Speed TAS
Character Choice:Kano is the usual speedrun choice, his horizontal move hits crouchers and is super fast, but not necessarily the best character, this is a hard choice to make but at least it's the RTA choice. If you could manipulate enemies in other ways, maybe some other character would be faster(scorpion brings enemies closer and if the enemy is uncooperative, that could be useful)
Mechanics:
Punches:you can punch a lot and it's a combo in the sense you may not block because blocking has startup but you could still technically throw. Hold back to become unthrowable except against Goro.
Pushback: it is applied when hit in a crouching state or when hit 5 times grounded when not being juggled. Notice how it applies for blocked moves, so you can defend one jump kick 3 punches and the next punch will cause pushback for you to get hit. Main strategy is try to get pushback inside a range you can still damage enemy, but it's not always possible. Some enemies have further pushback distance, i end walking right after the pushback to repostion for more moves.
Round ending: round 1 is just doing a hit that kills as soon as possible, round 2 needs to let the enemy be hit right after to end the match. In Endurance matches, you have to finish the round with specific moves to activate the endurance glitch, which ohko the next incoming fighter, making these fights super easy.
This ia a PAL exclusive glitch.
Goro and Shang Tsung: They have weirder AIs, way more uncooperative so certain concessions are made. A faster Goro has been seen but i couldn't get him to walk or jump my way. Shang tsung just needs to get morphed into a character i can exploit or be in a range i can stop him from backdashing, which is the only thing he does basically.I improved goro a lot with the replacement, but there may still be some other possible strategy with liukang or cage, which are also decently fast characters with their horizontal special move.
Improvements: more cooperation from AI with better understanding, maybe try Scorpion, but my initial loop combo is slower than most matches i produced in the TAS.
I checked the mk speedrun community and they seem to approve of the run. I tried making the minigame with breaking bricks faster but that is slower by 25 frames than failing. Flawless victory costs around 5 to 8 frames(maybe it's stage dependent)cause it uses mostly the same time from health calculation and i can't spend that little time in getting hitstun or blockstun, so i go for it every single time. Goro has a glitch where he may damage you without hitstun but i would have to be in a range that wouldn't allow quick kills.
I'm also posting a lot of glitches for the game in the Thread at tasvideos and mk speedrun discord page, feel free to check out:
https://discord.gg/mpg4wT
Forum/Posts/471831
Thanks to Dimon, Reeve, members of mk speedrunning in general and DarkNoob and SDR for being an inspiration. Also Tasvideos and you for reading this.
feos: The European version has an exclusive glitch with the Endurance mode, and while there's no real disagreement about it on tasvideos, the RTA community uses both versions equally. I think we can do that too, so the authors could abuse slight differences in the mechanics to get better times with whatever version allows it. The strategies are basic enough not to suffer significantly from what we dislike European versions for.
The Goro fight looked slower than in the USA RTA run, but now it has been fixed and improved over the latter. Other fights are also faster than both USA and Europe human records, and no one in the thread was able to come up with working improvements.
The movie is really repetitive, and the audience wasn't entertained, so it goes to Vault. Accepting.