

Grazing during this battle saves time, but I intentionally take damage at the end of the first attack to skip some dialogue from Lancer (who talks about how surprised he is at your skill if you don't get hit). During the mandatory Hathy fight, I use the first turn to X-Flatter all the Hathies to spare them in the next 2 turns. Vert-walking is used to press a button as fast as possible in a puzzle.

Kris does not have to slow down or wait to dodge any of the Rudinns in this opening area. Here is where we begin to see enemies in the overworld. The rest of the cave section is self explanatory. I'll do this in a few other areas of the run, so I'll call it vert-walking from now on. Because Kris cannot switch from looking left/right to looking up/down without losing his horizontal speed, I entered the room holding both right + a vertical direction, and by switching between walking diagonally right+up and right+down, I can press the buttons on the wall without having to lose any speed. In the first wall puzzle of the game, you have to face up while pressing Enter/Z to activate the button. However, with frame perfect mashing the Wrist Protector does not save any additional time, so the TAS skips picking it up (saving 12 frames). Also, the shiny object that Kris awakens next to in the Dark World is the Wrist Protector, which nearly every speedrun gets because it allows text to be auto-mashed by holding the Ctrl/C button.

Before Kris awakens, I mash all arrow keys alternately on/off to get him up and walking as fast as possible. This saves over 3 minutes right off the bat. In New Game +, instead of leaving home and heading to school, Kris can simply go back to bed and skip some introductory story.
