound engine came from Mega Man V. The music in this stage (and in the next two, and Fortress 9) makes it all too abudantly clear. It's pretty glorious.
• By this point I realized that I was going to need some more weapon refill tanks for the minibosses in Fortress 7 and 9 (given the way I've been using them against the minibosses in Fortress 1, 2, and 3). So from around this point on, I invested some more time in luck manipulating for weapon refill tank drops whenever possible. I wrote a lua bot to brute-force some combinations of shooting bullets on certain frames while making sure that movement capabilities weren't affected. (In the end, I ended up collecting one more weapon tank than I planned or needed, because after these luck manipulation/brute-forcing moments, I happened to stumble upon another one a bit later by pure chance). The first result of my luck manipulation/brute-forcing came in relatively early in this stage. (Look for drops of white spheres with an "S" inscribed in them).
• The boss is...some...shinobi-esque robot ninja thing. For some reason. It's weak to Water bubbles, just like three of the prior ones, as well as the next two ones. It's also really stupid. It starts out by throwing some shuriken very slowly, which can also be interrupted sometimes just by hitting it, so I just sort of hit it a bunch of times, and it is already almost near death when it's done throwing two shuriken. Normally it would then start to warp out and teleport to the top of the stage and do some other things that I completely forgot about (this boss is really not interesting), but it doesn't even have any time to do any of that here. (It should be noted that from this point on, the bosses do get quite damaging, so while the boss battle looked simple in the run, it is more of a challenge than it looks compared to the other bosses so far).

Fortress 5

• I run into some annoyingly placed enemies pretty soon, so I quickly switch to Water to deal with those. It works out just fine, as the fortress boss is weak to Water bubbleas again anyway.
• This stage features the return of the springs from the Grass stage as well as the fans from the Ice stage, which both make this stage that much more fun to deal with.
• At the end of the springs section, I slide through a 1-tile gap, and then do a little hop on the platform. I do this so I can start another slide, which allows me to keep horizontal momentum all the way throughout the next jump. This is another quite tricky area, as I can manage to get over the ceiling block that's covering the stairs, but it requires me to go very high up, and then actually move down a bit before I can catch the stairs and scroll the screen up. This was a tricky bit to get right.
• The boss of this fortress stage looks like it's inspired by Copy Robot from Mega Man, except it's pink and shoots some sort of heart shaped projectiles, among other things, so I'm guessing it's supposed to be some female equivalent to Zook or something along those lines. Regardless, this boss has a less stupid attack pattern and still does pretty high damage, so it's still definitely one of the harder bosses of the game. Not that it matters for the TAS though, it still goes down just like the rest of them.

Fortress 6

• Annoyingly placed enemies, Water bubbles, fortress boss still weak to Water bubbles, you get the drill by this point.
• This stage has a nice shortcut in it, which is convenient as it effectively makes the stage quite a bit shorter than the previous ones.
• The shortcut has a stack of tiles in the way which need to be shot with charged Zook Buster shots to get past normally, but as usual, clipping through them is a much more fun way to go about it. It actually was pretty hard to get Zook far enough ahead of the camera to clip through these blocks, but I managed to pull it off in the end while hardly losing any time for it.
• The boss is now some kind of eyeball in the center of the room, with two spheres rotating around it. All of them do a fair bit of damage on collision, and all of them shoot projectiles at you as well. It's actually a pretty interesting and unique boss fight. However, it's still just as weak to water bubbles and water shields as the rest of them.
• The boss has a fixed pattern where it always starts closing its eye at the start of the battle. Afterwards, it sometimes still does this sometimes, but this behavior was pretty easy to manipulate away.
• I got very tight with ammo management during the boss fight here.

Fortress 7

• From here on, the stages get noticeably more annoying for TASing purposes, interestingly. This probably has to do with a greater rate of enemies on the screen that cover more space, and narrower areas to move around in. But the general idea is, I ran into much more cases where me trying to do movements off to the right of the screen would fail because of enemy hitboxes all over the place there (which are actually on the left side of the screen) which would sometimes halt any attempt to progress completely. Some rooms required quite a few takes before I managed to weave my way around all the enemies. The last room of this stage was especially bad for this.
• If you've seen how the fortress minibosses at Fortress 1, 2 and 3 went, you'll know exactly how this one will go.

Fortress 8

• What I said in the Fortress 7 notes above doubly applied to this stage. The entire stage consists of long horizontal rooms (so lots of times where I move beyond the screen) with lots of narrow horizontal passages and tons of enemies in the way.
• This is basically the only stage I can think of with those blocks that require the Head upgrade, and yet I still don't make any use of that. I just abuse the screen scrolling as usual to skip past the one part where doing that is actually needed.
• The end of this stage features the traditional Mega Man spiel of having to refight all the previous primary bosses. Normally, the rooms here consist of a boss corridor, followed by a room with one teleporter, which brings Zook to a teleporting chamber with six teleporters to all the boss refights. However, it turns out the room with one teleporter has an exit to the right (although there is a wall there), which allows me to Room Skip the room. So I warp from the boss corridor to the boss teleporter room at once, and use some of the weird teleporter properties to enter the top left teleporter even though I'm actually two tiles below it. It doesn't really make any sense, but it works out.
• It should be noted that these teleporters are not like the upgrade teleporters, and the animation skip trick does not work on these. I did try this out.
• I use aerial rapid jumps to glitch into the top right teleporter. I enter it two tiles lower than it actually is, similar to how I enter the first teleporter on the top left side of the screen.
• Most of the bossfights are just the same as they were last time, except Earth (as I now have his weakness weapon (Water), so he falls in 4 hits now just like the rest) and Grass (as I now have the Fire weapon, so I get to show off a new weapon against him). All of them follow the same pattern of hitting them 4 times with charged shots until they are dead.

Fortress 9

• Needed we any more proof that this game used Mega Man V as a source of inspiration, among other things?
• This is just a pretty short stage with one long vertical drop, and then a short corridor to lead to the final boss battle.
• The vertical drop has some annoying, very fast moving enemies that get in the way a lot. In real time it's almost impossible not to get hit by at least one of them, but with some nearly frame perfect positioning and accurate shooting, it's possible to shoot them down before they can hit Zook, while freely falling down the whole way without air stalling.
• The last enemy (beecomb-esque enemy) was actually a massive pain to deal with. I need to destroy it with three uncharged shots, and then get enough weapon charge in to "store" a quick charge shot for the bossfight, while also moving forward as fast as possible to be able to clip into the boss door instead of entering it normally. It worked out just barely in the end, but took a lot of time to get right.
• The final boss fight is just like the other bossfights (killing them with charged Grass), except it's two in succession this time. (And the second phase skip from Rockman DX3 doesn't work this time around). I optimized ammo usage as much as possible, but still have to open the menu for weapon refills twice (using two refills the first time, and one the second time; one refill fills 8 bars, and ammo is 20 bars max).
• After the boss battle, after some time Zook Z teleports up and the game enters the ending cutscene. (For real this time! No video editing done this time!) I chose to prioritize fastest ending first and fastest input time next. What I did was use aerial rapid jumps combined with a full jump and upwards airdashing and air sliding to reach the lowest pixel with an optimal teleport time, and then made sure to pull off the maneuver as early as possible to optimize input time. Zook teleports away at the perfect y position one frame before the end of his air slide would have dropped him lower and postpone the ending by a frame.

Other comments

Trivia

• There are a few stages in this game that nearly directly lift their whole level design/layout from some actual Mega Man games. I can think of at least six. Do you know which they are?
• Also, recognise one particular tune which is also nearly directly lifted (with comparatively minor changes) from the source?

• This TAS has exactly 19432 button presses. That's enough button presses to beat Super Mario Bros. at least 136 times over.

Screenshot suggestions

Possible improvements

• The second and third rooms of Cannon's stage can be passed faster in the first run (note that this is not the same as the route used in the second run through Cannon's stage, as that depends on using the Foot upgrade for high jumps). Could save about 1-1.5 seconds.
• The Water boss' pattern could be manipulated better to get a hit in right before it enters its bubble (I found and did this in the boss refight). Could save ~10 frames.
• Wall rapid jumps could be used to clip through one ceiling in Fortress 1 instead of going around it (I discovered the trick in Fortress 2, after spending a very long time on the Fortress 1 bossfight). Would save about 40 frames.
• Aerial rapid jumps can be used like they were in Fortress 9 to teleport out earlier in Fortress 1, 2, 3, and 7 (this utility was only discovered by the time of Fortress 9). This would save about 4-5 frames after each of those battles.
• Probably some random frames could be saved here and there. The game has extremely volatile timing, which both makes it hard to find and clean out random lag frames, and makes hex editing the game completely impossible without completely desyncing less than two or three rooms further in. There may also be room for saving frames here and there with routing movement throughout the stages, which can be hard when offscreen, as half of physics don't apply and random enemy hitboxes get in the way (and it's not possible to destroy them while offscreen). However, all of this is just hypothetical. I don't know of any definitive routing or lag improvements (other than listed above).

Thanks to

• dekutony, for following my WIPs in the game topic
• natt, for his insight
• Tompa, for judging the WIP version a year ago
• Technokami, PCachu, Nicos and mklip2001 for commenting on that same submission a year ago
• You, for reading this text and/or watching the run!