User:TheOthin

I suppose it's about time I made one of these. I'm TheOthin, a 16 year old male living in Pennsylvania. I first came to this wiki towards the end of 2010, watching it constantly to keep up with any new pre-release information about Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. I found that my obsessive tendencies fit incredibly well with editing a wiki like this one, and so I stuck around, adding or correcting things whenever possible.

For my role here, I've found myself becoming a bit of a specialist in sequence breaking information, or at least the only one here who really seems to care about it. I attribute this to my background with playing the Metroid series, games now known well for their numerous instances of sequence breaking and the speedruns that result from abusing these sequence breaks. Through this wiki, I learned about the Retreat glitch in the first two Golden Sun games, and the Endless Wall glitch in Dark Dawn, both of which I've enjoyed making use of. I've been working on testing out implications of the two glitches in their respective games and adding information to relevant articles, although I haven't been doing that much lately. Learning about the implications of the Retreat glitch, in particular, I worked with a few other people on Speed Demos Archive to find ways to use it for speedruns of the GBA games. I focused mostly on The Lost Age, and in the process, it became my favorite video game. Unfortunately, interest in the project fizzled out after a while... The discussion thread on SDA still seems to have been abandoned, but writing this has reminded me to return to it. I started a new file shortly after writing this, and I think I'll keep notes on it here.

Currently, there are no speedruns of any Golden Sun game on SDA. This means, hypothetically, that anyone could submit any recorded run and claim it as the world record. However, SDA tends to only accept runs that are less than 7 hours long, although there are exceptions. Someone on Youtube has posted the last segment of a speedrun of The Lost Age, apparently completing it in 7:06 with almost all of the Djinn and characters around LV30. It's impossible to verify without seeing the rest of the run, and I don't know what tricks they may have used, but I don't think getting that many Djinn and levels that high is the fastest way to complete the game. Right now, I think 6:30 is a reasonable goal; I don't plan on submitting anything unless it's that time or less.

Anyway, I'm not recording my current run, but I'm keeping track of the times I get and strategies I use. I use sanctum warping and the Retreat glitch heavily throughout the run, at least the early parts I've done before. Farthest I've reached was the Serpent boss in Gaia Rock, which proved problematic with the low levels resulting from avoiding almost all random battles, but I'm sure it's doable. I don't know of much in the way of sequence breaks past the first few dungeons, so that's going to be another thing to search for.

Segment 1: Venus Lighthouse - Idejima

Standard stuff. I shorten the characters' names to one letter to make text mentioning them scroll faster (even though it annoys me), try to get through text as fast as I can, avoid mistakes, and navigate menus quickly to use Flare on everything as fast as possible, then save the moment I can on Idejima. I don't know about anything else that can be done here to make it faster, although I'm sure I didn't do things perfectly. Looking at the blog or something associated with the Youtube run, it seems their first save is at the same time, at least to the minute, so my time can't be too bad so far, at least, assuming they saved in the same place. If they did, it indicates they at least knew about sanctum warps, but they don't seem to save often throughout the rest of the run, so they can't have been using them as best as they could, and the same goes for save Retreat glitching. The blog's all in Japanese, so I don't know anything else they're saying about it or if there are any links to other segments anywhere... more reason for me to find a working Japanese language pack.

Time: 0:11

Segment 2: Daila sanctum warp - Kandorean Temple

I use a sanctum warp while loading the file to skip the scenes on Idejima and go straight to Daila, then head for Kandorean Temple, meeting Echo along the way. Once I get to the end of the second room in Kandorean Temple, I burn through Felix's PP with Move to get it below 6, to use the Retreat glitch. I use Retreat with the shortcut with insufficient PP, activating the glitch, then go back up the stairs, being placed at the bottom of the stairs to the last room, with the Chestbeaters, skipping most of the dungeon. Rather than advancing, I go back to the room before it, and activate the Retreat glitch again before crossing the rope with the steam that knocks you off. I allow myself to be knocked off the rope, this time being placed in the room with Master Poi, where I receive the Lash Pebble without having to fight the Chestbeaters or go through the rest of the dungeon. To get Fog without fighting the Chestbeaters, I drop down and go through the first room of the dungeon again, then Retreat warp to the second-to-last room again. There, I defeat Fog, then save in preparation to sanctum warp again. I'm sure there are faster ways to do a lot of these things, and all things considered, I don't even know if the Chestbeater skip is worth it compared to getting a perfect fight (or getting Fog, for that matter), but I'm not worrying about details like those at this stage.

Time: 0:19