yo
I am currently working on an updated TAS of story mode, and I want to share some findings that I've come across. They're very interesting, to say the least.
First off, I found out that you can double-rebound off of a wall. You have to be right next to a wall, and your opponent also has to be next to a wall. For optimization reasons, you'll want to try to manipulate the AI to perform their sweeping kick immediately as opposed to a punch combo or their special move, and it also has to be in the direction of the wall you want to rebound off of. When they do their sweeping kick, you have to be right on the edge of the hitbox of the kick, and it will throw you towards the wall. When you rebound, you have to do a frame-perfect B press when rebounding in order to not go up into the air, and then you have to land on the ground and quickly walk back into the hitbox of the kick before the kick ends. If you do it properly and are fast enough, you can get kicked into the wall again, and be able to rebound again! This would save time in fights where you utilize the enemy's sweeping kicks to build up the meter, like the boxercising fights in Amy's story. The important part of this is that you exit the hitbox of the kick before the first rebound, otherwise it won't kick you again. If you want to deal double damage the other way around, I recommend getting hit during your sweeping kick, as this will hit the opponent twice and potentially turn their rebound into hitting the wall and dealing more damage.
Now for the big one: Amy is as broken as Sonic and Emerl! This first started out when I had found a video from someone in the Sonic Speedrun Community discord that showed off Amy being able to preserve her meter using her Ground Power move. When I saw this, I wanted to try to find another move that could potentially also preserve the meter. And I actually did, and that means that Amy now has an infinite 1-hit KO method! You can preserve your meter with the following moves:
- You can preserve the meter by using Amy's Ground Power move right before falling off of a ledge. This will cancel the move on landing, which will end up preserving the meter. Be careful, as there is a bug where if you input R too late, you can actually walk in midair while doing the special move, which will NOT preserve your meter.
- With Amy's Aerial Shot move, you can jump and input R in the air the frame before taking damage, and this will end up preserving your meter as well.
Knuckles also has a trick to preserve his meter, using his Aerial Power special. Although this is not as quick as using his Ground Power move to combo the enemy, it's still worth documenting if someone else wants to toy around with it. By using the Aerial Power, you can hit the enemy to kill him, then on the same frame that Knuckles would come up out of the ground, you can walk up a ledge and this will preserve the meter.
This is not something that I myself discovered on my own, but I was watching a video where someone was trying to beat Sonic Battle without upgrading Emerl, and he mentioned a comment on that video in a followup video that peaked my interest. In Amy's story, there is one fight between Emerl and Rouge, where the condition is to get 10 KOs without using special moves. However, Emerl's default special move does not actually count as a special move! This means you can use the infinite-1-hit-KO trick on this fight to save a lot of time over the published TAS!
That's about all I have to share for now. If I find anything else, I'll be sure to try to keep this updated as soon as possible!