Wario Land 4 - Normal difficulty speed run (53:01)
19This is my Wario Land 4 speedrun, on Normal difficulty, coming in at 53:01, as timed from the creation of the file to the final hit on Golden Diva. SDA might actually start timing a little bit later, I don't know.
This is quite a difficult game to optimise: the fastest means of horizontal movement is holding R to dash (which I'm doing most of the run, any time Wario is leading with his head I'm charging up a dash), but jumping in a dash forces the maximum height jump on you, which is rarely the best option. So a lot of the time I'm actually letting go of R just before jumping which preserves most of my velocity. It's a movement that takes getting used to.
Apart from the Entry and Golden passages, the levels can be done in any order, though the only two that make sense are from Emerald around to Sapphire (the game's intended order) or from Sapphire around to Emerald; any other order would lose time on the map. I choose the latter because there are very tricky stages in Sapphire and it's good to get them out of the way early.
Some of the significant tricks in this run:
General: This run resets a -lot-. In all there are 30 resets, saving a grand total of just over 11 minutes. Resetting after a stage ends saves 29 seconds, resetting during the boss door-opening cutscene saves 4 seconds, and resetting after a boss saves 28 seconds, over waiting the respective cutscenes out. For me, this also means that there is very little downtime in the run.
Crescent Moon Village: The ghost in the background is a total jerk and likes to steal the key. However he always dives at you to get at the key, so if you jump over him as he dives at you you're normally safe. Also, in the second outdoor room in the runback I intentionally let him take the key, because he ends up in a perfect position for me to get it back without losing any time.
Hotel Horror: The green blocks require you to do a super ground pound to destroy, which requires you to hold a ground pound for at least five blocks' height. Wario only jumps three blocks high, but by perfectly timing a jump off an enemy in mid-air you can get up to the height required. I do this to skip transforming into Fat Wario in the frog switch room, and again in 401 to grab the key without transforming into Fire Wario.
Catbat: You can chain the entire sequence of hits in the second phase. When trying to replicate this, hold A and press down for -each- hit. Continuously holding down will cause you to fall off instead.
Aerodent: Completely botched the strategy, but what I'm trying to do is defeat the boss in a single pass. You can do this by ensuring that you hit the mouse in such a way that you don't touch the bear. This requires very precise positioning, and Aerodent takes 15 hits to kill. You get one failed attempt per pass, once you hit the bear twice he goes back up and starts a new cycle.
The Curious Factory: The crushers in this stage start moving once you bring them within range of the screen, so any time I'm doing things unusually it's to make sure I can get past all of them. In particular, everything I do to set up before the first set of crushers in the runback is highly important - getting crushed there costs about 20 seconds because of how slow Flat Wario falls.
Monsoon Jungle: Yes, despite all the backtracking this route requires, it's still faster than doing the regular runback by somewhere between 3-5 seconds. It's hard to say, I don't think I ever got a perfect runback on the upper route.
Golden Passage: Huge props to yoshifan for this strat, you need to have decent timing to execute it though. This seriously saves around 30 seconds over playing the stage normally, because the second pipe puts you so far ahead in the stage.
Golden Diva: The strategy here is to get up to the hammer as quickly as possible and just get hits with it for the entire remainder of the second phase. Much easier said than done. This is still pretty quick though.
I'm streaming runs of this game as well as others on Twitch.tv now - follow me at http://twitch.tv/mike89sda !
Enjoy the run!
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Michael McKenzie currently has 244,685 views spread across 67 videos for Wario Land 4. The game makes up 15 hours of published video on his channel, roughly 7.63% of Wario Land 4 content that Michael McKenzie has uploaded to YouTube.