Joined: 8/14/2014
Posts: 188
Location: North Kilttown
Yeah I took that into account. The first section of round 4 allows me to grab a ridiculous amount of coins so I didn't need to waste the time to farm earlier. Plus, not sure if I mentioned before but I found the second sword upgrade to really not be worth it. It costs way too much, 15,000 coins, and barely makes a difference to attack power on bosses.
From here it'll be kind straightforward as the bomb is fairly easy to work with and bosses start to drop higher number coins, making farming easier.
I do have to look into ways of glitching the dragon boss as fast as possible in 4-1. I know how to do it, just not sure why it happens or if I can speed it up in anyway.
Joined: 8/14/2014
Posts: 188
Location: North Kilttown
Link to video
Skip to 4:05 for new stuff.
So in Round 4, I start off by manipulating the coins up top to gain a huge cache of coins right off (another reason why I wasn't worried about losing coins through strat changes in Round 1-2). For starters in the caves, I found by wall jumping off the left walls to get over the pillars verses doing single-wall wall jumps on the right side pillars saved about 40 frames. I actually had to redo this whole section when I realized this.
As for the dragon boss glitch, the jumps around the stage aren't all for show. Even while the Dragon is off-screen I need his heads to be moving upwards to avoid any of it's fire/egg attacks that will make the glitch slower to pull off. A lot of testing was done in Round 2 with that Dragon to find the best ways of manipulating the boss' movement, all of which applied pretty well here as well. Funny enough, the RTA strat of just standing towards the wall and rapidly jumping and attacking works pretty well for this, but it isn't interesting to watch from a TAS perspective. Once the Dragon is in position, I start chipping away some health so that the bomb one-shot kills the dragon. I obviously want to be as close to the wall as possible so that the bomb goes off as fast as possible, but I found that you have about a 6 frames to get the bomb to connect where the next stage loaded up at the same frame.
Actually, quick thing about that. Does anyone know if frame rules are a thing in this game? Because I noticed even if I, say, kill a boss and grab a key/scroll a few frames faster than a previous state, the screen will fade out on the same frame. I notice this if it's between, like 5-6 frames usually.
Regardless, for the second fairy in the next section, it's almost a second faster to just wait up against the wall for the fairy to leave versus triggering the text boxes for it. Fairies only disappear when you have "passed" them, which in this case means the twin has to be up against the wall. The boss is kinda self-explanatory, but one thing of note is that the scroll always spawns from the boss and flies upward to the top of the screen and when it starts to drop, the scroll's hit box is active. Because of this, I had to make sure the boss was as high up as possible to save time with the scroll flying upward.
Again, only to a certain point though, as I would grab the scroll a couple frames earlier and the screen would fade out on the same frame as if I grabbed it later. I still grabbed the scroll on the earliest frame for consistency's sake. At this point the TAS is about a minute and a half faster than the current world record RTA.
