Getting one more submission just before the end of the year since I got in that TASing mood again.
Introduction
If you've been on this website, you're likely to know what Mega Man 5 is at this point as the series has been TASed numerous times across many different games and hacks. There's been so many Mega Man 5 TASes that use lots of Super Arrow and
This TAS is based on an old 2011 Something Awful Let's Play thread's Mega Man 5 races. Specifically, the final round involved the top 4 players to complete the game from start to finish with these special rules:
- The Mega Buster is not allowed to be used. For the first stage shooting is only allowed if Rush Coil is equipped.
- The usage of shooting with Rush Coil and Rush Jet is forbidden unless all other special weapons, including Super Arrow, are depleted.
- If the Beat letters are obtained, shooting with the buster while equipped with Beat is allowed.
- Only 1 M tank is allowed to be used throughout the entire run.
Here's a link to the old Mega Man 5 race videos, but do beware that this is from a Something Awful Let's Play thread circa 2011 and the language used is likely to be dated and offensive: https://lparchive.org/Mega-Man-5/Update%2018/
I wanted to see how a TAS of that would turn out mostly for my own sake, but I added some extra conditions since I'm a fool who wanted to push this challenge to the absolute limit. Here are the modified conditions I added:
- The use of Super Arrow and Beat are forbidden entirely. This makes the Dark Man 4 and final Wily fights much tougher.
- Most of the usage of shooting with Rush Coil and Rush Jet are completely forbidden after the first Robot Master is defeated. The exceptions are the jet ski section with the mini boss in Wave Man's stage, the crumbling tower in Proto 4 that requires breaking blocks with buster shots, and the crusher section in Wily 1 that also requires breaking blocks with buster shots. In those cases, buster shots are not allowed to hit any enemies.
- M tanks are completely forbidden to use. This forces a lot more ammo management for the fortress stages.
- Using glitches to zip through walls or screen scrolling glitches as a means to speed up sections is forbidden. I felt this restriction better fit the spirit of the original Mega Man 5 race rules.
This was a pretty complex TAS to produce. Lots of the RNG just didn't want to cooperate with me here and there and actually using a lot of these weapons extensively really highlighted how much weaker they are compared to just using the Mega Man 5 buster. Despite all of that, I'm happy with how this ultimately turned out and willing to leave it here for anyone else to try improving.
Game notes
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1
- NESHawk core
- Takes damage to save time
- Heavy RNG manipulation
- Contains speed-entertainment tradeoffs
- Ultimately, a demonstration of a silly challenge run based on a race done over a decade ago.
Mechanics and techniques
These definitely aren't all of the tricks a Mega Man 5 TAS can utilize but these are the ones that are relevant to the goals of this challenge run TAS.
Enemy i-frames
When damaged, enemies have 8 frames of invincibility, diminishing the rate of which rapid fire can take down enemies. This is a problem for Water Wave since it means that it can't take out enemies rapidly due to how fast the waves move as the second and third waves would contact the enemy while they have i-frames.
Jumping out of slide and the limitations
In most Mega Man games with a slide it can be cancelled with a jump out of it. Mega Man 5 is no exception to that but there's some conditions that prevent that due to some physics jank. Here are the conditions that prevent jumping out of slide:
- Mega Man is underwater.
- Mega Man slides close enough to either the top or bottom of a ladder.
- Mega Man is right next to a teleporter.
In these conditions, turning around has to be done to cancel the slide. The turnaround is used to jump up ladders for a faster ascent.
Sliding into a teleporter
This applies only to Wily 3 with the refights teleporter. When sliding into a teleporter it's faster to cancel the slide by turning around at the right position in the teleporter as the slide otherwise doesn't stop until either the max slide distance is reached or a wall is touched. This saves a few frames but there are some bosses that require waiting to manipulate their RNG anyways.
Ladder-wall boost
When reaching the top of a ladder and there's a wall directly next to the top of the ladder, sliding away from the wall for a frame, turning towards the wall, and then sliding away from the wall again gives a small distance boost. This is caused by the sliding hitbox detecting a wall when Mega Man turns around and pushing him away the appropriate distance.
Star Man post fight fast fall
By timing and adjusting a jump after Star Man is defeated in his stage, Mega Man will jump with normal gravity rather than low gravity. This greatly speeds up the weapon get animation as otherwise Mega Man slowly falls down at a fixed speed.
Item RNG manipulation
Item RNG is a mix of inputs and frames. Energy drops are the main items manipulated by enemies so sometimes there are pauses or slower movement done to get the right item drops when needed.
Boss RNG manipulation
Boss RNG is a mix of the frame entering the fight, the positions of Mega Man and the boss, and sometimes actions done by Mega Man. I had a hard time with some boss RNG manipulation so eventually I went with the best result I could pull off.
Robot Master ideal kill positions
The Robot Masters explode into 16 explosion effects that move in 8 directions. These generate a lot of lag. As the level end sequence isn't tied to them leaving the screen, this means that in the Robot Master stages it's faster to kill them farther away from the center of the screen. This allows for the explosion effects to leave the screen sooner. For the refights, Mega Man teleports away when he picks up the big health energy drop so in that case the best position is to have Mega Man close to the boss on the kill and the boss close to the ground.
Weapon analysis
Here's a breakdown of the weapons I do use in this TAS, roughly in the order they are obtained. Some are definitely more usable than others but at the end of the day they have the problem of not doing enough damage to most enemies in the game. Unlike some other Mega Man games, there aren't that many enemies that have specific weapon weaknesses to exploit. The extra layer for the original NES release is that there's no fast weapon switching which negatively affects the usefulness of some weapons.
- Rush Coil
- The Rush Coil in Mega Man 5 works differently compared to the rest of the series the Coil has appeared. Rather than being immediately sprung up when on top of Rush he instead hops up as a vertical platform where Mega Man can manually jump off. This functionality is only used in the Star Man boss fight where the buster is mainly used for the first stage. It then gets shelved for the rest of the game.
- Star Crash
- This shield weapon has a variable ammo count. If the shield make contact with anything without being shot out it costs 3 energy bars. If the shield is launched as a large but slow projectile then it costs 2 bars of energy and works as a slow projectile. This means that Star Crash has somewhere between 10 to 14 shots to use on a full bar. It's used for Gravity Man's stage and Gyro Man's stage to get through enemies either by taking them out when they're in the way or blocking shots. After that it gets shelved until the Gravity Man refight and the Wily Press at the end of the boss rush.
- Gravity Hold
- This has 7 shots on a full bar and hits everything on screen for a small amount of damage. Enemies killed this way don't drop any items to pick up. Due to no weapon switching and the high energy cost this weapon is only used for Gyro Man's weakness.
- Gyro Attack
- This weapon shoots a projectile forward that can be guided vertically once by pressing up or down. This has 28 shots on a full bar and does 2 damage to most enemies. Since it does decent damage to enemies this weapon sees a lot of use in the fortress stages and also demands lots of weapon energy pickups due to the constant usage. Overall I think this weapon is good but could use more enemies weak to the weapon. It's no surprise this is one of the most frequent weapons used in the TAS.
- Rush Jet
- Rush teleports down as a platform that moves forward. The forward movement can be slowed down by holding back and the vertical position can be adjusted by moving up and down. Since Rush's starting position is based on Mega Man's position this can be used as a pseudo platform as well as a way to cross large death pits, this is a decent substitute for Super Arrow usage. Rush Jet does allow for a slightly quicker ascent than Rush Coil and is also used in the situations in the fortress stages where buster shots are required to progress. One main concern is that moving up and down can generate lag so adjustments had to be done to keep that to a minimum.
- Crystal Eye
- This weapon shoots a big crystal orb the size of a maximum charge shot. When the shot collides with a wall, it splits into 3 smaller shots (1 horizontal and 2 shots going at 45 degree angles) that bounce off walls. This has 28 shots on a full bar and also does 2 damage to most enemies. The drawback that hold the weapon back is that the wall collision tends to create lots of lag so the main weapon's gimmick isn't utilized for most of the TAS. That being said this is one of the more frequently used weapons in the TAS.
- Napalm Bomb
- This weapon drops a slow moving bomb that explodes either over time or on contact with an enemy. This has 28 shots on a full bar. The main problem with the weapon is that the explosion that usually happens when using the bomb generates a lot of lag. This sometimes can be worked around by shooting the weapon in a way such that the explosion effect doesn't happen. This doesn't get too much use but is definitely usable enough for the TAS that it sees a fair amount of use.
- Power Stone
- lol, lmao
This weapon shoots 3 rocks in a swirling pattern. This has 28 shots on a full bar but generally does a measly 1 damage on most enemies. There are also some enemy projectiles that causes the rocks to be deflected away. This weapon can't be fired again until either going to the weapon menu or waiting on the rocks to despawn. The first option is generally slow but sometimes is better than waiting out the rock despawn time. This weapon is only used for Charge Man and Dark Man 4 for the weakness. At least those fights it's sometimes possible to get the rocks despawned faster by getting them all to hit Charge Man when possible. However their RNG can sometimes make that simply not feasible.
- Charge Kick
- This melee weapon comes out when Mega Man slides. The kick has 28 uses on a full bar and gives some invincibility to enemies and obstacles when used. Unfortunately this weapon doesn't give full invincibility where it's needed most such as the rolling spike balls and the start of Wave Man's attacks. It's used for some parts of Wave Man's stage for invincibility through some obstacles and is then shelved until it's needed for Wave Man. Definitely a weapon that suffers from no fast weapon switching since the i-frames generated would really help for some sections.
- Water Wave
- This weapon shoots 3 water wave projectiles at the enemy and requires Mega Man to be on the ground to use. The water waves can also block some projectiles if they touch them. This has 14 shots on a full bar. Since it produces 3 projectiles when fired, Water Wave is a very laggy weapon when fired. Combined with the enemy i-frame problems making the multiple water waves kind of useless for stronger enemies, this only sees use at the very end of Proto Fortress 1 and as a weakness weapon for Dark Man 1 and Star Man.
Level by level breakdown
The Robot Master route starts with Star Man and then follows weakness order. This follows the winning route of the RTA no Mega Buster race.
Star Man
This roughly follows the normal TAS of the level but now there's no charge shot and a robot dog shows up sometimes. The Star Man fight then follows and is longer simply due to having to use small buster shots. They can still be fired around the shield which I find amusing.
Gravity Man
Star Crash is equipped at the start of the stage and is used to clear out some enemies in the way. A big weapon energy pickup is manipulated to drop to compensate for the weapon's high energy cost as a few enemies require several hits with the weapon. Damage boosting is also used to primarily avoid needing to use more Star Crash than needed before reaching the boss. Gravity Man can be shot with a preemptive shield projectile on the first gravity flip. Carefully planned jumps and shots are used to get more than one hit per gravity flip done by Gravity Man.
Gyro Man
Star Crash is used once again for this level for most of this stage due to Gravity Hold not having the right weapon properties to do it by itself. This time no extra ammo pickups are needed for Star Crash as each shot is planned such that it runs out right in front of the boss gate. Slowing down before going under the big jumping robot allows for getting past it without getting, uh, stomped. Gyro Man is simple: use all 7 shots of Gravity Hold and have him die close to the corner to reduce lag.
Crystal Man
Gyro Attack is used for the entire stage since most threats can be easily handled by the shots. To avoid needing a weapon refill, some enemies are simply avoided by jumping over them. The crystal droppers are RNG manipulated to not get in Mega Man's way as he slides and jumps past them. Crystal Man starts the fight by shooting 4 bouncing balls. Intentional damage is used to absorb half of the shots to greatly reduce lag in the fight.
Napalm Man
Crystal Eye is used to handle this stage as its size can hit most of the relevant obstacles. Due to Napalm Man requiring 10 shots of Crystal Eye, a big weapon energy pickup is manipulated in the waterfall section of the level. An intentional hit is taken on the last tiger in the first area of the level as there wasn't a faster way around it. The next tiger is manipulated to attack immediately by pressing B while sliding. Another intentional hit is taken in the missile room to get past the remaining missiles with i-frames without wasting extra Crystal Eye shots. Napalm Man is pretty straightforward and is simply shot up close with Crystal Eye until he falls.
Stone Man
Napalm Bomb is used for this stage, though a fair number of enemies are avoided to not have the explosion effect generate lag. Napalm bomb is still used if it either can kill without an explosion effect or is otherwise faster than not using it for situations such as enabling more sliding opportunities. For the vertical moving platform section it's slightly faster just using Napalm Bomb over switching to Rush Jet by virtue of the time spent going in and out of the weapon select screen. Stone Man is manipulated to do as many short hops as possible. His other actions generate i-frames for himself which needs to be avoided.
Charge Man
Gyro Attack is used to handle getting past the enemies in the level quickly due to the vertical aiming properties. Power Stone is inadequate for handling enemies in this stage quickly. A big weapon energy pickup is manipulated to have enough shots for the stage. I would have fixed the unnecessary small weapon energy pickup but there's a big RNG hurdle that would require a lot of extensive adjusting. That's right: Charge Man.
Charge Man's AI needs to be manipulated to avoid his red toot attack as that generates lots of i-frames for him. Power Stone shots also have to be fired in a particular way to allow firing another one quickly without pausing. Mega Man also needs to be in position for Charge Man's charging dash to adjust Charge Man's facing direction and position. I roughly tried following the existing Mega Man 5 TAS strat with some adjustments since it didn't quite follow like that one. Luckily here I was able to get this fight done relatively fast enough here as I managed to avoid the red toot at all costs.
Wave Man
Charge Kick is used to slide past the steam vents and the swinging maces with the sliding i-frames. Unfortunately these i-frames don't apply to the rolling spike balls. Sliding has to also be carefully planned to avoid needing any weapon energy drops to refill it. On the bubble section Rush Jet is used on the bubble shaft to get on the small bubbles when they reach the top of the screen. The bike jet is a straightforward autoscroller where the only thing I shoot is the mini boss halfway through. A slide and a jump are initiated right before fighting Wave Man to get in position and conserve just a little bit more Charge Kick uses.
Proto 1
Crystal Eye is used for the start of the stage to take out the flying enemies in one shot. This also includes utilizing the split shots since despite the lag it ended up being faster. A hit on the first tiger is taken as it was faster.
Just before the first ladder, Crystal Eye is swapped out for Rush Jet to get past obstacles that require movement weapon usage. Taking the bottom path after the big spike pit was slightly faster despite requiring taking a hit due to no buster shots being allowed. Using Rush Jet as a platform above the laser shooter also enables sliding onto the next platform while Rush hits the wall. This required pressing down where it wouldn't generate extra lag but it was enough. The wall collision allowed for summoning Rush Jet again to climb the ladder quicker. The disappearing block section is subsequently skipped with more Rush Jet usage as a platform.
Water Wave is equipped when on the last ladder and is fired before sliding into the narrow passageway. Despite the lag it generated it does take out the moving cone at the other end of the passageway to prevent knockback. 10 shots of Water Wave were then used Dark Man 1 with minimal fuss. Some damage was taken for boss positioning reasons and the last Water Wave shot was aimed at the wall to get them to despawn faster for lag reduction.
Proto 2
Rush Jet is equipped at the start of the level to get over a wall near the start of the level. Once the wall was overcome, Gyro Attack was equipped to handle enemies that either got in the way or generated extra lag due to their existence. A lot of energy pickups are manipulated to drop to maintain the amount of Gyro Attack usage needed for the rest of the game.
Napalm Bomb is then swapped into after taking out a Metall cannon. Napalm bomb can take out tigers in 2 bombs and is also one of Dark Man 2's secondary weakness weapons at a whopping 2 damage per shot. Tigers are manipulated by pressing B. The first tiger is simply blown up with bombs. The second tiger is made to attack by pressing B while sliding to avoid lag. The third tiger is also made to attack by pressing B but this required slightly more trickery. As Mega Man was in the air B can't be pressed while sliding. Instead a bomb is shot at the flying enemy nearby so that the bomb despawns without a big explosion, cutting down lag generated. The last tiger is then made to attack by pressing B while sliding to safely jump over it. Dark Man 2 is unremarkable as he simply walks about. Damage is taken for boss kill positioning reasons.
Proto 3
Napalm Bomb is used at the start of the stage for a few big weapon energy refill drops and to clear out the enemies quickly. Rush Jet is equipped from the bouncing robot room to the end of the stage to get past the big chasms without the snake platform. Rush Jet is positioned in clever ways for lag reduction and ladder ascension. The second big chasm required jumping to avoid the falling robot. Gyro Attack is used on the boss where it's kept in one position by being close.
Proto 4
The vertical room requires buster shots so Rush Jet is equipped as it's faster than Rush Coil. The summoning of Rush also disrupted the rate of fire in this room so the same pattern couldn't be used as the other TAS of this game. Jumping at the right moment into the boss door allowed for a slide in the boss room to slightly speed up the cutscene. Unfortunately, Dark Man 4's secondary weakness weapons are Star Crash and Power Stone. As all shots of Star Crash are needed for Wily 3, Power Stone had to be used here. This fight has a bunch of entering the weapons menu to despawn the rocks quicker. I did manage to get a few power Stone shots where I could avoid the pausing but this was the best I could get.
Wily 1
Gyro Attack was used at the start to manipulate weapon energy drops to stock back up on ammo. This includes a large weapon energy refill for Water Wave as Star Man's fight required it, necessitating two extra pauses. Rush Jet is used to get over a high wall and to allow buster usage for the crusher segment. As the enemies weren't allowed to be harmed, damage tanking was required though the time loss was minimal due to the room being cycle based and zipping being forbidden.
After the crusher segment, Crystal Eye is equipped for some weapon energy drops and for exploiting Big Pets' weakness. Damage boosting was used to conserve some ammo for later. Big Pets is fought the same way as the existing TAS though an extra shot was needed to get a small enemy out of the way for one of the shots.
Wily 2
Gyro Attack was used at the start once again for more weapon energy drops and to clear out enemies easier. Rush Jet is briefly used to get across a spike pit while also having enough height to jump over the first big jumping robot. Gyro Attack is then equipped again while sliding past the second big jumper. Circring Q9 is manipulated to open its hatches earlier at the start for a faster fight.
Wily 3
Refights time and it's a pain in the butt in terms of RNG. Before the refights, Gyro Attack is used to get a small and a large weapon energy pickup for Gyro Attack as it's going to be incredibly important later. And now, the refights.
- Charge Man wouldn't cooperate with me it turned out so some Power Stone shots had to take the longer approach to leave the screen to prevent Charge Man's red toot attack. This fight required getting hit so time is lost having to refill from the large health energy drop.
- Gyro Man is still a chump.
- Napalm Man is still essentially the same fight.
- Crystal Man still has the same lag reduction strat so damage is taken. This does mean taking time to refill from the large health energy drop.
- Star Man is manipulated to do short hops by getting distance from him after using Water Wave. The last Water Wave shot is used towards the wall to slightly reduce some lag.
- Stone Man required wasting some time mid fight to ensure he only used short hops.
- Wave Man's first water spout got in the way of sliding towards him as apparently the startup of his attack ignores the i-frames of Charge Kick. Otherwise this is pretty straightforward after the first hit like the first time.
- Gravity Man works like he did last time with getting more than one hit in per gravity swap. This being done last also means Star Crash is already equipped for the last part of this stage.
After the refights the Wily Press is next. For some reason I couldn't figure out how to get RNG manipulation done mid-fight so I went with the first reasonably fast press pattern for the fight. At the end of the fight I take a small time loss to show off a small quirk where the level end sequence takes precedence over dying via spike contact on the ground.
Wily 4
Gyro Attack was used at the start to manipulate 3 large weapon energy refills from enemies. The third one was used for Crystal Eye which is taken into the final boss fight. Damage was taken on the last enemy of the game to get past it quicker. The remaining Crystal Eye is first used on Wily Machine 5 until no shots remain. Napalm Bomb is used to take out the rest of the first phase. Bad boss RNG from the vacuum attack meant that there was a delay in some bomb shots to avoid death. The full Gyro Attack ammo was used for the Wily Capsule fight. The first hit is done just before Wily disappears for the first time. From there it's a matter of getting two hits per capsule appearance. The last hit could then be done with an early ended input.
Potential improvements
- The most obvious thing would b to do this with fewer arbitrary restrictions. At the same time though, I feel doing the entire TAS with extra restrictions was part of the fun.
- A better Robot Master route could make for a faster first half of the run.
- There could be better ammo management and/or usage though what is here I feel is pretty solid.
- Better RNG manipulation is probably the biggest potential for time saving since Charge Man and Dark Man 4 with Power Stone isn't great to execute.
Special thanks
- Simply Simon for his wonderfully informative Let's Play videos of the classic Mega Man games.
- Phiggle for hosting the Mega Man 5 races and for thinking up the nasty finals race rules.
- By extension, all of the participants for those races since they did keep my pretty entertained all those years ago.
- Baddap1, Baxter, GlitchMan, kopernical, and NemoRuby for their Mega Man 5 and Mega Man 5 related TASes published on the site.
- EZGames69, whose work in progress TAS of going through Mega Man X buster only got me inspired to pick this dumb Mega Man 5 challenge TAS back up.