Indy and Marion just wanted a frickin' vacation trip. Was that SO hard to understand? Well in any case, now it's up to Indy to spam his new jump punch to get around this new island slightly faster than normal, manipulating Marion's AI (and even turning into her) to collect a single page torn from his journal so he can revisit his now second worst adventure. Thanks, Dial of Destiny.
I kid, I did like most of them a little bit, but that's beside the point. In a nutshell, things work a little different here than in LEGO Indy 1's DS version.
In terms of this TAS, it's meant to go through the opening sections before we enter the main levels proper (hence prologue%). I wasn't very sure where to draw the line on this part being considered complete, so here's the frame number for each possible "final input" that could be considered completion: 11037 (what I went with): The frame we pick up the page and unlock the story. 11097 (not seen): This would be the first frame the game would allow us to open the book and select the story menu.
You're dumped in a tutorial section, where you can now swim. Right away, there is a technique where wiggling (choosing my terms very carefully, considering who we're talking about) from side to side pushes your character forward with every stride, making him go faster than just swimming forward. You cannot jump out of the water, which is why I'm not doing so in this TAS. Also, this technique seems to work better in specific directions than others (namely sideways rather than north or south). Of course, either way, swimming is slower than running, so you need to stay on land as long as possible.
Once you get on land, you find out you can now dive down with an attack from the air. Each weapon seems to have a different arc, with unarmed punches sending you all the way to the ground, while characters using a bottle don't quite hit the ground. If a jump attack doesn't cause you to land before its animation finishes, the game holds you in the air for a bit, stopping your forward momentum, and losing some time. However, some weapons that lunge you further forward may allow you to cross gaps that are otherwise a bit too far. Although not available during the prologue, shovels are a good example of this. It's worth noting that while punches can be used without lag, they do not appear to be much faster than just running. In fact, I actually found that when I got to the big gate, spamming jump punches all the way through caused me to reach the cutscene slightly later than in the final TAS. The jump punch tends to be more useful to cancel your upward momentum when jumping, useful since the jump height is basically all or nothing.
The lighthouse-type building in the second area was rather annoying to save time on, since it contains a lot of mechanics that require both characters to operate. As a result, you're essentially throttled by your AI partner during this section, which, by the way, happens to contain bounce pads and ladders, both of which this game's AI struggles with more than anything.
For starters, ladders. You can jump up and cling onto the ladder midway through, but you cannot jump again on the ladder; you'll just let go of it. Your AI partner will not even do this technique. It will start at the very base of the ladder and climb up its entire slow, sluggish length. Worse is that if your partner gets close and you want to tag out, your old character will just jump off the ladder, as seen in the TAS. Sometimes it may even just yeet itself off the cliff while you're trying to get your partner up there. Fortunately, I found out that the partner AI won't move if you had made it jump, so I used that in a few spots to buy me some time before the partner tries to walk off the edge.
As for bounce pads, it seems that when the AI needs to use a bounce pad to reach something, it will not try to make the gap unless it is absolutely sure it will make it, so it will waste time to build up its momentum first.
When you reach the big gates on the island and go through them, you'll enter the mainland. This mode operates in freeplay, which in LEGO speak means you form a team of characters you've unlocked throughout the game in order to use their various abilities to collect things. This is where you collect red bricks, and, for the purposes of this TAS, journal pages. Well, for any% playthroughs of any kind, it's only the first page we need to bother ourselves with. 16 of the 17 pages are minigames to be played for 100% completion, but the first page is special in that it unlocks the main story. As for the island itself, because this operates in freeplay mode, Indy and Marion can transform into each other to complete our mission here faster. One technique shown here in terms of switching characters with L and R is that when you do so, you'll drop whatever you're carrying. When you carry part boxes to their spots and put them down, that's an animation that can be skipped with this very technique. A problem, however, with LR switching is that the game freezes for a few moments to load in the character, so you have to weigh whether it's faster to switch than to do whatever you're doing normally.