Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate - The Slaying of the Hydra - Prologue in 2:33.88
6Team: Xingcai, Hanzo Hattori, Benkei
Well, there's a lot to say about this level. To start with, it seems to load faster than most other levels, which is pretty convenient for individual level run grinding.
0:00 - I infinite jump over the first gate because otherwise you have to sit through all the intro dialogue before it opens. Infinite jump should be at least 5 seconds faster than dialogue skipping.
0:18 - dialogue skipping in this next part is a delicate art, especially since one of the dialogue lines - Ma Chao's "Hydra is behind this gate!" - may randomly become omitted from the queue, which messes up the timing. If you are fast and don't skip much dialogue, this line doesn't generally appear in the queue, but you never know.
Your goal is to time the messages so that you are able to defeat the next officer an instant before the "It's so big..." line disappears.
0:36 - you must defeat Guyki before you can use the ballista. One positive thing about grinding this level is that it gave me a greater understanding of the Hydra and ballista mechanics - this info should save some time in any% as well.
First of all, the Hydra animations are not random. If you do the start of the level the same way each time, the closest Hydra should also be doing the same actions each time as the ballista becomes available.
The purpose here is to get the ballista destroyed. This normally takes 3 fireballs from the Hydra. It's also worth to note that the Hydra will not deign to shoot fireballs unless the player is on the ballista at specific points during its animation cycles.
Speed strategy 1 - if you play the early level *very* fast, you are able to get on the ballista just a moment before a point in the Hydra cycle where it's able to begin charging a fireball. Missing this early fireball is typically a big time waste in this category.
Speed strategy 2 - the fire bombs lobbed by the other Hydras will also damage the ballista. In other words, you should get off the ballista whenever possible to try to prompt some fire bombs. Unfortunately, this is completely random. If you can get 3 bombs to land on the ballista, you can get it wrecked with only 2 fireballs, which saves a 15+ second wait for an additional fireball.
Speed strategy 3 - you could technically get the ballista destroyed without being on it with the help of fire bombs, allowing you to leave to the next place a few seconds sooner, but I didn't use this tactic in this run.
In brief - in an individual level run you want to manipulate the fire bombs to appear near the ballista for a massive time save.
1:08 - normally, it would be okay to just defeat the next officer to open the gate, but if you manage to get the fast ballista destruction, there will be a ton of messages waiting in the queue, and this will slow you down. In this case it's faster to just jump over the gate.
The rest of the level is full of queued messages. Unfortunately the end of the level, too, is triggered by a queued message. Therefore, it's worth it to dialogue skip all the longer lines to make the queue move faster (as far as in-game time is concerned). To my regret, I forgot to skip one long line, which is Zhang Ming's random babbling and screaming at 1:38. This alone slowed the run down by maybe 2 or 3 seconds.
1:48 - got to destroy second ballista. This is another RNG-heavy section, and with bad or average luck you can start losing some time here. This ballista is weaker than the first one, and you need either 2 fireballs or 1 fireball and 1 any other attack to get it destroyed. With any luck, the nearby officer hits the ballista with a melee attack shortly after he appears (like happened on this run). Otherwise, you could try manipulating fire bombs to appear here as well.
2:08 - afterwards, just make your way to the exit. Using Benkei is optional since the section is (nearly) an autoscroller. Make sure to not activate any unnecessary lines on the way, like the 100 KO notification, because that's also a time loss.
2:45 - to activate level finale, you need to defeat one more officer before the last gate, and then wait to trigger some dialogue from Da Ji. Don't wait too close to the gate or these lines will not start.
(You might be able to save time if you could clip through the gate after Da Ji begins talking. I don't think there's enough time to infinite jump over it during these few lines, though.)
3:03 - as one last insult to injury, the Da Ji dialogue that you have to sit through can sometimes become skipped by a random message queue glitch. On one of my attempts, Ma Chao's "Hydra is behind this gate!" line appeared out of nowhere and interrupted the dialogue, making the gate open early. On another attempt, Da Ji only said her first line before the gate opened up. If you can get this random bug to happen, congrats, since that's another 7 - 10 second time save.
So yeah... this level could still go sub 2:30 (probably even sub 2:20) with god-like RNG and the rare dialogue bug.
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