there is also another "safe strat", where if you run far enough away from the crab, it turns off its AI for a while, but honestly that is pretty much obsolete at this point with the double damage exploit. Could still be useful for PS2 I guess.
Easy, you save and relaunch the game for double damage, then you aim and time your shots just right, so they eat the crabs shots. You will see in my run, which I will submit now ;)
Good to finally get a leaderboard for this game. I actually applied for it yesterday, as I did my first real runs then, but I see you got there ahead of me ^^
I was part of a routing competition for the game back in 2018, and though I did do one rta run back then, it was more of a proof of concept run, and I never shared it outside the people on my team. (the competition had us make segmented runs of the game) But I always knew I wanted to come back to the game at some point :)
We were actually almost able to completely break the game in half, as we found a way to enter the volcano early, but it turns out, that even if you can get in and defeat the boss without having to pick up the three seals, you will not be awarded with the treasure unless the game registers you having picked up the seals.
I have made an autosplitter for the game, which it would be great to get a second person to test out, as these things sometimes works on one persons machine, but not on another's. (I will share it later in a separate post)
Of course I don't know what version of the game you run/are looking to run. I'm running the PC version exclusively, but I know one guy on youtube already has some runs of the PS2 version uploaded. On that topic, I think the two versions probably need separate sections, as I recently discovered a glitch that involves closing and reopening the game to gain double damage temporarily, which likely won't be possible on the PS2.
Anyway, it's always great to see that people are interested in this game and hopefully we can get a little community going!