Difference between revisions of "Hyrule Castle"

Revision as of 17:21, 3 January 2017

Hyrule Castle is the first section of the run. There's very few rooms with variable strats, so the segment is mostly about having good movement and reacting well to RNG.

Here's a theory TAS of this segment done by me (Josh) in BizHawk. [1] Broken link

Some short placeholder notes before I actually work on better ones:

• Play on the JP 1.0 version if possible. It saves a lot of time.
• Notice the way text is mashed. All of ABXY advance the text, and you should try to use all of them to combat human limitations on mashing. The final textbox in a dialog can be closed with any input. Usually L and R are used for this since they don't affect gameplay (you won't accidentally map, slash your sword, etc.). On this segment, A can often be used as well because we haven't gotten the Pegasus Boots yet.
• Movement is very important in A Link to the Past, and there's a lot of subtle timesaving movement tech to be used in this segment. Visit Movement to learn about wallpumping, airpumping, stairlag, and so on.

First Keyguard

Top Spin

For this guard, there are two common strategies used. The first (and easiest) is to charge your sword up, then release the spin near him so that he's caught between Link and the statue. This will allow your spin to hit him twice and, with good positioning, knock him and the key he drops towards the door.

Left Spin

The other way, which is harder but a little faster, is to charge your sword left and then pokespin the guard. If you're using this strat and you find that you're not catching the key on the way to the door without stopping, then you're doing it slowly and likely not saving time over top spin. Both the positioning and the timing can be a little tricky here. You can use the GIF to come up with cues for how to move Link (I use patterns in the floor). For the timing, after the poke, you need to delay letting go of B to release the spin WHILE holding down so that Link moves downward some during the poke animation.

Here some visual cue to help you.

File:Escape blue guard pokespin vcue.png

Black Knight

Pot Strat

The easier way to do this room is to go into the first cell and grab a pot to help with the kill. Pots are oddly powerful in this game (even useful later in the game when you have a much more powerful sword). 1 pot will do 4 slashes worth of damage here. If you wanted to be super safe, you could grab a second pot and kill him with it.

You'll need to boomerang the green guard at the start of the room every time with this strat, no matter his RNG. Even if he isn't in the way or doesn't notice you when you enter, he will notice you while you're grabbing the pot in the cell. Since Link walks slower while carrying something, you want to minimize the distance you walk with the pot, so pay attention to the movement in the GIF. You also want to throw it as soon as you can. Not only does that get your movement speed back, it also delays the guard swinging his ball & chain. After the pot is thrown, move down a little under the knight so your slashes recoil him into the top right corner. Not too hard :>

8 Slashes

The harder but faster way to do this is to skip getting a pot and kill the knight with 8 slashes. This doesn't save much time (only 40ish frames here) and is kinda tricky, so maybe not the best thing for new players.

Unlike the pot strat, you can skip booming the guard at the start if he's walking down. You'll still have to boom him if he walks right or aggros as you enter of course. Notice when I start and stop holding diagonal (v>). If you do either with bad timing, then the knight will probably start swinging before you can get the first slash in, which is almost always a bad thing. This GIF gets perfect position on the knight and doesn't have to adjust any. For real-time play, this certainly won't always be the case, and you'll have to be able to make small adjustments to keep the fight under control. The knight can be damaged every half second exactly, and getting the timing down on your slashes is very important. You can knock the guard more west with your 8th slash so the key is dropped closer to the cell door. Be sure to boomerang the key to get it quicker.

Keychest Room

Keep Right

This strat is pretty safe and consistent, and many top players prefer it over the other one. Just pump the right wall and boom the snake that's there every time.

Snake Gamble

Sometimes the left snake isn't there in this hallway, so you can gamble on it not being there and just go around the right one. This is very slightly faster than the above strat (10f or so).

However, sometimes the left snake is there, and you have to react quickly with your boomerang to stun the right one to get through. This is slower than just keeping right, since you won't be getting the wallpumps earlier in the room.

Keyrat Room

This is a dumb room.

When you enter there will be two rats on your screen right away. The rat with the key is the one offscreen to your left, and he and the two other rats have several different things they can do. As a general rule, you will want to pump some along the bottom wall and then airpump up some so that you can react to possible Northwest keyrat and so that your boomerang won't hit the torch and miss the key if you get a better RNG.

The best thing that can happen is the keyrat coming towards you as you're walking left. You can just kill it (which requires some quick reactions but not too bad) and safely boomerang most of the time (once again be sure you're up off the bottom wall a little).

For an advanced way to optimize the good keyrat RNG, the instaboom trick can be used to save about 10f. If you hold B on your slash, there's 2 frames where you're in the poke animation and can use the boomerang without the boomerang animation.

Another common RNG is for it to be near the torch or along the lower west wall. Just kill it normally and boom the key. You don't want to instaboom in this situation, but rather delay throwing the boomerang a little. If you're too quick, the boom will likely glance off the wall and come back to you without the key. Also in this situation, it can be common for the other rats to get in the way, which can be really annoying. Especially troublesome is if you kill one of the other rats and the keyrat together, and the other rat drops a rupee. The boomerang will often catch the rupee instead, so be careful in those situations.

The last type of RNG you can get is the dreaded NW keyrat. This can be particularly dumb if one or two of the other rats join him in the corner. Be very careful of throwing the boomerang too quickly in the corner. It's very easy to not catch the key here.

One new strat found by Jadin can be done sometimes to save half a second here if no other rats are in the way. Diagonally boom the keyrat to prevent it going all the way up in the corner. In my experience, when you boom to catch the key here, you should throw it diagonally (<^) instead of just (<).