Lately I've been checking out Kanshaku tamanage Kantarō no Tōkaidō Gojūsan-tsugi aka 53 Stations of the Tokaido as a possible TAS game. Here is the GameCenter CX episode devoted to it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mcSzBmKuHM
There are a lot of interesting things about the game engine. First, your weapon is a bomb/firework that travels in an arc, so it is harder to control than a typical platformer weapon. Secondly, the enemies actually have surprisingly good AI for a Famicom game. They actually react in an intelligent manner to your attacks and movement.
I could see three different styles of TAS for this:
1 - using warps (according to the video there is both a 3-level warp and 6-level warp so luck would need to be manipulated to get the 6-level warp each time)
2 - warpless
3 - pacifist. I think this would be really fun to watch, because the enemies chase after you if you don't kill them, and a whole bunch of them swarm you at once. As I mentioned before, there is a lot of potential for manipulation of enemy movement, which would definitely be a requirement for pulling this off... if it's possible at all.
