EarthBound Finished in About Five Hours

I’ve never seen a speedrun where you can actually watch the person that’s playing it. They must be so tense the entire time knowing they can’t mess up too much…

Personally, I cherish my games and the experience of playing through them. I try to stretch them out as much as I possibly can. I guess I am like the opposite of a speedrun gamer! 🙂

FANGAMER LUCAS SHIRT IN THE BACKGROUND!!!

This reminds me that I totally forgot about SDA’s marathon this year… the summer one should be fun though.

skateman222 here, one of the runners! Pretty cool that this popped up in my news feed today 🙂

I have a 4:58 on my YouTube channel that doesn’t use major skip glitches, which is quite impressive considering the wall skips save TONS of time (at least 10 minutes or so). Unfortunately, it’s not a World Record anymore because a Japanese runner beat me by 3 minutes with a 4:55 using the English game as well. All because I make a dumb mistake and teleport out of Scaraba by accident 🙁

You can still watch my run here if you’d like (WARNING: I tend to swear a lot during the run, so I apologize for that. Speedrunning a game this long gets stressful at times! DX)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmPWH8Bt7TY

Thanks for posting this on your awesome website! <3

Ooh, cool!

Here’s a question I’ve wanted to ask for a while – how do you keep from avoiding enemies that will only waste your time? I imagine if you’re going low-ish levels and you end up caught by a swarm of enemies, it’ll take a while to run away or defeat them, and this could probably take a good minute or two of your time (or worse, if you get killed).

Is this ever a problem or are there certain strategies for certain situations? I expect the “scroll enemies off the screen” trick is used a lot, but even then that doesn’t work all the time, right?

Do you have a link to the Japanese speedrun?

I was did a personal speedrun on a Mario World GBA cart. I don’t think i broke any records, but i still feel good that i was able to beat the game in like 12 or 13 minutes.

@Mato

It really depends on the area, I guess. Scrolling enemies off-screen is usually not a huge problem, but at times, it could take really long to do or you might even get in situations where you have no choice but to fight. Places that come to mind are Peaceful Rest Valley and post-Pyramid when the Dungeon Man is following you. Basically, UFOs are ANNOYING!!

The thing that’s interesting about Earthbound is that being at a slightly lower level than usual doesn’t affect you that much considering Paula’s PSI Freeze and Jeff’s Bottle Rockets do pretty much all the work and once you get past the early parts of the game, money is not an issue at all, that you can just refill Jeff’s inventory with Bottle Rockets every time he runs out. 8)

Hope that answers your question, Mato! Let me know if you’re interested in anything else regarding Earthbound/Mother speedrunning 😉

@Matt

0xwas’s 4:55:27 run using the English game:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J7bp5ADCFE

The MOTHER2 record is sadly not up on the internet because it was streamed on Nicovideo Live and is only archived for 7 days after it has been streamed 🙁

Believe it or not though, I believe both 0xwas’s run and maybe even my run on the English version would probably be faster than the Japanese run if we did our runs on Japanese version too! 0xwas and I cleaned up the route a bit more to save even more time 🙂

Earthbound could be beaten in slightly above than 9 minutes…