Q: What's your PB?
A: 1:56:50

Q: What's WR?
A: 1:56:47

Q: Wow that's so close to WR!
A: Tell me about it.

Q: Why are your PB splits empty?
A: My PB was on the old, Early Brawly route, so the splits for early game are useless on the new route. The routes basically sync up again at Winona, so that's when I start comparing to PB again.

Q: What is "Route" on your splits?
A: These are Machwing's splits from his near miss 1:56 on this route. He very tragically dies to the 3% Aerial Ace crit on champ in his run. The final time I got by adding my last two splits to his Drake split.

Q: What category is this?
A: Any% Glitchless

Q: What is the new route?
A: Sapphire was rerouted by pokeguy and others to delay Brawly until after Flannery, like in Emerald. This ends up saving time due to fighting fewer optionals in the early game, and removes a major run killer in early Brawly.

Q: What is that beeping?
A: This run uses RNG manipulation, which involves saving and soft resetting the game to set the RNG value to a known initial state. We can then do specific inputs on specific frames to get known outcomes. The windows to get good outcomes varies from 1 to 10 frames across the various manips, so we use a metronome timer (called Flowtimer, named for the developer Stringflow) to help time these tight frame windows.

Q: Doesn't using Flowtimer make this a Tool Assisted speedrun?
A: Not any more than using LiveSplit or Twitch chat does. "Tool Assisted Speedrun" is a bad name for what TAS's actually are, but I'm not going to get into that here.

Q: What RNG manipulations are done in the run?
A: Mudkip manip to get very good stats and extend into no encounters until the Rival 1 fight, Wingull manip to encounter and catch a Wingull and extend into a good Aqua Pooch fight, Abra manip to encounter and catch an Abra, and Kyogre manip to catch a Kyogre with very good stats.

Q: Wait why is this allowed in Glitchless?
A: Because Glitchless only bans glitches and not things that are not glitches.

Q: ...
A: Ok fine I'll give a real answer, but I warn you it will be wordy. Many a video and debate has been had over what a "glitch" is in a video game, and none of them have ever been productive. Trying to precisely define the word "glitch" using language is a fool's errand because it is basically impossible to unambiguously define any noun in any language (I challenge you to unambiguously come up with an English language definition for the word "table" that includes all objects with the quality "table" and excludes all objects that lack the quality "table"). This is a linguistic and philosophical issue, and not something that is relevant for defining what is allowed in a speedrun category. The category of "Glitchless" exists in these games to require speedrunners to beat the game "normally", i.e. collect pokemon, finish the main story, beat all 8 gyms and the elite four, etc. The line we choose to draw to achieve this goal is to ban any form of memory corruption or out of bounds memory access (i.e. accessing or changing any value in memory that you are not supposed to have access to). RNG manipulation exploits how random values are generated in this game, since the game always sets the seed to the same value when soft resetting the game. This does not fuck with memory in any way, so it is allowed.

Q: I still think that's a glitch and you shouldn't do it.
A: I don't care.

Q: What are the mudkip stats?
A: 24/27/10/31/31/30 Naughty (+atk, -spdef)

Q: What is extended Aqua Pooch manip?
A: It was known for a long time that we could keep the RNG manipulation going after we caught Wingull, and recently Machwing put in an absolute fuckton of work to map out a series of inputs to get a good Aqua pooch fight. It is now very common to get 5 turn, 4 turn, or even 3 turn fights, removing yet another early game run killer if you have the skill to extend the manip.

Q: Why do you get an Abra?
A: You don't get access to Fly in this game until after you beat the 6th gym, so having Teleport as a pseudo-fly is very useful for quickly traversing the map. We use Mawville as our main teleport hub is it is very central to the western part of the map where you spend your time before getting Fly.

Q: How does RNG work in this game?
A: The seed is always set to the same value when soft resetting, and RNG advances by one step every frame from boot. If you are in a battle, this increases to two steps per frame. There are other ways for RNG to advance, but these are all accounted for in routing to never be relevant during a manipulation.

Q: Why does stepcount matter?
A: The one other thing that affects RNG that is relevant to manipulations is friendship checks. Every 128 steps, each pokemon in your party is 50% likely to gain 1 point in friendship. This advances RNG by one step for every pokemon in your party when this happens. If this check happens in the middle of an RNG manip, we need it to happen at the same spot every time to get consistent results. This happens during Wingull manip, so our movement must be perfect up until this manip (about 10 mins into the run). This ends up not happening during Abra manip, and we can save one tile away from the Kyogre trigger so it will never happen there either.

Q: How do I beat Tate and Liza?
A: With lots of practice and dedication. The difficulty in this fight is that you cannot use X items on partner pokemon like you can in gens 6+, and both Solrock and Lunatone are faster than you and speedtied with each other, so the possible game states for this fight branch very quickly. The general strategy in this fight is to X Speed Swampert turn 1, kill Solrock with Surf + Dive, then finish off Lunatone. The AI is somewhat predictable in that if it sees a kill with one of its damaging moves, it will always go for that damaging move. This is preferable as the non-damaging moves are all very scary, and we can avoid dying by just healing when we are in kill range. The problem is that the AI flips a coin to decide which pokemon it will target.