Pokemon Sapphire Glitchless FAQ

Pokemon Sapphire Version
Any% Glitchless FAQ
February 2018

Q: What are you doing?

A: Attempting to beat the Champion in Pokemon Sapphire as fast as possible without glitches.

Q: What's your PB?

A: 2:02:40.

Q: What's the world record?

A: 2:00:59 by Exarion.

Q: That's not what speedrun.com says.

A: My current PB isn't posted on SR.com because I'm not happy with it. Exarion probably feels similarly about his.

Q: What's your goal?

A: 1:59:xx.

Q: Why did you save and reset?

A: RNG manipulation. At the start of the run I will reset for a Naughty Mudkip with great IVs, and attempt to perform a specific movement pattern to get no encounters to the first rival fight. Shortly after, I will save and reset to manipulate a Wingull encounter with a perfect catch. Near the end of the run, I will reset for a Kyogre with good stats. If the run is really good, I will use the Master Ball. If it could use some extra timesave, I will be skipping Master Ball and using a yolo Net Ball manipulation instead.

Q: What killed the run?

A: Likely any of the following: Petalburg Woods Pooch, Rustboro Geodude, Roxanne, Brawly, Museum Zubat confusion hax, Rival 2 miss/critical, Cooltrainer Brooke, Archie 1, Flannery, Norman, Winona, Liza and Tate, Kyogre manip failure.

In addition, if I make a movement mistake, I could hit any number of trainers, and depending on how long I have been playing, I may or may not reset or just continue the run for practice/PB's sake.

Q: Why no mic?

A: This run will require my utmost focus and attention if I'm going to achieve my goal. I sometimes have a tendency to get distracted by chat, and with just one big mistake, the rest of the run can easily go downhill. I need to not just be able to play well on good runs, but also be able to carry on strong after mistakes, because even if sub-2 is dead, I may still be able to PB, and can benefit from a practice run no matter what. I will generally have mic on during the early game, but shut it off if I am able to make it past Wattson. I will also minimize chat. I encourage people to watch and chat amongst themselves anyway, as I think this is a highly entertaining run once it gets moving, but I want to be able to provide quality gameplay, and that means I can't lose concentration and start making stupid mistakes.

Q: Isn't this game awful?

A: I actually really like the game, and part of why no mic is often better is because otherwise all I will be talking about is how much I hate it, and no one needs to listen to that. It's one of my favorite games of all time and has become tremendously important to me over the past few years, so I am really committed to reaching my goal. What it comes down to is that this game is so tough to grind, because it requires a high level of executional precision as well as mental grit to continue through endless resets over which you have no control. Where in other Pokemon games, bad RNG means big timeloss that you can choose to continue playing through for practice's sake, in Sapphire, bad RNG means almost certain death, which means you rarely get to complete even bad runs. I may get as few as 1-2 runs past Wattson per 8 hr stream if the luck is bad enough.