Wii U VC TMC FAQ

Wii U VC FAQ

Why are you playing on Wii U VC now?
The Wii U VC version is estimated to be around 24 seconds faster ("exact" timing will be finished soon), and since I have a Wii U, there's no reason for me not to play on the faster version.

Where does the time save come from?
Since VC is basically just a bad emulator, saving is a lot faster on the Wii U. Every time you save, the Wii U saves about 2 seconds over GameBoy Player, and there are 10 save+quits in the current route. Some loading zones are also a little bit faster, which is where the other few seconds come from. Interestingly, the intro as well as staircase loadings are actually a tiny bit slower on the Wii U, so it loses some time to those.

So what about home menu buffering?
As it stands, I won't be using home menu buffering in runs. The community seems very devided on that topic, and I'm not sure if we're getting to a conclusion anytime soon. Of course, I will grind a run with bracelets skip regardless after I get a time I am satisfied with.

Why didn't you run on Wii U before?
We actually never had access to the Japanese TMC ROM until just recently. We needed someone with a Japanese Wii U to buy the game from the Japanese e-shop to get the actual ROM, which took quite a while.

What controller are you using now?
I'm using the Wii U Pro Controller now, which has a very sensitive control stick it seems. Menuing is a lot harder with it and my movement is a bit worse than usual. It will take some time to get used to this one, since I'll have to get used to switching to the d-pad for menuning as well. I also always accidentally press the power button instead of the start button because the start button on the GC controller is more in the middle instead of in the right heh

Is the time save significant?
Well, 24 seconds are 24 seconds, of course. But in an almost 2 hour run like TMC, where even the first half of the game is still unoptimized (can be more than 30 seconds faster at least) and the second half consists of so many inconsistent time savers, I would say the time save doesn't really matter much.
Good movement in this game is super difficult, even just in the first 20 minutes you will have so many small movement errors that, if you combine the time losses from them, lose you sooo much time. Whether it is missing a roll, rolling into a wall accidentally, falling into the water, equipping the wrong item, getting blocked by enemies so you have to choose roll patterns that are a bit slower, there are so many things in this game that lose you a little bit of time and therefore there will always be a lot of time to save basically everywhere.
The second half of the game is a lot worse, you can lose more than a minute to bosses alone if they decide to be a bit trolly.
Bosses aside, the Flipperless Route consists of 2 house OGs that lose you a bunch of time if you fail them, there are 2 cutscene OGs that would save you more than 2 minutes combined, and Palace of Winds as well as Dark Hyrule Castle are super difficult to do well in general.
Because of these reasons, I highly doubt that the game will ever be at the point where the 24 second time save is going to hurt the competition for this game.
Until the game is super optimized, which honestly will require some serious dedication from the runners, it won't make sense to split the leaderboards either. If you want to compete for World Record and have to run on a slower version, you can still 100% get there despite the time difference. There is still so much time to save in this game that it really doesn't matter.

So what would a good time be?
Well, it honestly is very hard to say. Fir3turtle has had ~1:45:30 pace runs without getting any of the inconsistent tricks, so with them a 1:43 if not a 1:42 is definitely possible. Runners of other games have shown so often that even if you think a game is optimized, there's still so much time so save during the whole run, so I wouldn't be surprised if we ever saw a 1:41 or 1:40 on the leaderboards. While we've had some grinding sessions for this game from different runners, no one has really tried to grind out a super good run yet, so it's really hard to say what is actually achievable in this game.