This submission of Last Ninja, The for NES is a 327 frame improvement over the current publication:
[2870] NES The Last Ninja by illayaya in 08:01.11 The bulk of the time save is routing and strategy improvements but a lot of screens were optimized by a frame here and there.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.8
- Aims for fastest time
- Abuses glitches
- And so on
Last Ninja, The was one of my favorite speedruns once I got over how janky the game is and how bad the hitboxes suck. The controls take a bit to get used to but I don't think the game is as bad as people make it out to be.
You are tasked with defeating some ghost ninja named Kunitoki who is doing bad things, and you're a good ninja doing good things, so after you enjoy your trip to Central Park that you won on The Price is Right, it's time to go hunt down kunitoki and slaughter the hordes of ninja in your path...
Only there's not really any ninja and we don't even so much as kick the henchmen (named Cop, Kenny Loggins (brown hair/vest) and Rob Halford (other guy who is not the previous two guys)) We actually execute only one offensive move in the game, and it's to kick the final boss right in his kunitokis.
The previous submissions did a good job explaining the game and stuff, so I'll be mainly focusing on the routing and glitchwork. Numerous rooms were optimized but I'm not going to list all of them, just the important ones.
Central Park
There were 2 big time saves here. One, we skip the Shurikens. Normally you can only defeat Kunitoki by using them, but a glitch in this game exists where if you don't pick them up, you can actually still knock him down with a kick. I don't think anyone has figured out the exact details of it, but it doesn't work all the time.
Shuriken skip saved 57 frames
At the end of level one you do some boat jumping. On the final boat jumping screen you can glitch yourself to the right and sort of walk on water to jump onto the boat sooner, which lets you jump across sooner which is faster.
Boat Jesus saved 17 frames.
Total saved in level 1: 93 frames
The Street
Relatively bosing and uneventful stage, but there are two ways to finish it. After getting the key you need to open the sewers, you can take one of two paths. The current pub uses the streetlight path, whereas this TAS uses the "double back to the beginning" path which is actually considerably faster.
Route improvement saved 70 frames.
Total saved in level 2: 74 frames
The Sewers
Another uneventful level. Biggest save came in the second "three way door" room, which I rerouted.
Door strat saved 18 frames
Total saved in level 3: 30 frames
The Office
The big deal in this stage is the passcode, generating a good code as fast as possible is crucial, but you're at the mercy of hunting frames until you find the best ratio of burning frames for better codes. First code that came up was 0004, and I didn't find anything tastier so I kept it. I saved frames by generating it that we'll lose back in the final boss fight, but it is negligible.
There were two more substantial savings here. One, there's a room where you have to hit a button to open a door. You can actually just go through the door as though it were open without hitting the button. This is called Cats Strats since catsonurhead found it forever ago.
Cats Strats saved 57 frames.
The final savings is with the stick. The current pub pulls the estick out in the fan room, even though you don't need it to open anything. I figured out why they did it on the next screen.
If you have your stick out, you have less "landing animation" delay when jumping. So you can jump 13 frames faster after landing. However, equipping the stick takes time, and I found a route past the balcony guard that didn't need to use a jump.
Stickless strats saved 37 frames and lost 15 for a net save of 22.
Total saved in level 4: 95 frames
The Mansion
Mansion was very tight and uneventful. Saved 27 frames in the first room by not killing the enemy.
Total saved in level 5: 29 frames.
Final Battle
The goal is to knock down Kunitoki in the pentagram then light all 5 candles to win. Between losing frames due to the not quite optimal passcode, tightening up movement in the lure and candle lighting, we saved a whopping 6 frames.
Total savings: 327 frames.
This was a fun, if tiring, project. Some rooms took many minutes just to save a frame here and there, but overall it wasn't too bad.
Memory: TAS seems well executed. Some potential improvements were pointed out but it would require redoing the whole tas more or less.
I think I only vaguely understood what was going on but it was neat. Accepting
