Hey, I've recently got this game and was thinking of speedrunning it.

Anyway, I found a few interesting time saves that I think are really useful for anyone looking to speedrun this game.

1. In the mission "Top of The World" where you play as Elektra, you can complete the mission in under 40 seconds by wall climbing and avoiding all enemies. The first segment of this mission requires you to defeat a number of enemies before the wall opens up allowing you to progress. However, this can be avoided by wall climbing at the start. This is a tricky strat and can result in you falling to your death so I'd recommend practicing this before you try it and it's not a massive time save so it might not be worth it unless you're really good at it. Also avoid wall running to the sides as that will make her run to her death

2. The first mission of Storm can be finished upon destroying the first of the glowing orbs without destroying the 2nd. Idk how this works but it happened to me and idk how. I tried to get it to work again but it won't work.

If I find any other time saves, I'll post them here

Oh, another time save I forgot to mention is Femme Fatale, the mission where you fight The Wink as Wolverine, where you can save time

When she teleports up to those platforms and throws barrels at you, you can stop her from teleporting to the next platform if you're on top of the platform she's going to teleport to so she'll skip that platform. Also, instead of avoiding the barrels that she throws you can catch them and throw them back at her if you do it fast enough and as long as you're not too far away from her or too close to her (If you're too far, she'll teleport before the barrel hits her and if you're too close she will hit the platform and you won't be able to catch the barrel)

I'm testing more of the boss missions, particularly the ones where you can ring out your opponent.

The mission Earthquake! where you fight Fault Zone as Storm, you can get Fault Zone to jump to her death by flying over the pit to the left. This is very easy to do, just don't fly too far away or too low or you will ring yourself out.

The mission Daredevil! where you fight Daredevil as Elektra, you can jump off the Daily Bugle at the far side and cling onto the wall with your wall climb (Right trigger on the wall) and Daredevil will swing off to his death in an attempt to attack you. This can be tricky and can take a couple of attempts but even if you fail a couple of times, it still saves time over trying to kill him. Definitely worth doing (Also make sure to use your super jump to jump off the building because with the regular jump you won't be able to grab onto the wall before you fall out of bounds)

The mission To Defy A Goddess where you fight evil Storm as Wolverine (which is only done in the All Character Missions category), you can cling to the wall over the pit and Storm will eventually fly out of bounds to her death. However this will take a fairly long time as Storm will fly very high and it will take her a long time to fall far enough to die. It may be faster to just kill her normally or try to throw her off yourself but I'd recommend trying this out for yourself.

The Electric Man (Daredevil vs Johnny Ohm) can be completed by swinging over the pit and getting Johnny to fly to his death but it can take way too long for him to fly over the pit and Daredevil's special ability can run out by the time Johnny flies over the pit. EDIT: Also worth noting, Johnny Ohm will not fly if he's carrying an object as he's the only flying character not able to do so

For Fatal Heat (Venom vs Solara) (there's no out of bounds in this fight), just use your super grab as Venom to sling items towards you and throw them at Solara and you should be able to kill her very quickly before she regenerates health. Along Came A Spider (Evil Spiderman vs Human Torch) has a similar strat but is harder because Spider-man isn't as strong as Venom so can't web as many items towards himself

Deadly Venom (Spiderman vs Venom) and Lethal Toxin (Hazmat vs Venom) you can also get Venom to kill himself by swinging around the Daily Bugle or over Grand Central Station's pit but be careful not to ring yourself out

You can get Spider-Man to kill himself in High Voltage (mission where you defeat Spider-Man as Johnny Ohm by flying around the Daily Bugle. Make sure to hold A (on xbox) or X (on ps2) to go up because Johnny will fly downwards quite quickly and can ring himself out. This reduces your special quickly so make sure to be above land before your special runs out

In Poisoned Steel, you can get Hazmat to kill himself by flying over the pit as Magneto but it can be hard to get him to do so.

In Duel of Masters, you can get Magneto to kill himself by teleporting over the pit as Paragon. This is much easier than Poisoned Steel.

Sick! Please let's try adding more runs to the board.

So the site was rolled back and we lost some of the discussion from the last few days on this forum...

But you mentioned a new strat for the mission The Electric Man? Would this strat be faster or more reliable than the AI manipulation to get Johnny Ohm to ring himself out? If you could test both strats and compare, that'd be great

Dad gum! I just notticed we lost the posts, good we didn't lose the rules for the new categories at least

So, The strat is not for ever trying, because it depends on you have Rage, and manage to knock johnny Ohm on the ground. Is more like a "in case" situation. But if he is on the ground and you get a rage, it does offer a way to kill him by exploiting not lettting him get up again. I pulled of the 2 times i had the circumstance =)

Ok well I guess it could be a back up strat but I'm not sure I see it being of much use if you're going for the main strat to get him to ring himself out

The strat for the mission "Daredevil!" (Elektra vs Daredevil) is way too difficult and unreliable. I have a more reliable strat. If you run up the top right of the left wall and then cling on with your knives, there's a good chance Daredevil will swing to his death. If this doesn't work, the back up is to get off the wall and just try to throw him off, but stay near the ledge in order to do this

For me, this tends to work more often than not but it is tricky and requires some luck

@MysticManiac good one!

This strat isn't actually as reliable as I thought. Today, I've been practicing strats for Femme Fatale, Top of the World and Daredevil. I have a good strat for Top of the World and I sort of have strats for the other two. Hard to explain these strats in text but when I record a run, you'll see them

I also did an unrecorded untimed practice run which went pretty good outside of a couple missions; most notably Scuttle, Death Incarnate and Meet Your Maker. All of these time losses were very late in the run so I should practice my end game before doing a run

Today In DEATH FROM AFAR with elektra I found totally by accident an interesting skip

It's possible to skip the green energy shield walls by going through them. Some characters have moves for thrown enemies. While making these moves the character has some invulnerability frames, so they can go through these walls.

Maybe this can be exploited with other characters. If we could skip the green wall in death incarnate with Magneto, for example, it could be a big time save

The biggest issue I see is that you have to bring the enemy close to the shield, which is the hardest part, since enemies usually spawn far away from these walls. I had an enemy close to the shield just out of luck

When throwing enemies Elektra has this acrobatic stunt move, that other characters don't

But I wonder if "throwing objects" animations, or any other move, have similar invencibility frames?

So I'm testing this new strat right now. Throwing isn't the only way to get past the shield. You can super throw them but as Elektra's super throw moves backwards when doing her super throw instead of forwards as she does you have to throw the enemy while your back is to the shield.

Enemies can also hit you past the shield, and thrown items can push you past the shield too.

However, all of these strats can fail. None are completely consistent. Sometimes the enemies just won't get into the right position. I do think it's worth doing though because I'm sure it saves a decent chunk of time

You can also die pretty easily from this. I've died a few times already

Your strat of doing the regular throw on the enemy is probably the most consistent strat for getting past the shield

I'm currently uploading videos for this mission as well as other early missions (Femme Fatale, Top of the World, Daredevil)

Here's me practicing and testing the new strat

And here's some other strats I've come up with that I thought would be worth making videos for

So the mission Street Fight which also has a green shield can also skip this shield by using Wolverine's super grab on an enemy. It's actually a lot easier to get through this shield than the one in Death From Afar as you can use Wolverine's super grab on an enemy from a further distance than you can Elektra's throw

And this is a better version of the strat where an enemy throws an item at you and gets you through the shield faster

Nice work. It's great that you doing this study on the possibilities of actual skips. I found the elektra top of the world to be amazing, although I think for what the trick requires it should save more time, I don't know if the save is worth, but it surely is not a hard trick and once the runner feels safe about it it can be used all the time.

The Elektra Death from afar seems a lot harder but is the only one so far with a shield and a "goal point" that is possible to get and trigger the stage clear.

Street fight with wolverine in the other hand as I suspected still requires that the player kill all enemies, so the force field skip turns out to be not worth on this one.

I loved the Femme fatale fights! It's so good to know I have a lot of more time saving possibilities to do! My Current PB is about 1h 37min. I think that my ingame time is close to Falco but the loading times take several minutes of my total time. I just compared his video with mine and it seems PS2 has a much slow loading times compared to Gamecube =(. I will have to use emulator or get another console if I want competition lol

You did a good job fiding these time save jewels dude. I think when you have a good run it will be a much better run than the current WR. And I can't wait to watch it!

I actually timed the shield skip for Street Fight and it was still worth it. It saved 30 seconds as opposed to the regular strat. I think once you get past the shield, you only have to fight all enemies that are currently spawned + the few other ones that spawn once you get past the shield, but it prevents enemies from spawning earlier. Trust me, it's worth doing. And it's easier to skip the shield in this one than in Elektra's mission, at least for me

Yeah I've spent a lot of time practicing Femme Fatale. Some of the time save is from learning these "strats", more of it is just from practicing the fight.

Also worth noting, The Wink teleports onto the platforms 3 times at most. I think Wolverine's finisher (even though it's quite long) is worth using if you get Wink in danger after she does her teleporting on the platforms for the 2nd time, but before she does it for the 3rd time. It's unlikely that this will happen though but just something you should know

The game does have an in-game timer on the load/save screen so that could be used if load times are an issue between consoles. But there are some issues with that

1. It only includes hours and minutes, not seconds
2. Idk if that includes just gameplay or loading screens
3. Idk if it includes all gameplay or excludes failed mission attempts etc

Comparing my load times with yours, I think my load times are just slightly faster, like 1-2 seconds per loading screen. Star Falco's loads seem to be faster than both of ours though

@MysticManiac Yeah, when it's just a slight difference, it depends on small things, like if you loading the game from Disc or hard drive... But I notticed the difference in PS2 is tremendous, which is expected since playstation 2 is notorious for having a more complex architecture, compared to others from same generation. Some games tend to be "heavier" on the system. The difference in real game time I see between my gameplay and Falcos is really big, not only in loadings screens but also in transitions from a cutscene to other between stages, the transitions take seconds to disappear, appear, etc It seems anything that is not in game time takes extra seconds on ps2. I use a PS2 loading from a disc. I don't know if it can be fixed with a hard disk mod, but anyway I'm not buying a fat ps2 with hd mod any sooner...

Well, I think I have a good time for what it is anyway, and I might take a break for a while =) But I'm looking forward to watch your runs =)