This is actually my third and most likely the last speedrun of RE4 with special weapons. First one (1:54) was done somewhere around October 2005 and never submitted. The badly encoded second attempt (1:51) finished in December 2005 and eventually got on the site. I was never really satisfied with that time but knowing how annoying it is to speedrun Resident Evil 4, I didn't improve it. Well that was until atwyatt found the TMP glitch and basicly forced me to redo my run. This time I got 01:43:47, 7 minutes and 16 seconds faster than previously. Also, it is 3:44 faster than the current record at Shin's site.

Thanks

Radix for founding this awesome site and mikwuyma for running it now. nate for encoding my run and DJGrenola for the other stuff :p. atwyatt, on top of the TMP glitch, you've been awesome help and support from start to finish. Ditman from GameFAQs for discovering the striker glitch (ditman), pota and torao for their groundbreaking runs from couple of years ago. ZhenXiang for his/her 1:47 run which I stole couple of tricks from and all the others who kept watching/supporting during the making of the run.

General Tricks and Techniques

• TMP glitch: you can open doors with locks from the other side. This allows you to completely skip the garden and the save point plus it let's you get queen's grail early. Around 2 minutes and 30 seconds are saved. You need to have the stock for it to work and it probably doesn't work on other versions than GameCube.
• Ditman glitch: equip Striker, press R and quickly press Y, before the laser aim shows up and switch to another weapon. Leon does everything about twice as fast, more like 1.5x faster probably, though. Ditman glitch only gets cancelled on almost every occasion. Here's a small list of things that cancel it: Opening a door, taking damage, guarding an explosion, picking up some items, cgi cutscenes, entering a new area, Get On/Kick/Crouch action commands and shooting with the Striker. Also, ditman glitch is useless when Ashley is around because she falls too much behind.
• Button sequence manipulation: pressing L+R before the sequence shows up, usually forces the game to use A+B in the sequence. This was abused from 4-4 till the end.
• Difficulty adjustments/manipulation: Everything affects the difficulty adjustments on normal. Your health, amount of retries, bullets, grenades, deaths, hit rate and the list goes on. The game can get drastically easier/faster with the proper difficulty adjustments, it's still a mystery how the adjustments work in the middle of the chapters but the adjustments can carry over saves. This is abused in 3-4, where I load a save (2-3) which has little health and then load the 3-4 save (freeing Ashley with the rocket launcher) and the difficulty adjustment is now on very easy which means an additional group of enemies is gone.
• Running speeds: Fastest: grenade/egg/(special) rocket launcher/no weapon. Middle: all the others. Slow: Infinite Rocket Launcher, Yellow Health, Red Health.
• Damage immunities: During action commands, when turning some crank, press b right when some attack hits you and if you slash with your knife before an attack hits you (needs to be precise).
• Clipping glitch: Not used in the run but Ashley can push you through doors/gates and small objects. Put Ashley to a corner, aim at her so she ducks, run on top of here and keep running against the door and Ashley might push you through. Getting Ashley to the other side is the problem then :p.

The run

The reason I picked up the normal costumes is because I simply can't stand the special ones.

• 1-1

  Start out with the Striker, use ditman after the first kill and jump out the window downstairs because the window upstairs cancels the glitch. Used a grenade at the first group in the village and as you can see the first group spawns a lot faster on PAL so you gotta be fast when switching to IRL. The first group has quite slow chance of spawning, I think I found a way to manipulate the second group. Move like I did after shooting the first group and there's probably a trigger somewhere. I might be completely wrong, though (credit atwyatt for the village fight strat). Rest of the run is piece of cake, except for the grenade throw in the end.

   

• 1-2 and 1-3

  I played these two chapters together because it allows me to skip the loading in 1-3, saving around 10 secs on PAL and allowing me to make Del Lago a bit easier by saving at the cabin. Of course the fastest way would be to run 1-2 and 1-3 plus Del Lago but that would take forever to pull off. I could have thrown the grenade in the beginning right when I entered the area but I didn't find it reliable at all. Also, taking time to aim the throw is probably slower than my method (thanks atwyatt for this). I could have shot the both tripmines at once, dunno how I completely missed that :/.

   

• Del Lago

  Stupid random asshole. The throw when Del Lago turns around the first time is stupid random because of lag. Also, to get Del Lago not to dive is just so much fun.

   

• 2-1

  Ok, shooting those crates weren't good. Rest of the chapter goes well, mainly because this is one of those two-three chapters which have no randomness.

   

• 2-2

  Thanks Ashley for making ditman glitch almost useless in this chapter, well, there weren't many places to use it! Blowing up myself wasn't intentional in the cabin fight but it killed one of the enemies so it was enough. Cabin fight solely depends on how Luis kills those enemies.

   

• 2-3

  The second non-random chapter. One of the better chapters in my run. no complaints. If you're wondering why I don't use the Old Key asap, it's because I have to wait for Ashley.

   

• 3-1

  One of the hardest chapters in this run. The beginning isn't random anymore but the rest is just pain in the ass. I used a safe strategy at the Water Room to make it a little less random. You could use ditman when you enter the Castle Key area but that requires the enemies to open the door for you, which I found that is not happening along with the other things used in this chapter.

   

• 3-2 and 3-3

  Alas the Gallery Key Zealot glitch doesn't work on PAL but Ditman glitch somewhat makes up for it. The beginning of the sewers with the novistrados is just super random because of Ditman glitch. Mostly because the novistrados are a lot more aggressive for some reason and I can't use any action commands because it cancels ditman. TMP glitch was used in this chapter, too. I make it look too easy, though. I got super lucky in the end, btw.

   

• 3-4

  With difficulty manipulation this chapter is one of the non-random, too. I blew up myself to adjust difficulty some more and Leon has full hp at the start of 4-1 anyway.

   

• 4-1

  One of the most hardest chapters this run. I made a sweet strategy in the Lion Ornament room to eliminate all randomness without losing time! The TMP glitch here is a loooot easier here. The area with the novistrados nest is as horrible as ever. Shooting those wooden sticks at the tower sucked ass, too. I blame not having mouse+keyboard ;). Rest went great, I got really close getting grabbed at the bottom of the tower. Also before you fall down to the pit, after the two garradors, my game crashed once. RE4 nor my GC have never crashed. Of course that run was better than this one ;).

   

• 4-2

  One of the most random chapters. The cave with the novistrados is just stupid because I can't use any action commands because of ditman. I had to use shitload of grenades instead. Usually that doesn't work, though. I bet you noticed that I skipped the middle pillar with Ditman glitch.

   

• 4-3

  There's only little randomness in this chapter, so I kinda like it. That cart ride is boring as hell, though. I unload all my shotgun bullets to adjust difficulty, I shouldn't have started out with that many.

   

• 4-4

  The lift strat here is hard. First you need that dynamite guy to blow up the barrels before you kill him because if you don't it only needs one enemy to land on the lift and it stops. Then you have to shoot listening to the sound only. Picking up that faint growling sound behind everything else ain't that easy. Shooting Salazar wasn't that good.

   

• 5-1

  Despite it's length this chapter is not so random. Atleast not with my strategies. I shoot the search light in the beginning to avoid the cutscene and cancelling the ditman glitch. At the second mirror, I lured the enemies to the side so I could jump down unharmed. I just couldn't run past that rocket launcher ganado, I had to shoot him.

   

• 5-2

  I used such safe strategies here because the game was already getting so much on my nerves. All goes well, except that wrecking ball room mistake, which probably isn't a mistake.

   

• 5-3

  Don't get me started with this one. I honestly was ready to quit the speedrun completely. I simply looOOoove the Krauser knife cutscene, I think I'm in the thousands when talking about how many times seen. That hit I took wasn't fair. It clearly went through the wall :p. Krauser knife scene, It cages one and two, pushing the statue and Fina Krauser just make this chapter the worst ever. It goes without saying that this chapter is the hardest.

   

• 5-4

  I think this chapter is on par with Del Lago when talking about randomness. There are so many impossible strategies for this chapter, three of them involved enemies opening, keeping doors opened and knocking those metal bar doors down so I can keep running with ditman glitch. Also getting Mike blow up the right Gatling gun tower is just stupid hard. The hit I took and the misused Flash grenade were stupid in the end. Usually there's 3 enemies in the room with the first button and only couple of enemies in the second. Now it was the other way around. Of course I had no time to look.

   

• Final

  This chapter is just a joke.

Anyways, hopefully you enjoyed my run. If you have anything to ask regarding RE4 or my run, PM me at the forums or at IRC on irc.freenode.com #sda or mail me at sarouyucgan at gmail dot com

Resident Evil 4 Speedrun Glitches/Tricks Guide: http://youtu.be/YL1NiumceUw

Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/auddy07

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/xGameStormx

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheAuddy07

First off I'd like to say that Resident Evil 4 is one of my top 5 games ever and if I had to choose a game to be known for, this would probably be it. I want to thank God for watching over this run and being with me everyday, you are the man! I want to thank my friends and family for the support and watching my streams of this game, and to all the fans/viewers out there that I have become friends with through this ordeal, thanks for everything! A shout out to B11ZZ4RD for watching pretty much every stream I have ever done, and a big shout out to all the members of the Resident Evil 4 Competitive Players group on Facebook that have helped me out with strats! =)

P.S. I hate Ashley

Now about the run:

First of all, as of 04/21/14, this is the recorded World Record for the Normal GameCube NTSC Single Segment run of RE4. I played it on a Wii with component cables for the best quality I could get and recorded it in 480p with my Elgato Game Capture HD. I only do Single-Segments runs of RE4, because I believe it takes more skill to do so, and due to this it is harder to get a perfect run. I had tried many times over 3 days to get a good run, but I kept screwing up and restarting. Then, on 04/13/14 I finally got a new WR. This run is not completely perfect and I can definitely improve this run, but for now I am really stoked about the time I got. For have only been speedrunning this game since September of 2013, I can say I am super proud of what I have accomplished! =D

I chose to run the GameCube NTSC version because first off I live in America and secondly it's the version I played when I was younger. I know that the PAL, Japanese, and HD remakes are faster, but nobody pays tribute to the original American version, so I decided to. I will run the HD version later, but the NTSC version will always be the nostalgic one for me and holds a special place in my heart.

Here is a list of glitches/tricks that I used in my run (I copied and pasted some of Tomi Salo because his explanations were really good):

The Ditman Glitch - The most important glitch in Resident Evil 4. Equip the Striker, press R and quickly press Y to go into the inventory before the laser reticule shows up. Then switch to another weapon and Leon does everything about 1.5x faster. though. The Ditman glitch gets canceled on almost every occasion. Here's a list of things that cancel it: Opening a door, taking damage, guarding an explosion, climbing a ladder (non-vertical), cutscenes, entering a new area, Get On/Kick/Crouch action commands and aiming/shooting with the Striker.

Waterfall Glitch - This one was used in 2-1. You have to be at the right angle to jump down behind the fence and get the key item without deactivating the waterfall.

TMP Glitch - Using the TMP equipped with Stock, you can shoot through doors to break locks on the other side. This was used in 3-1 to skip the Hedge Maze section and also in 4-1 to get the Queen's Grail quicker.

Floating Glitches - I used the Boulder Skip in 4-1 to skip the dynamite puzzle, the Salazar float glitch in 4-4 to skip the boss fight, and the Island Float Glitch in 5-1 to skip a big part of a chapter. These glitches require the Ditman Glitch to be active and you have to jump down on a certain spot causing Leon to float in the air.

Laser Room Skip - It is possible to go through most of the lasers in 5-3 so you won't waste any time with the dodge animations. It's unclear how this glitch really works but you have to switch the weapon, touch the right wall or stop at the exact moment causing the lasers go through you without dodging them.

Pause Trick - If you pause the game, the time you spend in the pause menu will be excluded from the total time. I abused that so I can buffer/cloak the loading times in the pause menu so I won't lose that time when I am entering the inventory with higher loading times. That was used in 1-1, 1-3, 2-1, 5-3 and I forgot to use it in 6-1.

Difficulty Adjustment (DA) - Everything affects the difficulty on normal. Your health, amount of retries, accuracy, deaths and so on. The game can get drastically easier/faster with the proper difficulty adjustments. This was used at the very start of the game with a load game DA, it was used on the gondola before The Big Cheese fight to make the Snipers in 3-1 not spawn, in 3-1 to be able to kill the Red Zealot in 3-2 with one rocket hit, and also before the Ashley section in 3-4.

Now I am going to talk about each chapter individually. I am not going to go into great detail, I am just gona hit the high and low points of each chapter.

1-1:
Good - Got the window break at the very start and the "good grenade" on the 3^rd grenade throw.

1-2:
Good - Everything went smoothly!

1-3:
Good - The Del Lago fight went splendid! With his stupid RNG, you never know what to expect, especially in a SS run. Anyways, I got 5/5 of the "skill" shots at the start, then he decided to be nice and swim back across the lake for another 5 hits, but I missed the last one because I wasn't fast enough on the 6^th hit, but he had the good RNG again and I was able to get the final 10^th hit on him anyways.

2-1:
Good - The Waterfall glitch went perfectly!

2-2:
Good - Everything went smoothly!

2-3:
Good - Everything went smoothly!

3-1:
Bad - First off, that inventory switch 0_0. Second, I did not mean to kill the ball and chain guy who was hitting me because he was my answer to the DA for getting one rocket hit on the Red Zealot in the next chapter, so I had to improvise and find other ways of getting hit. I managed to take enough damage and get Ashley in a timely fashion, so it turned out ok.

3-2/3:3:
Bad - Stupid bugs. Also, I was a little crazy going through that pendulum room like that!

3-4:
Bad - You have to play as Ashley.

4-1:
Good - Everything went smoothly!

4-2:
Good - Dat Boulder Skip doe! Also, the bug caverns went pretty much perfectly, which was a surprise. The bugs and I go way back.... and they don't like me.

4-3:
Good - Got my beat to flow smoothly with the CT on the roller-coaster ^_^

4-4:
Good - Got the Salazar skip! (the hardest glitch in the game in my opinion).

5-1:
Good - Everything went smoothly!

5-2:
Bad - This is my worst chapter, need to fix when I switch weapons and such. Lost a lot of time on this chapter. =(

5-3:
Good - Got the laser room skip and the Krauser fight went as perfect as I could ask.
Bad - IT was being a jerk and wouldn't let me pass him, so I got hit, which kinda messes up the Krauser fight.

5-4:
Bad - A stray arrow hit me in the knee, costing me a good 5 to 10 seconds.

6-1:
Good - Did some flippy flips and got a new World Record! =D

I've been waiting to do this run for quite a while, but never really had many good opportunities to put aside time to do it. Regardless, it's a good thing I didn't though due to recently discovered glitches that I used.

Striker Glitch: Allows Leon to run incredibly fast, but due to the time it takes to just activate the glitch itself, I rarely use it. When implemented, it only saves a few seconds at a time, and overall the time saved by the glitch isn't too much, maybe only 1-2 minutes.

Locked Door Glitch: With the TMP, and ONLY the TMP, locks on the opposite side of doors can be broken, thus skipping approximately 5-6 minutes of the game. I do not have to go through the castle maze, nor the falling ceiling to get the Queen's Grail.

Although the current record time for RE4 Special Weapons is 1:59:07, and I utilized glitches to save time, I am playing on PRO mode. Enemies are harder to kill, such as Del Lago takes extra hits, and enemy AI is a lot more responsive. I'll let my video speak for itself, considering the RE4 SDA page already has a lot of comments on it. If I want to be realistic, my time is about 1 minute faster but I had to switch recordable DVDs since I went over 2 hours.

My AIM is danthetrmptman and my e-mail is dantheman9192@yahoo.com for anyone that wants to contact me to discuss this run or other games.

[General Strategy]

(1) Technique of Key usage and Skipping messages

The length of the messages shown at each door is different and depends on the door. In the case where the message is long (more than 2 messages, approximately), using a key from the item menu is faster than just checking the door to use the key. And in the case where the message is short, checking the door (as usual) is faster. And generally, to skip the message, tapping the square and X buttons quickly in turns gives you a faster message skip.

(2) Changing the direction of Ada by "Weapon aiming"

If you use "aiming" while you change the direction of "view", you can turn more quickly than usual. I designated this phenomenon as "Quick direction change" (This is different from "180 degrees quick turn".). But if you need to change the direction a lot, you had better not use this technique. Just use the regular direction change by using the direction button.

(3) Equipment

• Chicago Typewriter
• Bow Gun
• Bowgun Bolts x6
• Hand Grenade x11 (Initial equipment when the game started)
• Flash Grenade x3

I arranged these items in the attache case so that I could change weapons quickly with minimal cursor movement during the run. And I carried one extra Hand Grenade and Flash Grenade, because I needed this for the "Quick direction change". If you run out of Grenades, you cannot perform the "Quick direction change".

Prepare exactly 6 bowgun bolts. You need these bolts in Chapter 5. The reason for 6 is because if there are some leftover arrows, the reloading of the bowgun remains for Ada, and Ada cannot start running or opening the menu quickly.

(4) Various regulations

You can see some of my manipulations look like "mistakes". However, in most cases, they are required to regulate the enemy's movements.

[Chapter 1]

(1) Skipping the cutscene

If you skip the cutscene in the regular way, there is a short time lag (you cannot control Ada during this short period). But if you push the start button just before starting the cutscene with certain timing, there is no time lag. This might be the only technique available at this stage.

(2) Behind the Church

Ada threw a Hand Grenade when he jumped to the other side. This is the strategy to make the 2 ganados move quickly. If you just jump, they will grab you with a high probability. But don't kill them (because of the difficulty correction system).

(3) To Get the Green Catseye

When you get the Green Catseye, get the 3 female ganados "out of the view" so that their attacks don't hit Ada. When enemies are out of sight, the hit ratio is low.

(4) Inside the Church

Ada walked 1~2 steps at the entrance. By this regulation, you can simply run through the ganado (with a cap) on the 2nd floor.

[Chapter 2]

(1) Dynamite Cabin

I used 2 Hand Grenades. But atwyatt found a faster strategy to use only 1 Hand Grenade.

(2) Dodge Buttons

Start pushing both patterns of dodge buttons even before the right set is shown on the screen.

(3) vs Female Chainsaw ganado (Bella Sister)

I used the Chicago Typewriter. But I heard from ZENO that throwing 8~9 Hand Grenades quickly might save some time. I have not examined this strategy yet.

[Chapter 3]

(1) Throwing Hand Grenades farther

You have to wait until the Hand Grenade explodes if you throw it close to Ada. Throw it farther, then Ada can move soon afterwards.

And this is very detailed information though... When the Red Ganado is killed, he drops money. And if the money is close to the treasure box, Ada has to pick it up. So, I tried to explode the Red Ganado away from the treasure box.

(2) Get damage from a scythe

I got a damage or hit from a big scythe on purpose when I got out from the area. There are 2 merits from this. One is... there is no time loss compared with killing all enemies with a Hand Grenade. So, this is the minimal time loss (of course, you should not get any other kind of damage, like being grabbed or hit. This scythe is the only damage without any time loss, as far as I know.). And the other is... after this, you will be able to avoid enemies relatively easily because of the difficulty correction.

[Chapter 4]

The hardest chapter in this game. You need a lot of luck.

(1) From Gatling gun manipulation to the 1st lift

You have to move quickly after shooting Gatling gun to get on the 1st lift. Otherwise, you will miss the 1st chance for the lift.

(2) Cannon manipulation

I shot 2 because it was very hard to avoid their attack. But if you can manage that, just shooting 1 is faster.

[Chapter 5]

You need a lot of luck... not so much as Chapter 4 though.

(1) The 1st forced fight

The timing to shoot the bowgun bolts is important. You need exactly 6 bolts for a successful fight.

(2) vs Krauser

Shoot his leg first and his head when he kneels.

(3) vs Saddler

Proceed a little bit and shoot his head. One thing you need to be careful about is not to shoot the eye in his mouth. Otherwise, he moves dramatically.

[Postscript]

I thank ZENO and atwyatt for their advice to improve my run. If I use their strategy and eliminate all my mistakes in this play, I will be able to improve approximately 10 seconds, I guess. Of course, you need the best luck and to succeed in all precise controlling. In my opinion, "Luck" is generally the most important factor for a speedrun. I hope my strategy written here helps other players to improve the speedrun record of this game.

I would also like to thank atwyatt for helping me to write this commentary and MT for introducing my run to SDA.

2008. 2. 1. You-Hei "Cab" Muro

Author's comments in Japanese:

Wii, Assignment Ada, European version in 0:05:48 by Robert Brandl.

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Author's comments:

PC version Normal: 1:45:48 by Bartolomeu Penkal, done in 16 segments.

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Author's comments:

Best European Xbox360 version with special weapons: 1:26:23 by Robert Brandl, done in 16 segments.

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