Snow White in Happily Ever After is a game based on the 1990 Happily Ever After movie by Filmation; not the Disney one. This movie runs through various levels collecting coins and sneaking through hazards. This run completes Easy difficulty in 7:22.395 speedrun timing, which is 1:33 faster than the current world record. As a heads up, all of the enemies flash when they take damage; this is most apparent during the Maliss fight.
Game objectives
- Get through all of the levels and defeat Maliss
- Plays on Easy mode
- Takes damage to save time
Helpful and Interesting RAM values
00141A: x speed, increases by 4 each frame if you're holding the run button, and 1 otherwise, up to 196
000202: tomatoes % 256
000224: heart count (likely caps at 256, you can hold over 99)
000286: Maliss' health-1
00141C: Falling meter, if it reaches over 127, you'll get stunned after you fall, and you'll take a fall death if it reaches over 256.
I chose to run this because this is a game I loved a lot as a kid. This is on Easy mode due to the other difficulties requiring more coins and having more exploration, and also having a longer final boss. I think Difficult could also make an interesting TAS, however. You can play as Snow White or Shadow Man, and in this run I choose Shadow Man due to him not having as tall of a hitbox, which makes it easier to avoid obstacles and also makes you throw from lower, which saves a lot of time in the final level. This does make it harder to collect coins, however.
Items/obstacles
The yellow circles you see in the levels allow me to teleport to another location in the level
The main weapon of the game.
This is a special weapon that homes in on the enemy. The green one is able to home in from a farther distance
This blows up all of the blocks and enemies in range of it. The green one blows up in a wider range.
Hearts indicate how much health you have, and falling or getting hit by an enemy takes away 1 heart. There are enough hearts, however that this is not an issue in the run. The counter only displays up to 99 hearts, although you can probably hold up to 256.
You need to collect 20 of these in each level on Easy to be able to exit the level.
Some of the bricks are breakable, and others aren't. For the breakable bricks, they usually won't break if you try shooting a tomato too close to it
Movement
There is fall damage in this game; if you start falling/jumping of a ledge the fall value starts at a certain value depending on how you started travelling, and if it's 128 or more when you land, you will be stunned for about a second, and if it reaches 255 or more it will count as falling off the stage and you will restart from the checkpoint.
If you take damage from getting hit by an enemy, you will have i-frames for a pretty long time, which can be used to skip past other enemies; this is especially useful if you're hit by a projectile, as that also usually won't push you back. There are also i-frames if you get stunned from falling, although they are much shorter so often aren't useful.
If you press Y, your speed will increase by 4 per frame instead of 1, and also jump higher.
There is some time after you are about to fall off a pit where you can still jump, although when you are in coyote frames, you won't gain additional speed.
There is a warp right at the beginning of the stage that is a lot faster to take, due to not having to get any hearts, and from here I can just run to the end.
The warp to the end of the level is pretty early on; the main tricky thing is jumping up the platforms along the way optimally.
There are conveniently exactly enough coins in the path of the warp to complete the level quickly. Damage Boosting to the left using the worm after getting the coins is quite a bit faster.
Right at the beginning the jump to get to the warp without using the lower platforms is really precise, then I use the warp and fall down only stopping on one cloud, and then take a damage boost on the enemy next to the goal to skip the falling stun animation.
The six coins at the end of the level are really inconsistent to get; a lot of the time even if you pass their hitbox you won't collect them.
By jumping right out of the first warp exit, and doing a well-timed damage boost off the butterfly and jumping on it after, I can land on the moving platform above and get to the warp about 100 frames quicker than going around.
I was hoping to be able to jump from the beginning directly to a platform to the left, but it's just barely not possible, so I take the route up and get the coins on the way.
Was tricky to figure out the most optimal path here, as coin hitboxes can be smaller than they appear.
I pan the camera to the left at the end of the level to avoid having a crystal spawn which I would otherwise have to slow down a bit for.
- Crystal Caverns - Part II
The top of the level has a lot more coins than the bottom, so I have to make sure not to fall down.
This is a 2 minute long autoscroller, and it is slightly faster to die after checkpoints to spawn the log slightly farther in the level. I play around and show off a funny brick collision here.
In this level the yellow warps are replaced with doors, and there's one at the very beginning that leads to an area with a lot of coins
The ending of the level is a maze with illusional walls and you have to find your way through the maze. If I was using Snow White, due to her throwing from higher, I wouldn't be able to throw the apple down to the bricks without breaking the top layer of them, which would lose time. Jumping at the section before the end of the illusional floor lets me skip a dizzy animation, and if you don't have enough coins here, you are softlocked with no way to escape.
In this difficulty Maliss has 16 HP; using bombs makes his invincibility frames run out more quickly, so I use those and tomatoes to take him down.
Challenges
For the most part, I could redo individual levels and then resync smoothly, however due to bricks functioning pretty strangely in this game, the bricks wouldn't always behave in the same way if I tried resyncing, so I had to resync those levels manually. Particularly Doom 2, Mud River, and Courtyard 2 were issues for this.
For some reason, when I improved the first menu, the last menu to input name ended about a second later; I opted to keep the first menu improvement, as that caused an earlier Maliss fall.
Suggested screenshot: frame 16352
Samsara: Cute little run of a cute little game! The clever usages of things like damage boosts and death to save time in multiple different ways throughout the run shows clear effort in optimization and knowledge of game mechanics. Excellent work! Accepting!
Oh, and removing the branch since it's unnecessary for now.
