Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is the sequel to the Sorcerer's(Philosopher's) Stone for the Game Boy Color released on November 5, 2002. This game is pretty much the same in gameplay, it is a turn-based RPG combat system, but this time we are able to use Ron and Hermione in our party to help fight creatures. This is also the last game that was made for the Game Boy Color.

Game Objectives:

Emulator Used: BizHawk 1.11.8.2
Aims for fastest time

Stage by stage comments:

Harry's Bedroom

Harry is stuck in his room staring outside, when a house elf by the name of Dobby randomly appears on his bed telling him not to go back to Hogwarts because there is a great evil. This is where he proceeds to bang his head against the wall because he talks too much causing the gate on Harry's window to go up in smoke for Ron to come and get him.

Here we grab all of the things that he will need to go back to school: his suitcase, his snow white owl Hegwid, and finally a deck of Wizard Cards to use for the year, either the Merlin or Morgan Le Fey decks. We pick the Morgan Le Fey deck because this allows us to get the Card Combo, Weak Point, and allow us to collect the cards necessary to use the combo.

We then leave out for the Burrow.

The Burrow

As soon as we land, we get to do our first cutscene skip of the game. Literally just walk past Ron and into the house, where we then eat breakfast until nighttime. After we eat our extended breakfast, head up to Ron's room to sleep. With daybreak, we go down to the kitchen and overhear a conversation between Ron and his mom about tending to the garden, this ends with Harry going to help Ron by playing two minigames to get rid of some gnomes.

First minigame is really straightforward, grab gnomes out of the ground for 30 seconds. Second minigame has a little bit more to it, you have to throw a gnome. Generally in normal gameplay you would want to get it to go as far as possible, but here we just throw it at the wall as fast as possible because that is faster than just letting it go the first frame of control by 80 frames per throw.

After these games Mr. Weasley gives us a new spell, Informous, which is unless for this run, it allows you to get information on creatures that you fight giving their strengths, weaknesses and attacks, and then gives us the book to hold this information the Folio Bruti. Head into the house, get told about Floo Powder and teleport ourselves to Diagon Alley

Knockturn Alley through Gringotts

Once we land ourselves in Diagon...wait, Knockturn Alley? So because of a mix up through a cough, Harry lands in Knockturn Alley. Here we hear a conversation with Lucius and the store owner about selling some items. After he leaves, we head to exit Knockturn Alley where a cutscene with Hagrid starts and he takes us to Diagon Alley, but we pause on the trigger for that allowing us to just walk into Diagon Alley without Hagrid, though he does appear with us when we arrive there.

Once in Diagon Alley, we meet up with the Weasleys, get our vault key and Ron joins our party. With this new addition to our party, we meet up with Griphook, who will show us how to get to our vaults quickly, but once again Harry trips making us hang back and traverse through Gringotts as two 12 year old boys. Everything is going well until we get into a fight with a Footman that completely outclasses us in every way.

Here we let Ron take some damage since it was the best set up we could get, Harry cannot take any, he will die. Footman has 100 health and we have to cast Verdimillious in order to do sufficient damage, costing 6 MP per cast and each boy only has 20 total so we have to work with. To deal with this problem we have to get critical hits, in order to manipulate criticals there has to be a frame delay onto an attack that will do damage, this means that if an attack would do 0 damage it cannot ever do any damage at all. The fight starts off with a double crit dealing 49 damage total, then Ron deals 11, Harry paralyzes the foe with an intimidating stare, that will be explained in a second, 12 more by Ron and then Harry crits for 28 dealing exactly 100 damage to kill the Footman. Both Harry and Ron get 80 Exp. and level up to 4 after this fight

This fight also shows off a glitch from the previous game, Enemy Attack Skip (EAS is what I will refer to it from now on), this allows to very simply skip an enemy's turn by pressing "A" between 86 and 126 frames after attempting to flee. This is used to skip a turn where Footman would kill so that both boys get another cast to kill the Footman. This will also be used in more fights later on in the run.

With a dead Footman we go on to get money for books and leave Gringotts the same way we came in.

Whomping Willow

On our way to get our books, we step into a small alleyway next to the bookstore grabbing a card combo out of the crates. This is the combo Weak Point, this requires having specific cards to be able to be activated, #61, 47, 39, we already have 61 from getting the deck originally, this will be used for the end of the run. Then we enter the store, buy our books and have a talk with Hagrid, this ends up including Ginny, Draco and Lockhart. This mess of a talk falls apart and we head into another mess of a conversation. With both of these done we finally head to King's Cross.

This is a short lived stay, as we get blocked from the platform and have to take the car on a floating adventure to get to Hogwarts. This puts us into another riveting minigame where we fly around grabbing coins out of the sky and get hit by spinning blue cloud clusters to gain points. Once we get through all of that, we decide that it is a great idea to run into a tree, not just any tree though, the Whomping Willow. Once landed, we discover something...Ron's wand broke. This can cause some spells to backfire in fights,this isn't an issue for TAS,but if you do have a backfire it does (current health/4) floored as damage, so for instance if you have 80 health it will do 20, this is the same for 81-83 health. We descend the tree to enter yet another boss fight.

The Whomping Willow has 105 health and is weak to Vermillious, after waiting a few frames to enter the fight we start off with a Ron critical and delayed Harry criticals with some Ron damage to end the fight. This fight you cannot use EAS for it is slower than you, and you can only skip enemies that are stunned or faster than you. They both level to 5, getting 80 Exp.

In Hogwarts

After beat the Willow, we walk to Hogwarts, get chided at by Snape until Dumbledore shows up with McGonagall, who tells us that we will have detention later in the year as punishment. Dumbledore then proceeds to tell us about some changes to Hogwarts over the summer, such as adding a map on each floor to tell us where everything is (this is very helpful in casual play), and that the shortcuts have changed from the previous year this time all we have is from the dungeon to the 6th floor and the 1st floor to the 4th. These shortcuts are not open to us on the first night so we have to walk all of the way up to the 7th floor to get to the painting entering the Common Room.

Getting up to the painting, we don't have the password. We cannot get in, oh no! Once Ron spouts off some nonsense, Hermione comes up to save the day letting us in. Ron leaves the party and we head to bed.

Herbology

Waking up we get told that we have to go to Herbology, we use the 6th floor shortcut to get to the class faster, enter the first greenhouse you see, have some dialogue where Professor Sprout talks about Mandrakes, she leaves the class and the Mandrakes run out into the back of the class. In the back we have 4 fights, the 3 Mandrakes and a turtle to get to the 3rd Mandrake. Fights are pretty standard here, the only real issue here is that there is more frames used to get criticals than most other places due to increased lag in this area, each creature has 80 health, Mandrakes are weak to Vermillious and turtle is weak to Verdimillious. We level to 6 after the second Mandrake giving the turtle fight a little more ease, which we level to 7 after and we fight the final Mandrake taking a good amount of damage, without leveling.

There were two ways to get out of the back here, ne was to deathwarp back to the beginning or walk through. Turns out that the deathwarp was slower by ~500 frames at its best compared to just plain walking out. We leave through, talk to Sprout and get the spell Incendio. From here we head to Defense Against the Dark Arts.

To Quidditch

Back into Hogwarts, we go to the 1st floor to go to the 4th by shortcut and walk to the 3rd to Lockhart's class. This is a rather straightforward class, just a minigame 'collecting' the pixies after Lockhart runs out of the class because he can't handle a few pixies. This minigame has a lot of lag in it if we try to catch them, so we resort to making patterns with the wand and use it for a few frames to advance RNG count by 3 for later. This class ends with Lockhart coming back in and congratulating us on our efforts then turning around just to leave again. Both Ron and Hermione come into the party now, and McGonagall tells us that it is time for Quidditch. Take shortcut from the 4th to the 1st and go out to the Pitch. Talk to Wood and we start.

This game is my absolute favorite, just something about it is really fun to me. The Snitch appears in the top left every time, so it is just a matter of getting it to go exactly where we want it to go, the RNG change from the pixie minigame comes in handy here. The Snitch goes right then slightly down, this makes it easy to go get the Snitch. Holding "A" allows you goes faster on the broom and presses "B" grabs the Snitch out of the air.

Garden

Once the Snitch is captured, we get into a nice altercation with Draco about him using the Pitch and then him having the latest and greatest brooms. Ron casts a spell that backfires, causing him to start throwing up slugs. Maybe Hagrid will know what to! Head over to Hagrid's to have him try and help Ron out. It turns out that he can help, but only if we get everything for him first.

We leave the hut, leaving Ron behind, and head to the garden to the left of it. We have to get 5 ingredients for the fudge that Hagrid is going to make, 4 are out in the garden somewhere to be picked up and the 5th is obtained in a fight. This fight is against the Venomous Tencacular, it has 180 health and is weak to both Vermillious and Incendio, but can stun you. This is where Harry not leveling becomes useful. Having Hermione in the group is a big boost because she deals more damage than Harry so we keep her up so that she can kill the plant, we have Harry die here for the next fight coming up. The pattern that is taken in the garden is what I believe is the fastest possible path through while getting all of the items out. After getting all of the items for the fudge we head back to give them to Hagrid and cure Ron.

Quidditch 2

Upon trying to go back in the Common Room we are stopped at the grand staircase by McGonagall telling us it is time for our detentions, and now we have to go to Lockhart's Office. Arriving here we just have to sort fan mail for the entire night??

We finish this, leave his office and get told that we get to go to Quidditch again. Heading to the grand staircase we sidestep slightly to the right and walk down to avoid a cutscene with Nearly Headless Nick inviting us to his Deathday Party, besides we end up having to go anyway despite not talking to him at all. Now we go to the Quidditch Pitch again, have a rather quick practice and remind ourselves that we have to go to the Deathday Party, even though we have no idea that we have to go.

Deathday Party

Heading to the dungeon, we talk to Ron and Hermione to convince them to wander the dungeon with us, they each happily accept and join us to go the party where we end up talking a lot and then play a game of bowling.

Bowling is usually a really difficult game to play, but with our extreme abilities it is rather simple. The whole point of playing this game quickly is to get as many strikes as possible with the least amount of lag possible because the pins act as if there is no friction 99 percent of the time. All we do is get 9 strikes and then throw two balls, one that hits a single pin with no recoil and the last to hit the same exact spot to end the game.

Once this game ends we can leave the party, walk a little bit and pause to look at the character menu? This pausing allows to completely skip all of the snake dialogue that we would see normally that would lead us to the second floor near the girls' empty bathroom. Mrs. Norris is petrified everyone gets alerted about the incident and we go to bed after being told that the Chamber of Secrets is open, maybe.

History of Magic

Wake up to Ron saying that the class will probably help since we can ask about the Chamber of Secrets. We make our tired self down the stairs to head to the 4th floor and to Binns' class, where our teacher will continuously fall asleep halfway through a sentence until we get to a point where we actually get his attention and end up going to the library to get a book for him.

Leaving the room we take the shortcut to the 1st floor, go up to the second and walk into the library. From here we have to talk to Madam Pince to allow for the Hogwarts: A History to spawn in on the shelf. Going to get the book, there is a few frames after pressing "A" to move before you actually acquire the book off the shelf, allowing us to be closer to the end of the shelf after getting it and Madam Pince moving away. With book in hand we head back up to class, and before passing along the book we pick up a Wizard Card from the globe, this is #47 the second one that we need for the Weak Point combo for later. Handing the book in, we get told about how Hogwarts was brought about and the fight over who should be at the school, pure-bloods vs everyone else being there. Salazar gets mad that no one else agrees with him, so he makes a chamber to hold a dangerous creature sealing it away until his true heir can open it again.

Then once again, Binns falls asleep. We take this opportunity to leave and inspect near the girls bathroom.

Myrtle

Ron and Hermione join us and we head down to the wall to see what it says again. Noticing this time that it was etched into the wall by claws and a trail of spiders leading into the bathroom. This seems like the perfect reason to enter a girls bathroom as a guy, doesn't it? So then the idea was to have Harry go talk to Myrtle. At this point it can probably be noticed that we have been positioned us in certain spots slightly away from who we are trying to talk to, this reduces the amount of distance that has to be moved during the cutscene or to have a better position after the cutscene is over. Myrtle questions why we are there, Hermione tries to remedy the situation to where Myrtle starts to wail.

So to try and get her to talk, we try to go find her a flower. As always when we have a question about plants at random, we go and talk to Hagrid. Getting to Hagrid's serves little help, he doesn't know what to get Myrtle and suggests that we tell her a joke, but does say that McGonagall might have something for her in the realm of flowers. We head to her office, she isn't there so we steal her flower from her desk and return to Myrtle. By the way, not sure if it applies to other rooms, but entering Hagrids Hut 3 frames later than "optimal" on the way to asking him about lilies causes his inside cabin to load a bit faster.

This let's her talk after her giving us the most important spell for the rest of the game, Mucus Ad Nuseaum, it is a poison spell that deals 15 damage every turn at its lowest stage. She then tells us about what happened the night of the ruckus, which is no help as she wasn't paying any attention because she was crying but says that she will let us know if she hears or sees anything.

Getting a book to make PolyJuice Potion and Quidditch of death

Exiting the bathroom we get yelled at by Percy for being in there and are told to go to the Common Room. After walking to the dungeon using the shortcut and entering the Common Room, we decide we need to break some school rules, by Hermione?? We need to do this in order to learn if Draco is the heir of Slytherin. In order to get the book we need for that though we need special permission from a teacher with a signed note. "Oh come on. What teacher is that easily fooled?" "Professor Lockhart. He'll autograph anything that sits still long enough." Away to Lockhart's we go! Getting there and talking to him starts a whole thing about him talking about himself until we can get him to eventually sign a piece of paper to find a book to help understand his...tea strainer?? We get a signature and head over to the library, hand the note to Madam Pince, get the book, discuss our plan for the PolyJuice Potion then Colin appears to tell us that it is time for Quidditch!

After everyone leaves, we head down to the Pitch to once again get on our magical brooms and catch a flying golden ball to win a game. Talk to Wood, be talked to by a bunch of people and start the match. This match is a little more tricky than the other two, in this one there is a magically controlled Bludger that is trying to injure us severely, so we need to avoid to skip a dialogue box talking about it may hurt someone. The consequence of doing this however is that if we catch the Snitch without that dialogue trigger and then get hit by that Bludger, then that dialogue box for the Bludger will override the text for Harry screaming and flying off of his broom causing a softlock. So we have to avoid the Bludger, catch the Snitch and still avoid the Bludger from a position that it will miss flying at us after catching the Snitch. We fall, hurting our arm, Lockhart tries to fix it despite being told to just take us to the Hospital Wing and ends up removing all of the bones in our arm altogether.

We now head to the Hospital Wing, where we are told that we will have to stay a while for the bones to reform for some time. Amongst all of that mess, we get visited by Dobby again who tells us about what is going to be happening at the school this year and upset with us because we returned to school. He then let's on that it was his Bludger and he was trying to hurt us enough to send us home, and apparently feels obligated to banging his head against the wall for talking too much. He disappears as Dumbledore walks in with Colin petrified and his camara destroyed, to which he says that the Chamber of Secrets is most certainly open based on this as opposed to the last time that this kind of thing happened.

Potions and Draco

After all of that commotion, we heal our bones and make our way to Myrtle's where Ron and Hermione are happy to see us after some time and that they have started making the potion. To which we realize that we have to go to Potions class. So we join up once again in our group and walk down to the dungeon to which we actually enter a room now. Entering Snape's class we are told to sit immediately after a short talk about getting some items from the storeroom and hand out some fireworks to create a diversion. Snape talks, turns around, the fireworks are set off and through all of this we are able to get to the storeroom.

Entering here we have to get the Boomslang Skin and Bicorn Horn, one in the top right corner and the other right next to the classroom. We venture to the further one to get it done with, returning we get the other on the way back into the class. Entering back into the class all of the noises and explosions are gone and we rush back into our seats. After a few seconds of sitting there Snape dismisses the class. As we are trying to leave, Snape calls us over, "I can't prove you caused the disturbance in my class just now. But I suspect you did..." ...we were the only ones in the class, that would be a reasonable hypothesis there. But instead of reporting us or anything of that sort he just suggests a duel with Draco.

This is where dying in the last fight was really good, entering the fight we only have one health so him just casting a damaging spell will kill us and we lose. This is much faster than trying to win the fight, he has 300 health and the only damaging spell is Flipendo, it isn't worth it. Losing gives us the same thing anyway, snake appears, we talk to it, it disappears in smoke and everyone thinks that we are insane. Justin runs from us, Draco gives us Expelliarmus and leaves us tracking down Justin. Chase him to the 3rd floor where he and Nick are petrified. Peeves makes a huge deal of it, someone comes out of nowwhere to just be there and McGonagall shows up to take us to Dumbledore...kind of, she takes us to a door that leads to his office but nowhere further.

We traverse these narrow walls to get to his office. Walk around his office once we get there because he is not, see the Sorting Hat and Fawkes, who bursts into flames before Dumbledore enters. Harry says that it happened then begins to tell us all about phoenixes and their special powers. Then he asks us if there is anything that we needed to say, we say no and that ends that conversation, we leave and speed up to Christmas.

PolyJuice time

We appear in the Common Room with Ron and Hermione working out the final part of our plan, now all we have to do is get some of Crabbe and Goyle's hair and everything will be complete. Given chocolate cakes doused in sleeping potion are the wager for our duel. We head down to the grand entrance near the dungeon, find them challenge them to a duel after taunting them, meet them in the Dueling Club, fight and lose. Hand them the cakes, they fall asleep we take them to the broom closet and take their hair.

Return up to Myrtle's to add the finishing touches to the potion. Ron and Harry turn into Crabbe and Goyle while Hermione turns into...a cat? She stays behind and we head over to Slytherin's Common Room to talk to Draco and learn some things about all of the attacks and if he has any idea of what is going on. This makes us take another trip to the dungeon to get there, but along the way there we stopped by Snape asking us about the holidays, to which we act as stupid as Crabbe and Goyle before heading to see Draco. Enter the Common Room there, we get absolutely clueless as Draco hasn't any idea about anything. PolyJuice Potion begins to start wearing off so we have to leave back up to the bathroom to transform back. Hermione gets told about returning to square one and doesn't change back because the potion is not supposed to be used for animal transformations, end up taking her to the Hospital Wing, but before we do there appears to be a book on the floor that wasn't there before. So as a normal 12 year old we pick it up, it is a diary that belonged to Tom M. Riddle, Ron tells us that he got an award for Special Services to the school 50 years ago, with nothing written in it, and take it with us.

Diary

Once Hermione's potion wears off, we spawn in the Great Hall to a horrible sight of pink everywhere for Valentine's Day. Lockhart of course is leading the way proclaiming that 46 people sent him cards, "Hermione, don't tell me you were one of the 46." Lockhart leaves the scene and we try to escape before being stopped by a cupid who tells our valentine from Ginny. Then when we leave, Fred and George taunt us with it a little, Draco makes Ginny leave and Hermione leaves the group because she wants to study, more of she thinks that we are probably dumb for trying to work with the diary.

We head up to the Common Room again to get to the boys' dorm to work on the diary. Upon doing some writing in it, ittalks back to us and sucks us in to show us what happened 50 years, which is the last time that the chamber had been opened. We see some scenes with Tom Riddle, one with Dumbledore and the other with Hagrid. Dumbledore's was similar to the one that Harry had with him earlier in the year, talking about school and then asked if there was anything that he needed to say and said that he had nothing. Hagrid's was getting him in trouble for purging the school with a creature. We return to being in front of Ron to tell him that Hagrid was the one that the one that did it 50 years ago.

Aragog

The next day, we enter the Common Room and immediately get told that there is another game of Quidditch. Go talk to Ron and Hermione, hear a voice that no one can, and Hermione thinks that she has figured something out and rushes out. Along with Ron joining us, we again go to the Pitch. But this time the match gets cancelled because there are more people getting petrified, Hermione being one of them. McGonagall tells us to return to the Common Room to get some special instructions for the rest of the year to follow.

Enter the Common Room and barely walk up to McGonagall to be told that we basically can do nothing with some sort of supervision. So instead of being good and obeying this rule, we grab the Invisibility Cloak and walk our way down to Hagrid's and try to learn about 50 years ago. Before that conversation can start, we get interrupted by Dumbledore and Fudge telling Hagrid that he is going away since history tends to repeat itself, where we then see Lucius pop in to tell Dumbledore that he is be gone as well because he is being sacked. Since we are there, but not really, Hagrid tells us to follow the spiders and then everyone leaves.

Exiting the hut, we see spiders crawling toward the Forbidden Forest. They get followed all the way until we hit a cutscene that has us talk to Aragog.He tells about how everything really happened with Hagrid 50 years ago, that he wasn't the creature that everyone was fearing and that Hagrid got wrongly accused of the issue. After this talk, we try to leave but Aragog stops us to tell us that he wants to feed us to the smaller spiders. This puts us into a fight.

Entering this fight, Aragog will always start with his web attack this stuns everybody and he gets a free turn to do as he will. After the web, we manipulate to have both of the boys break free of the stun first turn and to have Aragog attack so that we can have a full turn now. On our turn, Harry poisons and we have Ron flee so that we can start EAS chaining. Aragog has 400 health, taking 15 damage a turn, the fight ends up taking 28 turns in total, one to start, half for set up and the rest is constant damage. Fight ends, gain 650 exp and leave. You'll noticed that Harry says something about trying to get out of there, walks but really just walks in place.

Lockhart

Leaving the Forbidden Forest is just as annoying as entering it, just smaller areas to walk through. Tight turns, manipulating encounter circles not to spawn. Just a mess of an area to work around. But we finally make it out just in time to be saved by the flying car, we leave the forest and land near the greenhouses. After some short dialogue, we decide to try and see Myrtle. We enter the school, head up the second floor and try to enter the bathroom...and McGonagall shows up, we lie about going to see Hermione even though we shouldn't even be out of the Common Room to begin with. She ends up taking us to the Hospital Wing anyway.

Showing up in the hospital, we go to see Hermione laying still, end up finding a piece of paper talking about a great beast. McGonagall pops on to tell us that Ginny was taking into the chamber and the school will close. Thinking that we won't be able to do it alone, we head to see Lockhart, accuse him being fake and end up in a battle.

This fight is a little more difficult from the poisoning standpoint. He has 500 health and is slower than us. Entering the fight we have Ron hit him poison and have Harry skip his turn to make Lockhart not cure his poison. Next turn, Ron throws his trusty rat, Scabbers, at him which stuns him and we run with Harry again. Being stunned allows us to start and EAS chain. 31 turns of chaining later, we win the fight get 500 exp. And we have Lockhart join the group.

Chamber

We take Lockhart with us to Myrtle's, talk to her about how she died. She just floated out of her body when a pair of eyes came out of the sinks. We walk over to the sink, inspect talk to it in snake and it opens! Make Lockhart go first, Ron follows then Harry. Slide down a slide miles down and in up in a small corridor to the Chamber of Secrets. There is the ability to skip a cutscene coming up if we die and we keep Ron and Lockhart for the final fight (though Lockhart gets covered up by Fawkes because he useless anyway), we don't do this because it is incredibly slow. We walk a little ways down and Lockhart decides to steal Ron's wand try to eliminate our memories just to have it backfire. Ron gets stuck after rocks fall and block the way.

On our way to the final area, we pick up one last Wizard Card, the one that we need to finish Weak Point, and we finish walking to the final part of the Chamber.

Basilisk

Upon entering the final part of the chamber we notice Ginny laying down on the floor, and we try to wake her up. Tom Riddle shows up saying she won't wake and that the Basilisk won't show until it is called. Debates start between Harry and Tom, leading to Fawkes appearing, the Basilisk showing up, it's eyes getting poked out and then Harry getting Gryiffendor's sword out of the Sorting Hat that Fawkes dropped, then the fight begins.

Basilisk has 750 health, and gets to attack first. We start our turn with using the Weak Point combo to make Fawkes damage output quadruple and then some. All we do from here is manipulate Fawkes to critical 4 times without dying and the fight is over.

Final setting

Defeated Basilisk. Tom Riddle says he still has our wand, but we destroy the diary anyway (this also means that we couldn't have another game unless we get another wand). Ginny awakens and we leave the Chamber and meet back up with Ron and Lockhart to escape back to the bathroom. Talk to Myrtle where she said if Ginny had died she would've shared the bathroom with her, Ginny said it was such a nice...compliment?

We leave there to McGonagall's office to meet up with the Weasley family and Dumbledore. Dumbledore says that Ginny is alright to go the Hospital Wing to get checked out along with all the family. Lucius pops in with Dobby talking about Dumbledore being back, Harry gives him the diary back with the sock in it and throws it at Dobby who is a free house elf. Dumbledore hands us a Wizard Card commerating us.

The game ends with us with Ron and Hermione waving about while watching fireworks.

The most important trick, considering you're very underlevelled in boss fights. Criticals double the amount of damage dealt, and has a red hitsplat. There are 2 ways they are determined. The first way is determined by the WRAM address 0x0E3E. This only changes when you make a move (failing to escape does not count), so it's rather limited. The 2nd way is to delay confirming the attack. This uses a separate address, and since most minigames uses the previous address, this allows one to manipulate criticals without changing the luck for minigames.

Unfortunately, things like when you enter menus appear to affect the latter, and I'm not sure how to take account with that, so the brute force script posted on the thread only delays pressing A to confirm.

The following cutscenes were skipped:

You can also skip the cutscene with getting caught by the spider in forbidden woods and Lockheart's betrayal in the chamber of secrets, but it ended up being slower. Oh, and you can skip that 1 dialogue box right before Ginny by pressing start, but not sure if that'd even help.

The fastest way to knock down all pins is to move the bowling ball to the left, then hit the pins by moving to the right. If done correctly, this triggers the fastest animation for knocking down all 10 pins.

The fastest way to transit Harry's turn to Ron's is to throw the gnome into the fence. However, throwing affects the RNG, so you need to take account into how long Ron's throw may be.

There are 2 ways. For enemies faster than you, you simply attempt to escape. Then pressing A after a while to skip their turn. Pressing A again will skip your turn as well. This is used in the Knight boss, along with the latter bosses after poisoning them to deplete their health. The 2nd way is for enemies somewhat slower. You use something to stun them, the press A after a while. This was used with the fight against Lockheart.

There are unused, but just listing here because why not:

Noxxa: Delaying, pending an improvement in the works.

Noxxa: Replaced movie file with a 507 frame improvement, and resetting to new.

Fog: Judging.

Fog: This submission was well done, with the detailed submission notes, the optimized play, and was decently entertaining. Audience reception was also great.

Accepting for Moons.

Fog: Publishing for Stovent.