This page lists glitches and information for Kirby & The Amazing Mirror (GBA).
Table of contents

General TASing Knowledge

Movement as Normal Kirby

On the ground, your maximum X-speed can be 476, whereas in the air it can be 504. Therefore, the best strategy is to jump and keep yourself airborne.
When landing on the ground, you can press in the opposite direction 1 frame and then in the forward direction 1 frame, then jump on the next frame, in order to lose only very little speed (504➜456➜472➜504). This will not give you running status, but obtaining running status is often slower than performing the aforementioned technique a few times in a row.
Sliding speed is 832 during the first part of the slide. Slides should be used on ledges so the slide is canceled after the initial 832➜514➜504 speed in order to gain a little boost.

Accelerate from a standstill

Kirby's X speed will accelerate faster when descending.
Also, Kirby accelerates slightly faster on the ground when walking from a standstill compared to jumping forward from a standstill.
Because of this, assuming Kirby is on the ground at the beginning of the room, it is often best to walk forward for 1 frame and then jump for 1 frame.

Accelerate downward faster

While starting to fall down, inhaling briefly or using an ability makes you accelerate downward slightly faster.


Movement when floating

When exhaling a puff of air, let go of directional buttons in order not lose any momentum. Beginning from the frame you press B to puff out, you can press directional buttons again.
During the "blow out a puff of air" phase, Kirby should avoid the ground as it causes a slight slowdown compared to when he is airborne.

Skipping the 'spitting puff of air'-animation

This is a glitch that will allow Kirby to skip the animation when he blows out so you will be normal immediately. The rate at which this bug occurs is set. At this time the bug hasn't been researched much.
As Wheel Kirby, you can use this to puff out and immediately blow up and starting to drive near the ledge, using the "Keep momentum, skip backward movement as Wheel Kirby" trick mentioned above.
EWRAM address $0x020EE1 (1 byte) will increment each frame and resets to 0 depending on Kirby's movement and state. When this byte is 0x00 while Kirby is floating up, then exhaling a puff of air on the next frame will cause the bug to happen.

Movement as Wheel Kirby

Wheel's speed is 1024. When starting up the ability, Kirby should be on the ground since his backward speed is slightly slowed on the ground.

Keep your horizontal momentum when bumping into a wall

If you are about to bump into a wall, you can face away from it in order to keep your momentum. Wheel Kirby can also use this fact for a little trick:
When you "clinch" to a wall (i.e. you have momentum towards a wall and face away from it), starting to drive towards the wall will skip your initial backward movement.
In the image below, three possible strategies are shown. Sometimes the aforementioned Wheel Kirby trick can come in handy, sometimes not. You have to test many different strategies.

Wheel Kirby: Driving through enemies

When driving through enemies, you will usually hit them either 2 or 4 times (each hit takes 3 frames). This is due to how the game handles invincibility spans for enemies. You can abuse this by always aiming to get only 2 hits on enemies. This can be done by changing your position before you start to drive (done at the beginning of a room usually). You will always get 4 hits for certain enemies or when driving uphill.
For example, you can move forward for 3 frames, go into wheel form and then only experience 2*3=6 hitlag frames instead of 4*3=12, which saves 3 frames.

Going through cannons

You can glide through a cannon by running towards it and then crouching. This works because the cannon's hitbox is somewhere in the upper half of its sprite.

Climbing ladders faster

When climbing ladders, Kirby's upward speed is not constant. You need to watch his Y-speed address to optimize ladder climbing. You should climb for a few frames, then press Left or Right for one frame and then start climbing again.

Dark Kirby Skip

For some reason, Dark Kirby doesn't always appear when he is supposed to. The conditions for this to happen aren't known. Whether or not he appears seems to be determined when you are still several rooms before his room.
It may be related to helper Kirbys already having visited the area, or it may be a bug. One would have to redo several rooms several times in order to have a chance at skipping him in a TAS which may or may not be worth the trouble.

Enemies that grab you

Enemies that grab Kirby like Cookin, Phan-Phan or Droppy will let go of Kirby when they get hit by something. This can be Kirby's puff of air, a projectile of his, or another Kirby's attack. This can be useful to gain distance and it will also give Kirby brief invincibility.

Missile Kirby and UFO Kirby: Move partially inside a ceiling

When moving towards the corner of a ceiling with proper positioning, you might get stuck inside the ceiling for a short time. You can stay inside the ceiling using Missile and UFO, but you will be ejected when pushing towards the ceiling. This is useful for various situations.

Get Wheel ability or Fighter ability from golems

Golems are obviously stone enemies and will give you stone when absorbing their ability. Some golem enemies, however, will give you wheel or fighter. It depends on whether they are performing a special move at the time Kirby inhales them. Golems can only perform either a stomping attack, a rolling attack or an uppercut punch. There is only one single golem in the game known to be able to perform all three moves. He is in room 22 of this map.

Missile movement

When transforming to Missile, Kirby will move backwards slightly before he starts moving forward. You can press the opposite direction of where you want to go to save time.
You can even try out combinations of directions in order to move into a direction while building up speed into another direction.
Generally, Missile Kirby moves diagonally at the same X or Y speed that he would if he went straight in those directions, respectively. Therefore, when going around corners, you should take a huge enough turn for speed to build up accordingly.

About Luck-Manipulation

You can luck-manipulate certain enemies to go out of your way or to otherwise behave as you desire. To do it, start running and/or change directions. Basicly, everytime you create a cloud of dust, RNG changes. It is assumed RNG changes slowly over time or depending on enemies (when their sprites change etc.)
Luck-manipulation like this can be done at the end of a room to prepare for the next room. At Kracko, it can be done just before the fight starts to manipulate his first attack.

Using resets

You can soft-reset the game (press A, B, Start, Select) at certain times to save time. For example, after beating a boss and receiving a mirror shard, you can save about 4 seconds but you will lose whatever ability you had. Usually, it's ok to lose your ability unless it's Wheel, since acquiring Wheel usually takes longer than the 4 seconds saved from resetting.
Other times where you can reset are in 100% when opening a chest or when visiting the last room of a path (as an alternative to L-Warp. However, it's not confirmed which of the two is faster.)

Helper Kirby using Magic

If you have no ability and a helper Kirby from a different room uses Magic, there is a chance it will give you an ability roulette. At the moment, manipulating helper Kirbys' abilities and behavior is nearly impossible. Certain abilities seem to be more rare than others.
But if a helper Kirby can be manipulated to give you an ability roulette just when you need it, it could be useful in a TAS.

Glitches

Cook glitch

This glitch causes enemies to be fetched by your cook ability but then hang in the air forever. To do it, use cook with no enemies around. When in the last few frames of the animation, enemies have to travel onscreen and the screen must be frozen briefly, e.g. by a helper Kirby transforming.
After doing it, using the ability again will perform the cooking as usual. However, when opening a chest or receiving a "health kiss" from a helper kirby, some sub-glitches can be triggered:
Since helper
This glitch is useless at the moment.



How to do itStuff you can do to expand on the glitchMaking a helper Kirby do the glitch

Inside of Walls Glitch

Under certain circumstances, it is possible to enter walls. However, it isn't useful for speedrun purposes.
As a 1st method, when triggering a miniboss fight, the moving camera will push you into a wall. In Kirby Nightmare in Dreamland, this occurrence would normally kill you but this aspect seems absent in Amazing Mirror.

As a 2nd method, when a new wall is generated by hitting a bomb block, you can end up inside of a wall by pressing Left and Right alternatedly each frame.

As a 3rd method, you can use the Parasol Glitch (see below).

Parasol Glitch

When falling downwards with the Parasol ability, you will automatically open the parasol and swiftly move forward. Using tool-assisted input, you can preserve the speed. Doing this against a side of the screen (not a wall), you can keep preserving the speed indefinitely. Since the speed address is signed 16-bit, preserving speed any higher than 32,767 or any lower than -32,767 will cause an overflow or underflow respectively which will cause Kirby to suddenly move into the other direction at super speed. (Wheel moves at 1,024 speed for comparison.)
This glitch can be used to skip some rooms in a low% playthrough. The current best low% percentage is 27%.


Doing the glitch in a miniboss fightCausing speed underflow

Ladder Glitch

If a Blockin stops and becomes a wall on top of a ladder and you are climbing the ladder, it will cause you to be pushed into the air.


Dark Metaknight: Stand in midair / change your color temporarily

TODO

Post-End Credits Glitch

If you gameover just when Dark Mind 6 is beaten, you will start outside the big mirror and some aspects of the game will be strange:


Ability Icon Glitch

TODO

Dark Kirby Game Freeze Glitch

TODO

Dark Mind 5 Softlock & Stun Glitches

TODO

Dark Mind 6 Sprite Glitch

When Dark Mind 5 is beaten and the game fades to white, there is a small time window where you can call other Kirbys via phone. If done correctly, the called in Kirbys will move around instead of standing still for the cutscene. A sprite glitch will occur for Dark Mind 6 depending on what abilities the called in Kirbys had.
For abilities that cause the game to crash, it seems to emulate differently between VBA and mGBA. Fighter crashes on VBA, but doesn't cause anything on mGBA and console. Therefore mGBA is considered console-accurate for this glitch.


Banana Glitch

TODO

Ditched Ability Glitch

TODO

L-Warp + Falling into depth Freeze Glitch (Japanese only)

TODO

Multiple Ability Stars Glitch

TODO

Useful resources

Memory addresses - UserFiles/Info/637936906470196031
Luascript - https://tasvideos.org/Forum/Topics/2095?CurrentPage=9&Highlight=530445#530445 
TCRF - https://tcrf.net/Kirby_&_the_Amazing_Mirror
GameResources/GBA/KirbyAndTheAmazingMirror last edited by MUGG on 7/15/2024 10:14 AM
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