Submission #9353: dekutony's GBC POWA! in 11:56.10

Hi, everybody! I'm dekutony and I have returned to submit a new TAS after a good long while. I've been kinda busy this year so I haven't had the time I used to have to to work on stuff like this.

This is a TAS for the homebrew game POWA!, released in 2022 by aiguanachein for the Game Boy Color. In this simple 2D platforming adventure, you star the titular Powa! as you go through a series of levels spanning 5 worlds in order to get back to their home village after retrieving some medicinal herbs. This game has a cute artstyle, characters and nice music, so I got really interested into making a TAS of this game. It beats the game in under 12 minutes.

You can get the game here: https://aiguanachein.itch.io/powa

Now with that out of the way, let's get into the TAS comments already.

This is a simple grasslands world consisting of 4 levels, followed by a boss. As the tutorial world, the level design is basic and easy to navigate. Despite this, there's moments where I wait for the enemies to move out of the way (this will be a running theme). Our little friend Powa! (which gives me Yacopu from Trip World vibes) has a deceptively short jump, which also doesn't go as far as one would like, so throughout the game I have to carefully plan out my timings for each jump. Powa! also features a bubble attack that lets you kill most enemies (bees are an exception), however, it is an incredibly slow attack with a lot of cooldown frames. So, the vast majority of the time I resort to carefully maneuvering around them without killing them because your basic attack is really that slow. I kill enemies when I have no other option. You die in one hit, which means stuff like damage boosting and invincibility frames doesn't exist in this game.

The first world's boss, Draco, is a pterodactyl that chases you once its woken up. You must reach the end of the level before he catches you. Simple enough.

This is where the careful platforming and maneuvering comes into play. This is a series of vertical scrolling levels were you have to climb to the top and reach the end. I'm unfortunately not fast enough to reach a couple of the moving platform cycles, so I have to wait a bit for both times this happens, not to mention the spiked floors, rolling rocks and falling stalactites. Ladders in this game have the weird property where you can only get off them when you hit the ground, either by climbing to the top or landing to the bottom, you can't hop off them by jumping or anything like that.

The second boss, Voltor, is a vulture that flies left to right shooting feathers against you. After doing this a few times, he can do either of two things. He can swoop in to your direction to try and kill you, or the other thing that we actually want, he falls to the ground and gets tired, letting me counterattack during his tired state. This is done in the first possible frame each and every time. What determines what the vulture is going to do after his attacking pattern depends on your current player position, so it's very simple to manipulate the boss to always fall down the floor and hit him as early as possible.

The water world. It has swimming water physics and controls, different from the rest of the game. You cannot attack at all, so this is the world where avoiding enemies is the only option. Constantly swimming is the fastest way of moving. Touching the ground or the ceiling cancels all your momemtum while swimming, so constantly swimming is very important. There's also spikes, retracting spikes and fish and jellyfish everywhere!

The octopus boss, Olagar, is when boss fights start to get a bit tricky. The objective is to detonate the bombs the boss sets up when you aproach them without dying from the explosions, then make it so that the octopus gets caught by the explosions and take damage. The octopus's movement and bomb placement is dependant on my position, so coming up with the most optimal pattern for this was key... I did the best I could while also dealing with the constant projectiles that get thrown at me.

This is the forest level with a lot of underground sections. There's now bats that move erratically, birds that drop... projectiles below you and moles who shoot directly at you, so this is where avoiding enemies is at its most difficult. The bats specially are a pain to avoid, and sometimes you just have to kill them in order to advance.

This world's boss, Gorrin, was another tricky one. First of, you need to spawn the boss first by getting close enough to him. He then runs around, back and forth at pretty fast speed, faster than your normal movement. After doing this pattern, he stops and skids directly to the wall, stunning him, which leads him open for your attacks. I couldn't for the life of me hit him at the earliest possible frame. He just runs too fast, so I can never catch up to him in the first frame of his vulnerable state, no matter how hard I tried. He takes damage at around frame 4 of his stunned state all three times.

This is the last world of the game, your hometown gets invaded and you've got to put a stop to it all. It is a single level where there's a bunch of little blue dudes shooting projectiles. Not much to say about it.

The final fight against Fatto (yes) consists of attacking him while landing on those small breaking platforms in time, all whilst avoiding the constant projectiles. The platforms respawn as soon as you land at the bottom of the floor. Thankfully, the moving platform has a generous enough cycle for me to jump on the breaking platforms very quickly. The boss moves back and forth pretty quickly as well, so timing is essential here too.

I finish the run with a final in-game time of 10:33.

With all that being said... Thank you very much for watching and reading!

nymx: Claiming for judging.

nymx: Updating with improved movie.

nymx: This was a very good game and it has excellent music. During my analysis, I saw a few places that were missed opportunities. Those places didn't add up to enough reason for me to dismiss this submission; however, it can be improved. The main thing that I was looking at, was the Boss fights. After giving them a try, I now understand the reason why they don't look optimized.

So congratulations on this good effort.

Accepting.

despoa: Processing...