Aquaria

[Glamador]

I thought that entering the body early like that will leave you trapped?  Isn't your companion stuck or something?

[hhallahh]

Heh, those are some neat tricks, especially the beast form one. I'm not sure about the shortcut into the body if it means you can skip the whole Sunken City because it kinda screws up the game's plot, but that probably wouldn't be unprecedented in a run.

[hhallahh]

Oh, and I just discovered a new shortcut of sorts that uses the fact that with nature form, planting a briar right under yourself while on land can send you flying with a very high initial velocity. This can be used to launch yourself from the area with the Roc onto the high ledge east of the Sun Temple, which allows you to briarhop up the tube in the center and drop in near the end or possibly drop down into the boss room shortcut. Unfortunately, getting to the roc area seems to require Beast form (unless a trick similar to the one used to get to the Veil can be used), so I'm not sure if it would be of any use in a real run. It basically allows you to skip the entire Sun Temple, though.

It would, however, probably make it easier to climb the left part of the sun temple to the boss room shortcut rather than getting to the boss the conventional way. Speed food should allow you to quickly get up onto the platform next to the left wall, and then a (very) well-placed briarjump should launch you straight into the boss room. I haven't found the right placement in order to do this, though.

[Glamador]

Well I know from experience that it is not an easy process.  I spent about 20 minutes trying (and mostly failing) before getting to the top.  Now I think of it though...if I had used speed food I might have gotten up sooner (I always fell JUST short of the water bubble at the top).

[groobo]

Getting up the right side of sun temple is impossible without beast form, so you can scratch taht idea. Getting up the left side sounds like a good idea, it should save a minute or so.

[hhallahh]

Well, it was pointed out by Glamador on the Bit-Blot forums that the game was patched so that the way to bypass the Body shown in the video was blocked. This means you'd have to do Sunken City normally, which means you have to get Beast Form (to kill the boss there), which means you might as well shortcut the Sun Temple since you probably can't skip Mithalas anymore.

I'm assuming a speedrun would have to be done on the patched version of the game, anyways. I liked the Veil sequence break, but like I said the Body one seemed kinda dumb to begin with, it's a shame that removing it makes the Veil break not worth doing, though.

So it looks the optimal route goes back to Energy -> Beast/Nature (order shouldn't really matter, maybe Beast would be best if there are currents to be avoided that'd save time) -> Li -> Sun -> Sunken City -> Body.

Also, in my brief attempts to climb up the Sun Temple tube (before rocketing myself back down into the water on accident), it seems like if you could be it properly it wouldn't take more than 15-20 seconds to climb. You can briar rocket about 80% of the way up, if you can land on a briar anywhere near that peak than it would only require 1-2 more at most to reach the water where the memory is.

[groobo]

Actually, when doing an actual speedrun you'd be using one of the older versions of the game so that you can get into the body early on.

edit: Here's proof that you can get into the sun temple boss room earlyish (still skipping the beast form).

[Glamador]

Well...we've got tricks...we've got the form order down...now all we need is sum1 to run it.

[hhallahh]

Well, I asked over in the SDA rules thread whether the game should be run on the patched version or not... I couldn't find a definitive answer in their FAQ anywhere, and I'm not sure what the policy is. I'm torn either way.. skipping Beast form is cool, skipping Sunken City isn't so cool, but it's an all-or-nothing deal.

Oh, and one other thing that would probably be worth discussing is consumable use. +speed and +damage foods could be used to save time, and so a detailed route might go a bit out of its way to acquire these things. For example, if Hot Soup grants +1 speed for 30 seconds... how much of a % increase is that? If it's a 50% boost, then you're essentially saving 15 seconds of travel time for each Hot Soup, and it's easy to imagine this being worth getting at times. Likewise, Spicy Rolls are +1 damage, which helps for boss fights in particular. Later on you get +2 speed/damage foods, but I think those require rare ingredients.. which still might be worthwhile to get. Anything else I'm missing?

[groobo]

Well, I asked over in the SDA rules thread whether the game should be run on the patched version or not... I couldn't find a definitive answer in their FAQ anywhere, and I'm not sure what the policy is. I'm torn either way.. skipping Beast form is cool, skipping Sunken City isn't so cool, but it's an all-or-nothing deal.

For all the games I ran for sda I could use whichever version I wanted. The version that allows to save most time via eg. glitches is an obvious choice.

As for food: the healing poultice is a must (+2 health) for the body (especially if you're doing a ss run). It's faster to take damage and keep on wallboosting than to eg lure everything out of your way w/o taking damage and than proceed safely. Also, the ingredients are pretty much in your way. It takes like 5 extra seconds to get the leaf poultice and you can get jelly oil either on your way out of energy temple (the blue jellyfish drop them) or at the veil on your way to the sun temple. The healing poultice is aquired a sec before doing veil early and takes almost no time at all. With the cooking glitch that's all you have to collect to heal all you want. I didn't do any testing for +damage and +speed (well, I tested this only to check if you can get into the veil with just +1 speed food - fail) food at all.

[hhallahh]

Oh yea, the food glitch. Honestly, I hope that patched/unpatched runs would at least count in separate categories, because unlimited food pretty much trivializes the entire game.

But on a more constructive note, it's my impression that you don't actually have to pick up a given food in order to be able to make it... it just tells you what the recipe is when you get it. Thus you should be able to make foods before discovering them in the wild.... right? Or maybe that only applies to stuff like Poison Loaf, suffice to say I'm sure I've discovered recipes via cooking.

[tjp7154]

Just remember that it takes time to into the menu and eat food.

[hhallahh]

Actually, that was something else I meant to bring up... since there's an ingame timer, that means the run would be timed using that, right? If that's the case, do we know that going into the menu takes up time? How about cutscenes? I don't think there's a way to skip them anyways, but just in case.

[groobo]

You don't need to collect recipes? Not collecting the healing poultice would save some seconds from my route.

As for timing: I'm not really sure. One of two methods would be used (segmented runs):

1 - time taken from last save and timed manually to the final hit on the last boss (since the game doesn't display your end time after you complete the game)
2 - timed manually from gaining control to the final hit on the last boss

SS runs would be timed using the second method, obviously. Also, something that stands against using the first method for segmented runs is that the game counts seconds when saving but doesn't display them. So when you save your game with a time of 1:10:59, the game will just say 1:10. We can easily assume that the second method would be used for segmented runs also.

[Glamador]

Well it's been awhile.  Have you put any more thought into it Groobo?