Good morning, everybody, and welcome to VG Myths, the online Internet video game TV show always making an active effort to march backwards. Sonic 3 & Knuckles is the grand finale of the Genesis Sonic trilogy. Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles need to blast-process through a dozen zones of momentum platforming action to blow up Dr. Eggman's diabolical machines, once and for all. Being a Sonic game, gameplay follows one rule: hold right to win. But winning is overrated, so tonight, we're sawing our D-Pad in half! (rip in peace D pad) Can You Beat Sonic 3 & Knuckles Without Pressing Right? Plus, as a bonus challenge, we're gonna find out the minimum number of times you have to press left, meaning for most of the playthrough, you're completely locked out of horizontal input. The run is being performed on the SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics Collection on PC, thankfully allowing for full controller remapping and unmapping. No matter how far you manage to slip your fingers, you can never accidentally press right like an idiot. And, of course, we're doing this run completely legit; only features available in the original release are allowed. No save states, no rewinds, and even no fast forwards. Trust me, that last one is going to hurt.. When it comes to character choice, Sonic and Tails aren't rough enough to handle this run. We're gonna need the master of mobility: Knuckles. Only Knuckles is capable of two super versatile moves - gliding, and climbing. Gliding allows for instant forward momentum with a slow descent. When a glide is released, you lose almost all speed and drop like a rock, making it double as both a movement tool and emergency brake. And, for some reason known only to an unknown Sonic team programmer with questionable priorities, Knuckles will reverse direction if ending a glide while touching the left edge of the screen. If you glide into a wall, you'll enter the climbing state. You can climb up or down, step up ledges, and jump off. Most importantly, jumping off a wall makes you reverse direction, thus giving Knuckles full movement potential as long as there are flat walls to his right and left. In short, those other losers have to use their feet to get basically anything done, but your main man Knuckles has a fully fleshed-out one-button moveset. Angel Island Zone is a great starting level to help you get accustomed to your new way of life. Later levels require careful planning and routing, but here you've got the time and safety to take the long way around. But it's not without its hazards. It's time to meet the number one most dangerous enemy in this entire game - SPRINGS! I recommend bringing a GameBoy; this is gonna take a while.. You'll also wanna be stocking up on as many extra lives as possible - either by collecting 100 rings, finding television broadcasts of your face, or entering checkpoint minigames. The Jackpot minigame in particular will net you a continue if you collect a ring while your ring total is at least 50, so make an active effort to get your ring total up for each checkpoint. When it comes to boss fights, you usually go in facing right, and most bosses don't have walls, meaning you'll need to be extra cautious not to push further forward than you need to; hitting the right edge of the screen is a death sentence. If you need to make leftward movement, you can bounce off the boss with a glide attack, or intentionally take damage from something on your right side. Believe it or not, taking damage is a totally sustainable strategy. Ring #1 will always fall slightly to the right of where Knuckles lands. As long as there's a flat play area, you can pick it back up infinitely. While the specifics of how to fight each boss will vary, most are trivial once you get the hang of backward movement. Hydrocity Zone ACT 2 is where the run really shows its true colors - Act 1 is annoying, but Act 2 is diabolical. The crushing wall is simple enough, but immediately after, these upward facing fans will lock you into a midair spinning animation, during which none of your inputs respond, save for left and right on the D-pad. This section is so close to the beginning of the level, it's impossible to go around. Of course, impossible doesn't mean much around these parts. There are zip glitches where you get caught in the wall and get sent flying around the stage, but these zips all use horizontal movement, so they look like a no-go. I did manage to get myself stuck inside the wall, but from there, every action is a dead end, sometimes literally. So, with no other choice left to us, we're making Left Press #1. The rest of the ACT is a maze of split paths, with tons of fan-littered dead ends, but wibble-wobbling between them is a golden route that ends up at the boss totally safely. Marble Garden Zone has less dead ends, but you're still gonna need to use your gray matter to reach the goal. I was actually worried that the run would fail here, due to the required spinning tops, but thankfully, they jettison you into the wall you need to break with no input necessary. Unfortunately, though, there's another crushing wall near the end of Act 2. You move right into the last room, the exit swerves left, and the falling wall is unclimbable. I think it might be possible to get through with wall-clipping shenanigans, but I couldn't find any reliable way to get inside. Until something gets found, this marks Left Press #2. And immediately after that left-pressing failure comes a threat to the no-right run in its entirety. This gigantic incline leads up through the top of the screen, meaning no wall, and we need to jump to the right. The pulley doesn't give us enough height, and keeps us facing left, and simply jumping on the incline doesn't send us far enough. There is, however, one super finicky precise way up there. Thanks once again to some unsung hero programmer at Sonic Team, sometimes, for seemingly no reason, Knuckles will turn to face downhill when landing on a slope. You're probably gonna time out once or twice, but keep jumping up the left edge of the screen and gliding above the lower incline until you get the pixel-perfect landing that faces you right and gives you enough time to jump into the right wall. Get to your well-deserved checkpoint, and deconstruct Egg Robo to kiss Marble Garden goodbye. Carnival Night Act 1 is the shortest and easiest stage in the entire game, Act 2 is supposed to be much the same, but even so I still managed to spend hours on it like an idiot. Every branching path leads into one of two roadblocks. Sonic and Tails' path leads you into a room full of levitation deally-bobs that send you into the mid-air spinning animation. Even if you hypothetically managed to get through that way, the game would be soft-locked since some unsung VILLAIN at Sonic Team forgot to spawn in the capsule. (baka) Knuckles' intended path, meanwhile, is blocked with this short jump. It doesn't look like a problem at first, but if the player enters their- *O H N O* edge leaning animation, they automatically turn in the direction the edge is facing. The ledge happens to be facing a GIANT column of spikes, so we can't glide from there either. After pointlessly finicking around, I ended up figuring out something that put the prior 5 hours into perspective. Get a pin-point glide onto the single section of wall that doesn't have spikes on it, then.. just turn around where you came from.. Knuckles only goes into the edge animation the FIRST time you climb up. The second time, the break-able blocks don't push you closer to the edge, so, you face right! (simplest thing in the universe, 5 hours well spent) With that done, let's move on from the shortest and easiest zone in the game and vow never to be an idiot again. Ice Cap Zone is a straight-forward level. While I wouldn't call it easy, it features a totally linear path and no explicit road-blocks The trampolines might look like trouble, but you can actually just jump off of them and still get decent height. And when that height isn't enough, climbing around the trampolines works just as well. After Ice Cap, is Launch Base Zone! The finale of Sonic 3. This zone is gonna play havoc with your directional orientation, with tons of gimmicks that fling you around willy-nilly, and sections that require you to do some pretty precise tricks to get yourself moving AND facing the right direction. I think this might actually be the most fun zone for the no-right challenge. Turning this momentum platformer into a momentum puzzler. In Act 2, unfortunately, the puzzle takes a turn towards the impossible. The path is blocked by a door that only moves after destroying the red switch to the upper left. We have no way of reversing direction, since the ground is flat, and the door, un-climbable. We COULD potentially get past with out-of-bounds shenanigans, but, my attempts at that were.. pretty pathetically fruitless. So, Launch Base Zone has unfortunately succeeded in adding a 3rd left press to the counter. But, with that bad news out of the way, we can move on to the final boss of Sonic 3. This battle has 2 phases. The first is an intense match against Egg-Robo, where you need to dedicate EVERY FIBER OF YOUR BEING to ducking on time with the music while waiting for good RNG! I actually recommend intentionally getting a time over before fighting this guy. You might be here a while... The second phase takes a ton of hits to kill, but as long as you never let your one ring get away, you should have plenty of time to wear him down. With Launch Base Zone crumbling, it's time to throw Sonic 3, IN THE TRASH! Welcome to Sonic and Knuckles! Population: KNUCKLES! Since Mushroom Hill has a special stage right on the main path, I should probably mention right now, that you should never, EVER enter a special stage unless absolutely necessary. You'll probably accidentally wander into special stages entrances every once in a while, and they can even be decent short cuts, but there's a catch. Every time you fail a special stage it cycles to the next special stage on the list, AND saves to your save file if you beat a zone or get a game over. One of the special stages has NO red spheres on the starting axis Since the special stage only ends when you either beat the level, or touch a red sphere, The game is effectively soft-locked with Knuckles bouncing back and forth for the rest of eternity. Thankfully, it's never actually required to enter a special stage. Even this one on the main path can be walked under. While the Act 1 boss is a tutorial repeat, the Act 2 boss, Doctor Identity Crisis, is one of the harder ones. The auto-scrolling screen makes it difficult to spin-dash, effectively locking us at the left edge. The only reliable way to build up momentum is with a glide It's usually not gonna be high enough to hit Eggman Robo in mid-air, but time it exactly right, and you can safely glide under him to bonk his egg-butt from below. After eight bonks, he's HARD BOILED! For Flying Battery Zone Act 1's boss it's absolutely required to go into the fight with rings. And there are no rings after the checkpoint. I recommend triggering the check point for a chance at a continue, so you'll to beat this thing on your first try. Stand on his face and intentionally get hit by his right hand just before every attack If you land on his right side, the fight becomes unwinnable, so make EVERY GLIDE COUNT. ACT 2 introduces cramped screw rooms that usually require you to reverse direction. Luckily, each one always has a wall and just enough space to reverse yourself, but you need to pull it off within an EXTREMELY super-tight time limit Whenever you get glitched into a wall, (which is probably gonna happen more often than not) you can do a spin dash to dislodge yourself. Keep trying and maybe, HOPEFULLY, you won't end up a pancake. The Act 2 boss is one of the easiest in the game- it literally beats itself! Unfortunately, there are TWO Act 2 bosses, the second being the hardest boss in the game. MS Paint Robotnik doesn't have any walls around him and is only vulnerable while swinging up. Since he always moves towards you, you can't just camp to the left side of the screen, otherwise, he'll reach you before you can get all the necessary hits in. Since he moves so slow, if you EVER end up on his right side while facing right, he'll lock you in with no opportunity to hit him again. Essentially, this battle is on a soft time limit. You need to get all eight hits in ASAP. Face left when entering the battle, and stand still so the moving floor delivers you to the right edge of the screen. Glide into him right when he spawns for hits 1 and 2. Bait him into the right corner, wait 'till the last possible moment, glide to the left edge of the screen, and immediately glide back. You should have enough time to get in hits 3 and maybe 4. Keep your distance and hit him every time he comes up. If done perfectly, you can kill him before he reaches the left edge of the screen. And even if you're less than perfect, you still have time to get the last hit in during your invulnerability frames. With MS Paint-buttnik erased, Flying Battery is history! It's the moment you've all been waiting for- Sandopolis Zone: The Longest, Maziest Zone in the entire game. Several paths through Act 1 are automatic no-goes, since they travel through upside-down sandfalls that leave Knuckles falling into the ceiling for the rest of eternity. You can brute force SOME of them with enough speed, but your best bet is to avoid them entirely with a specific route looping up and down and all around the stage's upper and middle paths, in ways the devs reaalllyy, definitely did not intend. Once you reach the boss, use the tried and true strategy of letting him murder you to death. And by that I mean let him murder you.. until he dies. *sad piano :(* Act 2 is where Sandopolis really begins; this level is the most feared of any 3&K player. Every section has you RUSHING under a time limit. Constantly pulling levers so you can kill the ghosts at bay and moving to and fro, pushing switches to open doors that close lightning fast. (spoops) Most of these doors can't be climbed, so missing your opportunity usually means automatic death. Extremely luckily, it's still possible to push switches without.. you know, PUSHING them. With one finally heroic keystroke, the unsung vigilante hero of Sonic Team made spin-dashing directly next to a pushable object cause both you and the object to move forwards. Partway through the level is the most frustrating part of this whole affair. A moving ceiling directly above a row of springs. Glide into the springs just right and you can slide to the left wall, waiting for the door to close behind (technically below) you. If you do it wrong, you'll be stuck sitting there until your inevitable doom. And even if you do it RIGHT, there's a 50/50 chance you'll end up getting crushed to death anyway. I hope you've been stocking up on extra lives. But as long as you go through this entire gauntlet perfectly, there are no true roadblocks. You can beat the entirety of Sandopolis Act 2 without pressing right OR left and potentially even without a time out. Lava Reef Zone is the final complete level of Knuckles' campaign, and thankfully, most of the level design is a straight shot toward victory! There's just one major roadblock.. This switch guarded by a spike crusher - which opens a door to the right. The door can't be climbed on, and thus we can't use it to reverse direction. Basically, all my Lava Reef Zone playtime was spent experimenting in this little hole. The ground is uneven, so we might potentially bounce backwards into the switch, but.. I could never get it done fast enough. You could try reversing direction from above, but the timing is equally prohibitive. I also tried getting murdered by the spike crusher, a promising technique, but, alas, a fruitless one. Thankfully, there is a viable method that's only SLIGHTLY less glitchy. Glide into the crusher while it's lowered, position yourself just far enough, that the crusher nudges you left the next time it falls. I'm not totally certain what's happening here, but after doing this a couple times, you can get the switch to trigger, and open the door to continue Lava Reef. The Act 1 boss has 3 separate targets to destroy, one of which stays at the left edge of the screen. Focus on killing that turret first. Spin-dash into the right turret and it'll shoot you all the way back. Once the left turret's dead, the right turret and hand are sitting ducks. Zoom through Lava Reef and Hidden Palace Zone, to reach the teleporter to Sky Sanctuary Zone! Say hello to the final boss: The Blue Robot Guy Who Looks Like Sonic Whose Actual Name And Relation To A Certain Other Blue Robot Guy Who Looks Like Sonic Has Never Really Been Conclusively Determined. He's easy! With the death of The Blue Robot Guy Who Looks Like Sonic Whose Actual Name And Relation To A Certain Other Blue Robot Guy Who Looks Like Sonic Has Never Really Been Conclusively Determined, The Sonic 3&Knuckles Press Right to Lose run is MISSION COMPLETE! And GOOD JESUS! was this a fun one. It's No Jump all over again. Whenever I see someone playing Sonic, my brain tells me they're doing some kind of reality-breaking nightmare maneuver every time they start walking! If you want a run that'll make you see Sonic 3 in a whole new light, Give the no right challenge a try. Since the specific routes in each level are so important, I edited together a demonstration of the entire game on my no commentary channel. If you're interested in trying out the run yourself, you can study the routes there. I also recommend keeping a map on hand. The maps at Sonic Zone:0 are SUPER detailed, and it helped a TON. Also, if you have any ideas to eliminate the 3 left presses, PLEASE try those out too. I'm too willing to bet with a little elbow grease we could turn this into a No Horizontal Movement Run. Speaking of, while I didn't use it for reference, I've gotta give a shoutout to YouTube channel Razor & Zenon's no D-Pad tasses[?]- Including a complete run of Sonic and Knuckles. Link in the description. Special thanks to all Patreon backers, including: Andrew Cryburt Mrs Seckman Erick Flinn Lezlamb RB_Drache David 20 Covers Zahlen Oum MrHarryWonka Alexander Botkin Chris Nate ChazM Mason2K Anyuu Salieri Ross Clark Ikreera Jay Dee Jez Robert B Brashier CitrusLusche ZanoBane BCRMainSound Joshua Bradbury Vincet Hall BassSinger313 YellowAlert Kevin Knitter Anon42 Suwt Robert Sephazon Alex Nelson and Jenduro. Let me know how much this video sucks and how I can improve in the future in the comments below. Knock Knock it's Gozaimasu for watching and get of of my house! [This was just.. hell to make. GameChamp probably intentionally made it that way so the subtitle makers would give up. It was easier to make the Splatoon subs to be honest.]
This is mind-blowing
He also beat Mario 3D World without jumping, the guy's a genius
yes you can
Heeey, Knuckles' glide is easy mode! :P
This is actually pretty cool.
the madman
I love this guy.
My child self never got pass that up and down elevator.... :(