[TAS] MM2 Even Item Distribution Route Mockup
Did you know that Kitamura-san (one of the creators of Mega Man) is active on Twitter? It's true! @ak_blueprints. He shared that originally, the Items were not going to be tied to specific bosses, but given out EVERY 2 STAGES. After all, Dr. Light is supposedly inventing them back home, right? You don't find them IN the stages. Feel free to not believe me, but I've wondered this in the past, so it was really fascinating to hear him say that.
Anyway, my mind naturally got to work imagining how the Any% speedrun would be affected. This is the route I came up with:
FA QM HB WC
To be clear, that means:
Flash, Air: No items
Quick, Metal: Item 1
Heat, Bubble: Item 1+2
Wood, Crash: Item 1+2+3
This video is a SPLICED demonstration of how that would look. I was able to pull most of it from Any% and Buster Only, but I had to TAS 1½ stages, those being Heat and the second half of Metal. Skip to 6:26 and 7:54 if you want to see those. Some of the transitions may be a little jarring, but I'm OK with that. It's a segmented TAS (which is weird because a TAS is already the limit of a segmented speedrun as segment length approaches 0...)
Here's the reasoning behind this route.
We need to do two stages without Items. Flash is an obvious contender, but what about #2? At first I thought Bubble, since you can get the zip with pausefalls, but that won't work for several reasons:
1. There's a substantial Item 2 zip
2. The Buster-only boss fight is much slower
3. Without Metal Blades, we can't end the fight in the ceiling and get TAS Wood.
So, I settled on Air. Fast Air is only 12 seconds. There's no way that can compete with a good zip.
So now we have Item 1 unlocked, but let's consider how Item 2 and 3 will be used.
Item 2:
Bubble spike zip,
PROBABLY faster than a dinky Item 1 strat for the yokus in Heat.
Speeds up the final segment of Metal
Used at the tail end of the Clash Crime
Item 3:
Could potentially speed up the second zip in Heat (i.e. the vanilla one you're used to)
However, H is necessary* for the crazy delay scrolls in Wood, so we can't put that off. And remember that Wood has to directly follow Bubble.
Quick is totally fine with just Item 1, and Metal can miss out on the Item 2 ride; the Heat one seems better.
From here, the route pretty much clicks into place.
FA QM HB WC
There is one potential variant that I may try someday:
FA QM BW CH
This puts Heat later so we can use Bubble's power to defeat Heatman, as well as get that rare Item 3 zip setup.
However, it takes away the fast death in Wood. And this is assuming that the Wood delay scrolls are POSSIBLE without Atomic Fire, it's just used as a convenience to avoid extra menuing.
Now, how about RTA? Well, since you aren't doing TAS Wood, and you DO need Item 3 for Crash, the best option would be to just swap Bubble and Heat:
FA QM BH WC
Poor Metal still doesn't get his precious Item 2 ride, but that's just the way it is. You will need to jump over the blockies with Item 1 instead of walking through them like TAS does.
Even if you don't fuck with the spike zip in Bubble, it still doesn't really make sense to put Metal in the Item 2 block. I guess you could do super early Wood:
FA QW MB HC