Credit goes to Doc Skellington for their TAS videos and amarishiro for their any% record that I used to get the routing. This is the any% run, which requires beating all 10 chapters. Time ending on the save screen after chapter 10, according to the SRC page. THIS TAS ALSO HAS MILD FLASHING LIGHTS IN ONE LEVEL!! I wrote a LUA script that disables this effect for that section and I can link it if needs be. It's only a graphical edit, it doesn't affect the game in any form.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.9 (melonDS)
- Beat all 10 chapters from a new file.
This is the any% TAS for Wario: Master of Disguise. The route unlocks all 8 disguises, and 5 of the upgrades. It avoids upgrading Sparky and Wicked Wario. Neither are needed to complete the run. The TAS does not have inputs for the BIOS.
Episode 1: "Whose Show Is This Anyway!?"
The beginning. This is where we gain Cosmic Wario, who will be our main use of manipulating RNG. Each time a bullet sparks off a wall, the RNG seed is rolled 9 times. This RNG seed controls the chest minigames, and we want to avoid slower minigames to save time. The rest of this level is basic movement. Each jump saves a frame, so we try to do that where we can.
Episode 2: "The Purple Wind Stinks Up The Ship!"
Two new disguises, Arty and Genius! Arty gets a few good uses, but Genius will take a backseat for now. Genius is currently only able to show secret pathways. Because we already know where those all are, he's useless to us.
Episode 3: "The Sphinx Sits on a Secret!"
This is where the RNG manipulation matters the most. Aside from the three purple chests which are required to unlock the boss, we have 5 randomly selected riddles to solve of wildly differing timelosses. We also gain two new disguises, Captain and Sparky. Captain is great at traversing water, and Sparky is just a lightbulb. He can light up rooms and reveal paths that TAS has memorized. This chapter also is the first showcase of save warping.
Episode 4: "A Third Thief Brings Grief!"
We're now exploring an ice cave to find 4 bird statues to unlock the boss. Dragon Wario makes his appearance and is good for destroying fire blocks. Arty Wario gets our first upgrade. Now with 3 blocks to play with, platforming gets a bit taller. Also note that ice, which normally takes control away from the player when walked on, can be mitigated by jumping on it while not touching the D pad.
Episode 5: "Picking the Pharaoh's Brains!"
Here, we're required to collect two items to, you guessed it, unlock the boss. First, our new upgraded Genius Wario comes with new tricks: A boxing glove! He can punch enemies and break down fragile walls. The first half of the chapter has basic platforming, but things get interesting later on. There are many rooms that require lighting torches to reveal platforms that wind around the room. We can just skip a lot of these by jumping in precise ways and placing blocks to get where the devs somehow didn't plan around.
Episode 6: "A Flower That's Drunk Up Power!"
Immediately we start off with a huge skip. By placing the blocks in a staircase pattern in the right spot, we can jump up and run to the second section of the level. We normally need Cosmic Wario's upgraded gun to unlock the gate protecting the key, but with a clever save warp, we're able to access it early. We then grab the upgrade after. This level is also about pushing statues to block off a waterfall blocking our way. There's some interesting routing with one where we place blocks in a specific pattern in order to get the statue in place about 30 frames faster than the RTA route.
Rounding the level off, we have one more key skip right before the boss. Placing one block on the ledge, one on top of that, and one in the water, we can use them to force Wario underwater past the current and under the doorway. On the second phase of the boss, we use it's fire bombs against it to speed up the fight.
Episode 7: "Fouling Up the Whole Works!"
With the hot lava, we're unable to survive as every disguise except Dragon. We abuse this fact by swimming with Captain Wario, changing to Dragon for a few frames, and switching back. Our heat meter resets immediately so we can do this until we can reach some "Hotpants" to protect us. The game is kind and lets you get these at any chest that's found under the water, which we abuse. Captain Wario now gets what I would argue is the best ability: Submarine. Swimming in all directions is now unlocked, and we have missles to use to break blocks. A death warp saves a bit of time, but it's mostly just optimizing movement. Boss is kind of a joke, not varying anything up in the slightest.
Episode 8: "When Dolphins Ruled the Earth!"
We start off with a small fun glitch. Activating the blocks while inside let's us jump on top, so we're able to get in more jumps on them. We also get another key skip by placing two blocks in a very precise manner. In a few rooms, we use Arty Wario to skip having to activate the blocks now. This is about 10 frames faster if I remember right. After collecting the lost soul, we get to my favorite part of the TAS: Stuffy the 64th.
The TAS heavily uses animation canceling to destroy the boss. By switching between abilities, we can cancel the punch from Genius Wario, switch back, and throw a new punch. This is where the flashing lights normally come in without a game mod or lua script.
Episode 9: "More Shocking Than the Next Episode?"
This level is based around charging the generators found in the level. We power the four yellow generators, and two of the blue. We do also see a case of zipping in this game. By getting the elevator to crush Wario, and moving in the right way, we zip to the top of the level and save some time. This level also introduces our final disguise: Wicked Wario. He possess the ability to fly by blowing into the mic. We explore around, grab the dynamite, and make our way to the boss.
Episode 10: "The Final Face-Off!"
Our final level is a maze of mushroom switches. We need to activate all switches in the area to change the purple door green. Some of them are hidden and do require Genius Wario to find. They can't be touched otherwise. We take a small shortcut early on, but this is mostly just getting through gauntlets of enemies and healing up to stay alive. With the keys and gem acquired and used, we make it to the final. Her patterns are all RNG based, and are easily manipulated. Holding up/down runs the RNG each frame so we can get any result we want. Time ends on the saving dialogue.
There's a few things that could be improved. First, there are a few places where inputs could be just input faster, or things avoided but that requires resyncing the entire TAS each time, and chapter 10 is a pain to resync. I'm too burnt out to continue for the time being. Understanding how enemy pattern RNG works could help optimize some rooms. Rooms with a lot of enemies can lag out the game and eat inputs, which is often dependent on the random movements of enemies. Other than that, there'd have to be a major bug to sequence break levels, or some better routing for the TAS.
Darkman425: Replaced input file with one that removes the 1128 frame of blank input at the end.
Darkman425: Even with just comparing the in-game times against the current RTA record on SRC this TAS is way faster, sometimes by minutes in a few levels, due to the level of careful optimization and RNG manipulation done. Nice work!
Accepting to Standard.
