Pokemon HeartGold Any% - FAQ This is a speedrun by the way Q: What are you playing on, is it an emulator? A: I play on Nintendo DS with a capture card installed. Q: What's your PB? A: 1:59:13 Q: What is your goal? A: PB, maybe WR Q: Why HeartGold? A: Since I'm doing Radio Manip, some frames are solved faster based on version. It just so happens that HG has more of these faster solves than SS (3 to 0 advantages in the common range of frames, 8 to 5 on the later frames). There are no other differences that are relevant to this route, everything will work the same on SoulSilver. Q: What is Any%? A: Beating the game (beating Red), glitches allowed. Q: What glitches are in this game? A: Yes, there is tweaking, which saves a significant portion (1.5 hours, about 45% of glitchless) of the game by cutting out from getting Surf to Tohjo Falls, and the first 7 Kanto gym leaders if you are doing glitched speedruns. Q: Why do you name yourself and the pokemon you catch one character? A: Because it's faster to name them one character for text purposes. Q: Why did you choose the girl instead of the boy? Are you that kind of incel gamer? A: No, the girl is faster by 8ish seconds because Lyra’s cutscene in the catching tutorial is silly. Q: Why do you choose Cyndaquil? A: I use Cyndaquil because it is the fastest until Raikou. Q: How do you know that you're getting x? How do you know that x is not gonna happen? A: It's all part of the RNG Manip. I know what will happen as long as I do movement correctly. Q: Why is your movement so weird? A: It's because I'm manipulating RNG to get what I want. Q: Why are you resetting so early? A: Because I messed up RNG. Q: Couldn't you have just taken the death and fought x again? A: No. Q: Blue and Red? wtf?? A: Blue and Red is so hard without knowing what's going to happen (Blue can be done manipless but on Red there is no shot). Because it's so bad, we manipulate the battle RNG for the final two fights. So you'll see some cracked out fights on Red and Blue that you will normally never be able to pull off without manip, because you would never go for those risks without knowing for certain what outcomes you'll get. Q: What are Cyndaquil's and Raikou's stats? Cyndaquil: 4/23/21/28/5/31 Rash Raikou: 16/4/22/31/17/4 Rash Q: What else do you use/catch? A: I catch a Sentret. - Sentret gets Cut, Surf. - That's it! No Kenya, you can't use Fly unless you beat Chuck, which is overall ~2 minutes slower: https://pastebin.com/tbzBUfai Q: What are the hardest fights in the game? A: Everything. Elder Li, Falkner, and Bugsy are still there. Rival 2 is much harder to win if you get errant Water Guns because you don't buy Super Potions. Whitney and Rival 3 are 2x must hit Fire Blasts, Lance is 6x must hit 93% Thunders. The 3 Aces on Route 26, Rival, and Elite Four (Karen especially) are all bosses too, where you have to hit many raw Thunders, or even raw Thunders through Double Team. And you have little to no healing for most of this section too. Luckily, Blue and Red are RNG manipulated, so I'm not worried about losing to them, but rather hitting the manip successfully for them. Q: Where are the biggest timesaves in the run? A: First of all, faster route developed by March. Revolves around doing 2 Goldenrod shops, which is faster than my PB route, almost as fast as WR route that skips Fire Blast altogether, but more consistent. No Whitney identifiers, just hit 2 Fire Blasts. No encounter manip, just radio manip. Extended to Goldenrod w/o Repel use is required to make the money route work. PB dropped manip before Union Cave, so lost time to spinners and Repels (using and buying them). Route 26 fights can be better. I forgot to heal paralysis before Rival. E4 was alright but improvable (missed Doom, para'd by Plume). 4 tweak retries in the run total (1 NBT2, 3 Rt8), and of course there's a wide range of timesave/timeloss on Blue and Red that might go in my favor.