Pokemon Yellow FAQ (Feb. 2017)

Pokemon Yellow FAQ (March 2017)

Q: What are you trying to do?
A: Beat Pokemon Yellow as quickly as possible without using glitches.

Q: What are you playing on?
A: A GameCube using a GameBoy Player.

Q: What is the world record?
A: 1:55:49 by Gunnermaniac3.

Q: Why are you starting over?
A: Probably because my Nidoran died or I made a major mistake. These things lose too much time.

Q: Why do you save and reset in the middle of the run?
A: This is RNG manipulation. The game almost always starts from the same RNG seed when you hard reset after a save. You can buffer every input from reset to file select, allowing you to frame perfectly load your game. As long as you continue to be frame perfect, you'll get the same RNG. So what you can manipulate depends on how easily you can be frame perfect. Movement is extremely easy to do frame perfectly, so encounters are manipulated whenever it is worth the 20 seconds it takes to save and reset. Battles require too many precise inputs to do frame perfectly.

Q: When is it worth manipulating encounters?
A: Route 2 (catch a nearly perfect Lv. 6 Nidoran in the same spot every time), Viridian Forest (manipulate a single Pidgey encounter between the second Bug Catcher and the third) and Mt. Moon (manipulate no encounters on 1F and B2F). The game's RNG becomes inconsistent over time, so a full Mt. Moon manip might not be possible.

Q: How much time does the manipulation save?
A: It's tough to say, since runs before RNG manipulation just reset for good Nidorans and encounter luck. A good run with RNG manip will exit Mt. Moon at about the same time as a good run without it. But these good starts will happen nearly every run with manip, whereas they often took weeks to achieve without it. More good starts means more time-saving risks can be taken without fear of losing a valuable run. All things considered, I'd estimate 2 minutes.

Q: What stats does this nearly perfect Nidoran have?
A: 8-13 HP, 15 Attack, 9-11 Defense, 14 Speed and 13-15 Special. The HP, Defense and Special vary based on what frame you saved on, but the differences are minor.

Q: How are you catching the Nidoran from full HP almost every time?
A: By buffering all of the inputs before the catch. The only difficult buffers are the initial text box ("Wild Nidoran-M appeared!") and moving the cursor from FIGHT to ITEM. Both are 4-frame windows. I also catch Pidgey this way.

Q: What do the letters next to your splits mean?
A: This is a grading system for the splits in my PB. A means amazing, B means bad, C means crap, D means disaster and F means fuck, time to reset. I got this idea from Werster, who got it from another streamer.

Q: Why are you playing Yellow? Isn't it a terrible speedrun?
A: I haven't done a run with RNG manipulation yet, and the route has some other new strats that I'd like to try.

Q: What is your goal time?
A: WR WR WR WR WR WR WR WR WR (seriously, the manip makes WR free, so might as well go for it).