(Epilepsy Warning) World Record Progression: Sonic Adventure 2 Battle

[Music] Sonic Adventure 2 battle is all the characteristics of a great speedrun it's got fast pacing action and one of the best soundtracks of its era hundreds of gamers have come together over the past decade to work out how to beat the game as fast as possible what has resulted is one of the most broken speedruns the world has ever seen [Music] just a few top runners can say that they've had the world record and for at least a period of time been the fastest person on earth to beat the game this is the history of that world record this is the world record progression of Sonic Adventure 2 battle competition for this game originally existed from individual level runs or ILS grinding one level over and over again to do it as fast as possible instead of the whole game eventually the idea came about on speed demos archive to do a full speed run of the game Sonic Adventure 2 has two stories available from the start here of story where you play as Sonic Tails and Knuckles and dark story where you play as Shadow Eggman and Rouge this video will be focusing on the more popular category hero story and the first recorded person to do a hero speedrun back in December 2007 was this guy yoshi fan 28 [Music] for those who don't know there are three main types of stages in Sonic Adventure 2 and they each of me plays a different character the sonic stages were built for speedrunning yoshifan was able to dash and jump and most importantly sprint his way through these stages your goal is just to get from the start of the stage to the end in the fastest time possible speed demos archive rules said that he had to stay in balance for his speedrun that didn't stop yoshifan from using a few clever shortcuts in some of the sonic stages anyway puzzle room skip for example was a way to get to the end of crazy gadgets slightly faster he normally had to go out of your way to shoot a missile to break down a barrier in front of the goal ring but instead yoshifan performed a super ounce on top of a block while upside down and hit the goal ring from below a super bounce can be done by Spin dashing into a wall then jumping and bouncing while being right next to it for some strange reason the game turns your horizontal velocity into vertical velocity when he hit the wall in a bounce so you fly up the wall much higher than normal as everything here was ruled to be done in the boundaries of the map the yoshifan was able to do it to save time in his run the tail stages on the other hand were slower paced the goal is similar to the sonic stages getting from the start to the end but how you do it is different you are in a mech shooting enemies and other obstacles to clear your path ahead this however didn't stop yoshifan from running full speed ahead as much as he could and then there were the knuckle stages which were definitely some of the most frustrating in the game there's no defined start and finishing lines to the stages instead you're tasked with finding three objects usually pieces of the Master Emerald they randomly spawn one at a time in one of dozens of locations across the stage if they all spawn really far away from each other then you're losing a lot of time because you have to go all the way to each one to pick them up the oshi fan would find out where the next emerald was by going to his screen and reading the hints it gave you which is always specific to an emerald location but this meant that he had to memorize dozens and dozens of hint messages to know where the next piece always was so not only was good luck required to get pieces in good locations to pick them up quickly but incredible memorization was needed as well there's also various boss fights throughout the game but most of them were pretty simple for yoshifan just go all-out attacking them and they'll all die quickly enough exactly 46 minutes after the run began yoshifan had finished the first ever hero story run of Sonic Adventure 2 battle he had played on the gamecube version instead of the Dreamcast version because of faster loading times and overall it was a very solidly executed run but one that was still bounded by having to stay in bounds but sometimes boundaries just have to be broken meet sonic guitar sonic guitar was one of the game's most famous individual level runners he'd held world records in some of the stages and was regarded as one of the game's best players overall many players back then were il runners including Yoshi fan but sonic guitar was a prime candidate to beat the hero story world record sonic guitar also decided to not abide by the inbounds rule set so he had a plethora of new skips some in bounds and some out of bounds to use that had been discovered in the three years since Yoshi fans record many were minor clips through a wall on aquatic mine using a sine clipping past the doors you'd need to open it in death chamber Spin dashing through a door to avoid picking up a key in pyramid cave these weren't big time savings but they at least helped him pick up a few seconds over yoshifan super bounces were using the egg golem boss fight now as well you only have a few frames to perform each one so it's a very risky strategy you can get on top of him if you do them correctly so you don't have to climb up his back sonic guitar didn't care how hard they were he was going for them anyway and he nailed them the biggest revelation however was crazy gadget skip sonic guitar discovered it in June 2010 and as you would expect it takes place on the crazy gadget stage where you play a sonic and change the gravity to make your way through the level at one point you change the gravity to the left walk on the wall and then are supposed to change it back you continue making your way through the level sonic guitar did not do that instead he kept the gravity on the left and then spin dashed and jumped at the perfect time to clear a kill plane a barrier that will kill you if you come into contact with it he then had to navigate through the stage very precisely while on the left wall making any false moves could have caused the game to softlock and he would have had to restart the level he used the messed up gravity to gain a ton of speed and fall through a wall then floated through space and landed exactly on the goal ring where he needed to yeah needless to say this trick was one of the toughest in the game but if everything was done correctly it would save him around 40 seconds so all of these new tricks put together along with more optimal playing in some other sections was enough to take more than three minutes off the record in December 2010 at this point the hero story record was in a good place there is still a lot of people doing individual level runs as well of course but here a story was gaining in popularity sonic guitar achieved a really solid 42 58 and months passed without anybody beating it then in November 2012 something strange happened the game was re-released on Steam and runners soon figured out a very important distinction about the PC version everything loaded faster so much so that the PC version would gain nearly three minutes just on faster load times alone additionally the PC version had more hint screens on the knuckle stages meaning the player could figure out where to go quicker than before so ultimately this meant that the world record can now be beaten fairly easily as long as the person doing so played on PC someone had to take advantage of this opportunity and in December 2012 the guy to do so was broken arthritis better known as Logan starting to shake bad [Music] logan wasn't on the same level of sonic guitar quite yet some of his early records were casually achieved in races with other runners and while they were faster than sonic guitars run when using the in-game timer to eliminate load times they were still multiple minutes slower gradually though the gap got narrower and narrower yes yes yes yes [Music] yeah yes yes oh my god forty seconds ahead now [Music] oh my god [ __ ] this game [Music] 4140 yes finally this record is hard to beat now this record is extremely hard to beat now yes yes it was he was now just 11 seconds away from a run under 40 minutes but like he said the run was getting pretty optimized pushing the run under 40 minutes was not going to be easy and then seemingly out of nowhere two huge new skips were discovered City escape skip and final rush skip sometime in early January 2013 Musashi apparently accidentally found City escape skip if he do a trick off of this ramp and avoid touching a speed pad which caps your speed you can actually land just barely out of balance next to another speed pad Sonic's foot Clips the speed pads so his direction rotates 90 degrees while remaining in the same state that he was while flying off of the ramp if all was done correctly Sonic is now lined up so that he'll continue flying out of bounds right past the staircase and fall through space to later in the stage final rush skip was found by chain jump he fall off of a rail you're riding on and then have a balanced attack launching horizontally this boosts your horizontal speed there's an invisible vertical kill plainer than trying to get through if you do the bounces hack and are lucky with your speed that it's possible to be moving so fast horizontally that you'll be on one side of the kill plane for one frame then on the other side the next frame and never actually come into contact with it it's explained here by youtuber chubby Bubba so you can see that on this frame you aren't actually notes I of this kill plane and on the next frame we're outside again so there's no praying where you're inside the kill plane you go from being outside to outside on the other side after you fall and fall through space all while navigating to avoid more invisible kill planes if all goes well you'll fall and land on the goal ring skipping much of the stage so now Logan had a new goal get a good run that had both city escape skip and final rush skip since City escape was the first stage in the game and final rush was the last non boss stage there were so much that could still go wrong in between these skips but they were two very pivotal points in the run on January 30th 2013 Logan was on an all right looking run but if he could just land final rush skip it would instantly go from an all right run it's being likely a huge world record he slid his way down the stage and as he jumped off of the rail everything fell silent all he could do now is hope that he didn't die oh my yes I'm gonna do it dude oh my god oh my [ __ ] god oh my [ __ ] god no way oh my god oh my god [Music] yes oh my this was it he finally got his wish the only thing standing between him and glory now was to fight with shadow [Music] Bogey's cookies yes 39:21 the first ever sub 40 it was a great run but still there was more time to save his luck in the knuckles stages definitely wasn't the greatest and his execution throughout was far from perfect too like this death on metal Harbor yep Avengers ended now it's totally my fault I'm gonna keep going so he wanted one more world record this time one that was better all the way through he got on a run that was ahead way ahead go in the final rush he just needed to land the skip he died on the easier part of the trick the difficult and seemingly random part the first coal plane had gone fine he died while trying to navigate around the other ones it was devastating but all you could do is give it another try thank God at least I got it second try [Music] but I'm still like a bunch ahead right now like it still wasn't perfect but it was still a lot better than the old record and Logan is pretty happy about that yes thank God Logan's new world record had taken him nearly 25 hundred attempts to achieve all the new strategies new skips tough execution and persistence had finally paid off on April 13th 2013 with the time this impressive the question had to be asked how long would this record last [Music] you record opponents apologies Logan we're taking it so soon that's right it stood for seven days Talan 2461 had been speedrunning a lot of Sonic Adventure 2 while Logan was lowering the hero story record noun but he wasn't quite able to get the record from him at least not until right after the first ever 38 talents run had some very good knuckle stages he got great piece location in aquatic mind a meteor herd in particular and right yeah Wow oh my god really good pieces Wow still the run was definitely far from perfect there were some bad time losses across the run some were due to bad luck others due to missed execution Logan summed it up pretty well at the end of talyn's run mr. ron still hasn't reached its full potential [Music] after months of attempts a 3715 was the end results simply put this run is fantastic outstanding lucky and death chamber to save a lot of time great execution throughout the whole run nearly everything went well the record is finally in a place that Talyn was satisfied with with in October 2013 as fate would have it yet another big skip was discovered this time by master c77 and in the eternal engine stage you jump with your mech between a tank and a wall and let the tank's collision push you into the wall most of the time you just jumped and nothing would happen but if you were really lucky you would get pushed all the way through the wall into space and glide to the end of the stage with these of course there is no consistent strategy to get this to work you'd pretty much just jump into the tank and pray that it would work eternal engine skip could save upwards of 30 seconds that was enough to put Talon back on the grind again to get one final run that would put the record Neely out of reach for anybody else after thousands of attempts on January 15 2014 everything was coming together for talent ok good enough don't hit a kill plan well I don't have this in my PV so this split is gonna be amazing Wow a minute ahead I never thought I'd ever get this okay okay [Music] oh my god it's on the run that's what the speedrun will be known as the run the run was thought to be nearly flawless it took Talon a few times to get eternal engine skip to work but that was the only significant time loss in the run and even that wasn't too big of a deal as the dust settled people realized that beating this run with what was known at the time was nearly impossible it stood for days which turned into weeks which turned into months but as the time went on although nobody is able to beat Talon that didn't stop the top Sonic Adventure 2 players from around the world from discovering more tricks some were small shortcuts like flying with tails at the exact point where two walls meet and hidden base to pass through and fly farther into the stage some were large skips like a more consistent set up for final rush skip you jump off of the rail higher up and instead of hoping to pass through the kill plane you attempt to navigate around it with your boosted horizontal speed this method was a few seconds slower but since he didn't have to rely on luck it was the way more consistent method then there was the ultimate risky strategy crazy gadgets skip skip I remember crazy gadget skip where you play the stage on its side it turned out there was a way to skip crazy gadget skip it was called crazy gadget skip skip first shown off in the tool-assisted speedrun from hazel fusion varriya and THC 98 and later improved in real time by Dark Pro you would go onto the left wall like before and then Spin Dash between two invisible kill planes and fly out of bounce to the goal ring here's the catch you can't actually see where you're falling through space so you've got to use visual cues from the background even attempting this in a run would be absurd however because of the enormous risk involved even though it did provide a solid 20 second time save if it worked it was simply considered not viable for any runner to go for still with all these strats somebody did start to close in on Tom's record a dude named a mustache from late 2014 through 2015 he took his personal record down from 39 minutes to 38 minutes to 37 minutes before eventually getting within a minute of talyn's run and then on June 19th it seemed to all be coming together the new strategies solid look and great execution had put him 25 seconds ahead of talyn's world record at going it's a pyramid cave [Music] all right so his lead was now cut in half but a moustache was still in great shape overall for the next stage death chamber all he needed was good luck from the Master Emerald locations just like that he was knocked back to four seconds behind world-record pace he ended up finishing the run with a 36 11 6 seconds away from the record so close yet with the crazy run that was needed to beat Allan another chance that the record would be hard to come by a few months later in October 2015 a moustache was on an innocent-looking run he was 8 seconds behind world-record going into crazy gadget since it wasn't realistic to gain 9 seconds before the run ended he made the decision to go for crazy gadget skip skip on this run he had no choice but to go for it to beat the record but this trick was basically just throwing the run away and then this happened out of nowhere a run that seemed to have no chance at world record was way ahead of it with just one stage and a couple of boss fights remaining after taking care of final rough skip all the way standing between him and the record was the shadow fight [Music] [Music] it had taken him more than 5,700 attempts but a mustache was deservedly the new world record holder a mustaches record stood without challenge for a few months landing all the skips in a run including crazy gadgets skip skip was menacing for anybody to try to tackle eventually a Japanese runner known as Chewbacca would become a close competitor getting personal bests in the 36 minute range and in January 2016 he got a run quite close to the world record but there was something very strange about this run the run of finished was the time of 35:42 approximately 5 seconds behind the record however Sonic Adventure 2 also has an in-game timer at this place how long it took you to beat each level at the end of every level when taking the timer for each stage and adding them all up the time of a Sonic Adventure 2 speedrun is about 10 minutes faster overall because you're skipping all the time between the levels in your calculation for years the in-game timing method served as a secondary methods in traditional real time timer from start to finish this 35:42 however finished with an in-game time of 24 19 while a mustaches world record had an in-game time of 24 39 a difference of 20 seconds so whose run was really faster as it turns out the only recent shabak ii speedrun was slower than a mustaches run with real time was because his pc wasn't as good it loaded everything a bit slower thereby adding about 25 seconds of load time across the whole run this wasn't factored into the in-game timer so even the shabak ii speedrun was slower with real time it was actually about 20 seconds of gameplay faster to account for this the community decide at the time all runs with the in-game timer from then forward officially making the new world record of 24 19 by Shabak II this was around the time when the green forest wall run began to be used as well there's an area on loops where the game prevents you from falling by taking Sonic's downward direct and forcing him that way the trick takes advantage of that by spin gnashing from the side of the loop then turning left and hitting this area the game will then force Sonic to his down direction in this case toward the big tree that you normally have to use Springs to climb up by then using a homing attack the player is able to climb all the way up the tree without having to use the springs from there the era of Japanese dominance began throughout nearly all of 2016 the hero story record was held by either one of two Japanese runners Tsubaki and Emma Rua it seems that Emma Rua didn't stream his attempts alive on Twitch but he was still a very respected runner who lowered the record with a couple of amazing runs on the other hand Shabak II did stream on Twitch for simplicity's sake he still used a real-time timer on his stream even though the category was officially timed with in-game timing that didn't stop him from throwing thousands of attempts at the game 13,000 to be precise [Music] [Music] nice [Music] a 2403 Shabak e and ma rua had taken the game down to just above the 23 minute mark as 2016 came to a close the atmosphere of Sonic Adventure 2 speedruns have changed gone were the days of finding revolutionary new strategies that would save dozens of seconds and in their place was a world of precision runners trying to optimize every last second from the game a new world record contender emerged dark pro he pioneered death chamber death strats intentionally killing Knuckles in certain situations to respawn closer to other pieces or dying to essentially re-roll the locations of the pieces he is previously more of a speedrunning scientist help him find some strategies for the crazy gadget skip skip but he eventually tried his hand at doing some of the speedruns too and he too was really really good but 2017 would turn into a dogfight of epic proportions shaving seconds off of a speedrun though was already extremely optimized these guys all streamed on Twitch once again often with the real-time timer on screen even though it was officially timed with the in-game timer as the record traded hands over and over the player skills just got better and better P bead good will I'm disappointed nice nice nice [Music] that might be some means in on March 26th 2017 dark Pro lowered the world record to a 23 22 this was the fifth time in four months at the record in been lowered but what made this record particularly amazing was that even with all of the risky strategies dark pro decided to go for the older way riskier but faster version of final rush skip just because he could and wanted to save the time oh he got it and finished with an absolutely amazing record and that is not where the world record stands today no there's one final record to talk about dark prose record stood for many months but somebody did beat it this is Dage 4 he had been playing the sonic adventure games for most of his life but didn't complete a full game speedrun of either for a long time he very quickly picked up the world record in most categories of the first Sonic Adventure game so he then turned his attention toward Sonic Adventure 2 there weren't any significant new strategies for him to use all he could do was pray for good luck and play perfectly more perfectly than anybody else before him and on February 28th 2018 Dage did this [Music] [Music] it just happened it [ __ ] lost Abner it just [Music]

Channel: Summoning Salt

Views: 1,757,153

Rating: 4.9500079 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: vfFbui-9du8

Length: 30min 21sec (1821 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 19 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Zedyy]

"There was a way to skip Crazy Gadget Skip. It was called Crazy Gadget Skip Skip"

Legendary.

[u/Dage4]

tfw you get wr less than 2 hours after the video goes live

[u/vMambaaa]

Summoningsalt Singlehandedly made me interested in speedrunning. I can't get enough of these videos.

[u/PanMearBig]

We don't deserve SummoningSalt.

[u/InnocuousAssClown]

One minor correction: in the Knuckles stages, the emeralds don’t spawn one at a time, they’re all there from the beginning. However, the computer hints and flashing at the bottom only point you towards one at a time.

[u/BlindManBaldwin]

Here I was, ready to go be productive, and then I saw SummoningSalt uploaded a new video. Welp, better watch it!

[u/toriblack3]

saved 4 later bby

[u/Torque-A]

Now I'm sorta wondering where he can go next. A few other Youtubers have already done WR progression videos of their own for some of the more-played titles (Ocarina of Time, Paper Mario TTYD, Mario Sunshine, etc). Are there any other titles with a long history of speed running that haven't been done yet?

[u/NoThisIsStupider]

I find it so hilarious how the hint system is explained in such a "nobody who's played this game has ever heard of it" way. It's unbelievable how many people played SA2 completely oblivious to the hint system, although it wasn't taught super well.