Going back to a run which doesn't involve as-of-yet impossible to obtain items, I have a
WIP of a Pokémon Blue Gengar run. I'm currently in Veridian forest, which isn't very far, but I still need to decide whether I'm going to be picking up items along the way (to prevent the Gym Leader speeches) before I progress. FractalFusion did this in his Pokémon Yellow run, but I'm not sure if it was actually faster (due to going out of the way, and the ridiculously long jingle for picking up hidden items).
In this run I decided to rename the hero 'I', and the rival 'ASH'. This should save about 18 seconds over the course of the entire run. Thanks to a tip from Chamale, I was able to save three critical hits in the section, two from the very first rival battle, and one against the Weedle in Veridian (he noticed that with a attack DV of F, one could get one more damage against the Rival in the very first battle (this actually works with a DV of E as well)). I ended up Rolling E1EF, which is just about as good as it gets. I'm currently 140 frames ahead of my previous run, around 80 from the name change, and around 60 from better manipulation.
As I indicated above, I'll be using Gengar this run, glitched L100 in Mt. Moon (which doesn't involve going out of the way at all). He starts with Lick and Night Shade, and I plan to learn Thunderbolt and either Mega Drain or Psychic later on (both have advantages and disadvantages... I still need to figure out which is better). Strength will also most likely replace either Lick or Night Shade. I'll also be glitching a Mew as a Fly/Surf slave while I'm performing the Snorlax skip. I really have no idea how much faster this will be than the published run, but certainly serveral minutes. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
EDIT:
Something I forgot to mention. I noticed while working on my 151 run that when an opponent requires one critical and one normal hit to defeat, that it was around 15 frames faster to put the critical hit at the end. At the time, I had (wrongly) assumed that somehow there was less of a delay when using a critical as the last hit. The real difference turns out to be that when the opponents health bar changes color (from green to yellow, for example), this takes 15 frames. This is why I saved one critical hit for the end in the Rival battle, to prevent the change from yellow to red.
This also implies a possible change of strategy in other cases, particularly when needing two max damage normal hits. The first hit will cause the opponents health bar to turn yellow. An equally valid strategy would be to use a weak normal hit first, and then finish off with a weak critical. Not only is this infinitely easier to manipulate, it's also potentially faster:
0-10 frames (max normal + miss) + 15 frames (color change) + 0-10 frames (max normal) = 15-35 frames
0-2 frames (normal + miss) + 0-4 frames (critical hit) + 20 frames (critical message) = 20-26 frames
Although the first case has a lower minimum, in practice it's usually in the 30-35 frame mark (average 7.5 frames to manipulate a max damage hit is about right). The second case requires almost no manipulation whatsoever. I think this will become my new strategy.
