Game:

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991)

Duration: 1:56:02

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6

IGT: 1:50:46.35 | CR: 155/216
Yep. spent like 25 minutes looking for that hammer...
Yeah, there was no good time to route in magic bat. Like sure, if I got powder super early, then maybe it would have made me suspicious, but powder was in mire shed, so that didn't really trigger my suspicions. After heading to the dark world and clearing SW and full clearing TT (didn't pay off), I decided to do smithy, purple chest, cave 45, and stumpy on the way to hype cave. Magic bat is right next to smithy, but the problem is that if you go and do it without hammer, you're stuck in the light world again and have to walk all the way back up to the kakariko portal and back down again. So it's a single isolated check, not really on the way to anything besides SP.
Early flippers also made east dark world (PoD, pyramid) more appealing to check. So that led to me checking graveyard ledge, catfish, pyramid ledge + front of escape, dipping into PoD, finding the hookshot, checking all of east death mountain, and even dipping into Ice Palace before I finally decided to check it before going to SP/bombos tablet. I was almost certain Ice Palace was the answer as you had access to it ~10 minutes into the seed, but alas, trying to read the logic did not pay off here. The Ice palace dip was sloowwww too, as without hammer it doesn't make sense to do icebreaker, and I was a bit confused on how to best route the dungeon without hammer (I think I could have done it slightly better)
On the plus side, I avoided going to TR -- I hadn't checked the medallion while doing the east death mountain checks, and didn't want to risk going all the way there only to find that it was ether-locked.
Once I got the hammer and had decided on SP over TR, it was pretty straightforward to go do SP (find boots) and check bombos tablet for go mode ether.
So, things that didn't work out for me: full clearing TT, doing hera basement chest, dipping PoD (and then heading to east death mountain), dipping IP without hammer. If anyone got hammer early they probably did way better on this seed.
My execution was quite good for my level at least. I had my best ganon fight ever with tempered sword, got a perfect 8-2-2, and two doubles (though with a slight mishap that forced me to relight the torches).

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