Can Mario Complete Dry Dry Ruins Without Any Keys?
10,98793 frame-perfect inputs later, we've got a new glitch video!
I needed to make a TAS to show this off reasonably, and wanted to give a better overview of Loading Zone Storage (LZS) before diving into the challenge.
Applications of LZS are pretty versatile. It is usually used to exaggerate Mario’s angle during a room fade-out, which gets remembered by the game, and gets reapplied as Mario walks into the next room. I think this occurs because the developers wanted room transitions to appear a bit more seamless - if the screen fades while Mario is off-center, the screen reappears with Mario walking from that same angle. Using LZS to amplify our entrance angle enough can make Mario fall out of bounds, and this is sometimes be used to skip sections of the game, or set up other glitches.
See Devon's video on LZS entrance skewing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktJw2XgRGLA
Another useful trait of LZS is the ability to combine certain actions with a room transition. Various in-game events differ in terms of priority, and loading zones are pretty high on that priority list. Sometimes, cutscenes or fights can be skipped using this.
The final application of LZS is the hardest to apply, and it’s actually the one we’ll be exploiting the most in this video. While a room is fading out, we have no control of Mario. He’s in a unique state however, where he phases through walls and other objects. It’s a tight window before that next room loads, and we can’t make any new inputs count, but we do know what direction he’ll be going... toward the loading zone we have stored. Dry Dry Ruins has a lot of convenient 2-story rooms, so we can store the bottom loading zone, do a few double frame-perfect jumps up top, and position Mario in front of the door we want to phase through. He’ll walk through the wall during the fade out, and the newest loading zone we touch will take priority. Dry Dry Ruins is somewhat unique in having a loading zone behind each door, because they aren’t truly doors; they’re more like sliding panels. So, this wouldn’t work on just any door, such as the ones in Koopa Bros. Fortress. This can be used to skip most of the keys in the Dry Dry Ruins.
Skipping the last key is a bit more tricky though, requiring the use of Lakilester.
Despite appearing paper-thin, Mario typically has a cylindrical hitbox. We’re going to use Lakilester to obtain “clippy,” a state where Mario’s hitbox is fragmented, only appearing as a flat plane in the direction we’re moving. Clippy naturally exists when Mario’s side boundaries need to be disabled, such as when on a partner - the developers didn’t want Mario’s hitbox pushing Lakilester or Sushie around while we’re controlling them. And the clippy state gets disabled once we hop off.
There are a few ways to preserve clippy though, and we’re going to do it by entering a battle with a menu up. If we hit the block to aggro the Pokey Mummies, we can hop on Lakilester to enable clippy, and open an overworld menu the same time we trigger an encounter. The timing on opening the item or partner menu is sort of misleading, and frame-perfect. Done right, the memory pertaining to clippy will not be stored during the battle, which means clippy will not be deactivated when we get off Lakilester by switching partners. With our abnormal hitbox, it’s fairly simple to angle Mario up-left against the lock, gradually maneuvering up-right until he turns around, and is pushed far enough into the loading zone behind it.
I also show off a few other tricks and glitches that are by no means required to complete Dry Dry Ruins without any keys, but still save time in a speedrunning setting.
Special thanks to -Peardian- for the original Dry Dry Ruins map!
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