Beats Kirby's Adventure without using copy abilities, except for the sword in the Meta Knight boss fight and the Star Rod. It's named "No Abilities" since that's the speedrun category name.
I think normal Kirby's movement is cool enough to show off.
Comments
The main movement tech throughout the entire run is sliding. Pressing down + a (or b) will make Kirby slide, starting with a speed of 677 subpixels/frame. When Kirby is in the air, speed is not lost if you're holding the direction that you're moving towards. So, by sliding off a ledge, you can preserve all of that speed, then you can jump at the first possible frame to try to keep it. Every frame you're on the ground reduces your speed by 14, so it's best to try to use big jumps to clear much of the level.
Another important aspect about the run is RNG manipulation. Since the game is very laggy, it's best to avoid certain attacks from enemies, such as a Waddle Doo's beam attack or a Sparky attack. RNG is advanced by doing certain actions that produce tiny stars, such as landing from jumps or from bumping into walls, so a combination of these could give you favorable enemy patterns.
RNG is manipulated extensively to get good (mini)boss patterns.
Other Tricks
- Damage boosting is useful for clearing enemies without inhaling
- When spitting, holding the direction you're moving towards preserves your speed
- one-frame jumps are useful for turning in the air without skidding
- sometimes resetting is faster than watching the unlock level cutscenes
Glitches
Most glitches used in the run are just clips.
Pause Clips
Probably the most "major" glitch used here. When pausing on the same frame that an enemy loads in, it is still "active", meaning it will still move around and attack. If Kirby gets damaged by the enemy, you can escape the pause menu. When the game is paused, the map's collision is changed to the top-left room, so escaping the bounds of the level is very easy. Most of the time you have to float while in the paused state since trying to jumping or inhaling will unpause.
Used in 3-1, 4-6, 5-2, 6-2, 6-3, 6-4.
Slope Clips
If you're at the middle of a slope, have around 160-170 speed, and press A on that frame, you clip through the slope.
Used in 3-2, 4-2, 4-4 (!), 6-4, 7-1.
Corner Clips
If you fly into corner in a peculiar way you can clip into walls. Currently, I've only discovered a setup for clipping into two-high walls, since this clip seems particularly precise. Hopefully one day someone finds setups for all sized walls.
Used in 7-1, 7-6.
Ladder Clips
Getting off ladders a certain way makes you clip into the corner. Might be the same thing as corner clips, honestly.
Used in 2-3, 5-2.
Stage by stage comments
Grape Garden
I got lucky finding a pattern where those 2 poppy bros lined up.
Yogurt Yard
The clip in 5-5 doesn't really fit into the categories above. It's just weird geometry, I guess.
Orange Ocean
Meta Knight fight could be faster by around 20 frames if I could take damage, since you can get more hits by sliding into him. (Maybe remove a damage boost from 6-1?)
Rainbow Resort
7-6 is my favorite level in the run, since it shows off a lot of tricks. I'm sure that inhale trick in the Float Islands section is useful somewhere else.
Staying still for a bit after the Dedede fight since moving around immediately after defeat will delay fadeout for a second.
Fountain of Dreams
During the Orb fight, you can shoot every 20 frames (+ lag), but you can bypass it by taking damage. Taking damage also makes the game lag sometime by 2 frames, so the net timesave is 9 frames compared to TASEditor's run.
Other comments
0xwas made a no abilites TAS back in 2013, which I looked at a lot for comparison. I ended up using the JP version because of this, but now I'm sure all NTSC versions play almost exactly the same. (Not enough to sync up, though.)