My xmas miracle came early, SMB2 mastery
What a relief this is. It's just taken so damn long to actually do it. The fact it happened on xmas makes it that much more entertaining.
I've owned SMB2 for FDS for about 2 years or so now, a bit more perhaps. After playing through the entire game 8 times to unlock the bonus worlds and beating those, I set out to clear the game perfectly. First I learned the shortest route with warps. It wasn't long until I beat it this way without dying. Then of course the skeptics weren't happy. I was omitting over half the game with warps. That's quite true. So it was time to learn it for real. No more warps. For good measure, I self-banned the use of mushrooms as well. Relying on mushrooms to deliberately take damage to skip something dangerous is pitiful so such tactics were not acceptable in my play. I do use 2 stars however. It just feels ok to me to use them. The game is hard enough as it is without mushrooms or mistakes!
I think in 2011 I was able to clear the game without using a continue. In early 2012 I had a heartbreaking run where an extremely rare mistake occurred in 5-2 causing me to die only 1 time due to a goddamn pakkun flower. I've had taken breaks from this game for as long as 2 or 3 months straight without practice, sometimes feeling burned out, particularly disappointed with being as close as possible without actually reaching the ultimate goal. I estimate I've beaten SMB2 somewhere around 150 times now, almost every single run is without continue. I have more 1,2,3,4 death runs than I'd care to count.
I played a bit late last night, and around 3:15am (already xmas) I touched the axe of 8-4 and finally, I got it. No deaths. I spent the whole game's FDS FM-synth enhanced ending cheering and doing stupid shit because this hell is over. It irritates me some bullshit went down in 6-3 causing me to take a mushroom against my will, so I quickly found the earliest place where I could get hit by an enemy to get rid of the powerup. I meant to touch the nokonoko walking on the bridge but a fish flew into me so that was fine. I clearly never took advantage of the powerup and discarded it ASAP, and I still never died; the mushroom ban is my own choice and has nothing to do with not dying so I guess it shouldn't bother me much? Had some really fucking scary moments. 7-2 I nearly got killed by that asshole jugemu. I think it was 7-4 where I got so close to Koopa he nearly took my head off. XD
My computer is old and I can't afford to build a brand new one right now so my recording framerate sadly is not very high, but thankfully it's still understandable what's going on. Normally I would never advertise myself in such a way but SMB2 perfection is so fucking rare, hell I don't know if anybody has done it on tape before at all, so I figured this one is worth sharing. Sadly not only do I not know if anybody can beat this game perfectly, but I know nobody who even owns the game on FDS to begin with. I've seen Japanese players before but they're always on the SFC port and almost always emulating... and always absolutely terrible at the game. Once you know the levels the game is not really that hard to beat normally.
My recording is on my Japanese broadcasting channel. Here's the link to the tape.
Sure I got counterstop runs on Akumajou Densetsu and Contra which were grueling tasks too but SMB2 is definitely by far the toughest goddamn challenge I ever set out to do and cleared. (I doubt I'll forget Contra. 5am, Loop 9's final boss, no more 1UPs. I absolutely had to kill the boss to get the score to max out or I just wasted 4 hours in failure. But I did it. That was sick shit too. And I never ever want to do it again. XD)
SMB2 is special in my eyes because of its history and it's exclusive to FDS. This is my personal payback to 80s Nintendo who thought non-Japanese people cannot play such a "hard" game. Fuck you, yes I can. And I did. I doubt even Miyamoto expected anybody would ever beat the game no-miss. ・ω・
By the way my elevator glitch display in Fantasy World is a signature of mine. I always do that every single time I play 9-1. Once Fantasy World loops, well the only way to break the loop is to die so the suicide is absolutely intentional to force the game to end and display the game over screen. Finally after all these attempts I can accept the game's statement "You're a super player!" as truth. =)
I haven't decided about Bonus Worlds. Don't even ask me...
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Originally Posted by joshnickerson
