Hi guys! It's time for me to show you a few aspects of WBIII that fall outside of normal play. To begin:
SECRETS:
OK, so I'm starting with my endgame password from the main run. I don't get to start with all my health and I've lost most of my magic, but for some reason I have a heap of extra cash. I'm not really sure what that's about. Possibly your extra magic gets converted to money? Could've saved myself some grinding time using that. Oh well. The important thing is I still have all my stones. I take them up to the floating platform next to the tower in town and something interesting happens:
! Turns out there are a bunch of secret doors in town that take you just outside of each boss door. You can only open them if you've got 99 charm stones. I could've saved myself the effort of going through the last stage! In fact, if I'd really wanted to I could've ground for charm stones as Lizard-Man and skipped straight to the final boss. Beating it would be another matter, of course. I think it'd be possible, but luck would have to go my way.
Here are the locations of the other doors. Pretty neat, huh? It's kind of funny, actually, because ordinarily if you make your way back to a boss room after beating it then you just get taken to where you'd come out after the fight without having the fight first. I wonder if having 99 charm stones makes all the bosses come back to life?
To find out, I head back towards the mummy dragon's lair. I stop by the sphinx treasure room on the way, because I know that restoring from password refills all the treasure chests in the game (something I could've used to save grinding time, by the way). While there I accidentally find out something I actually didn't know about:
There's a hidden door above the roof of the sphinx room! In fact it turns out that by pressing up while standing anywhere along those roof blocks you can open a door to the end of the catacombs. Man, I'm glad I found that before making my way through the whole pyramid yet again. Anyway, having reached the end of Lizard-Man's stage I charge through the boss door to find out if it's in there. It is not. Ah well. Time for the next secret. I hit reset, and enter a password I know by heart:
What what what?! Yes, this nifty password (WE5T 0NE 0000 000, the name of the game's developer) starts you off in town in HU-MAN form with a full set of equipment, 99 stones, the apparent maximum amount of magic you can get from a password, all the life hearts, and even a key! It's pretty sweet. Unfortunately the human form, aside from having maxed stats, isn't actually all that useful. Which brings me to the next section of this update:
GLECRETS:
Now, I'm not sure if this is something the developers intended for you to be able to do or if it's a straight-up glitch. There's speculation on the internet that it was a debug feature that got left in. Anyway, what you do is equip the Tasmanian sword, as I've done. Then you hold down button 2 on controller two, jump, and attack while in the air:
Pretty neat, huh? This is way faster than changing in the transformation rooms, plus you can do it anywhere, plus it lets you change to any form regardless of which dragons you've defeated (it's the only way to get back to HU-MAN after changing away in game. If you use a transformation room after WE5T 0NE you can get to any animal form, but not back to normal). Just like the 99 stone doors, it's a way to sequence break: you can get the Tasmanian sword once you've reached Piranha-Man form and gotten the Thunder Saber by entering Lion-Man's stage as Mouse-Man. Then you can change to Hawk-Man and head straight to the final stage.
Here's another equipment-based glitch that some say might be a debug thing left in accidentally. I think it's just a glitch, but who knows? Anyway, you just equip the magic saber along with the top right item in each other screen (Knight shield, Goblin mail, and Fire ball), then swing your sword:
Hey presto! Blocks from nowhere! Normally you can only create blocks on top of star blocks, which only exist in two rooms making the mechanic pretty pointless. With this glitch you can make them wherever you like. There are a few places you can access early using this (you could bridge the gap over to the Dragon's Castle and get the legendary gear before Hawk-Man, for example), and it's pretty useful in combination with the next glitch for getting places you aren't supposed to be.
I switch to the thunder saber to bust out of the prison I've created for myself.
I switch back to the magical saber but enequip my fireballs just to confirm that you need them equipped for this to work. Looks like you do. Anyway, that's the last of the things that I think could maybe have been included on purpose. Time for out and out
GLITCHES:
So if you stand under something, jump, and swing your sword at just the right time, you'll be knocked back slightly. The game's environments are all fit to a grid of little squares, and this pushes you back in line with the square behind you. Dunno why it happens, but it does. What makes it interesting is what happens when there are solid blocks behind you when you do it:
Yowza! You get pushed back through the wall and keep going until your passage is unobstructed. The graphics get all messed up, but the level geometry remains intact. You just can't see it. Scrolling the glitchy bit off screen and coming back fixes things. This is most easily done with HU-MAN, but I'm pretty sure I've done it at least once or twice in other forms. I don't have any evidence of that, though. There's a similar trick with MOUSE-MAN if you use the Tasmanian sword to transorm into PIRANHA-MAN while standing in a space only one block high, which I'll be demonstrating a little bit later. For now, here's a different PIRANHA-MAN trick. Remember how HAWK-MAN can gain height without using the jump button by turning back and forth? The same thing happens with PM, though it's not as pronounced and is much more difficult to keep going. It's also more interesting, though:
Ordinarily, if you reach the surface of the water you're swimming in, you'll jump out of it. If you're gaining height without the jump button, though, you'll keep swimming out into the air. It's really tricky, at least for me, so this little .gif is all I've got to show of it. If I were better at it, I'd be able to swim up to the screen above and get a chest that ordinarily only HAWK-MAN can reach. Alternatively, I could swim out of the ocean off to the right of here and up to the Dragon's Castle to get the legendary gear.
So, the Hades Armor. You might remember me saying it refills your health when you die while wearing it? Here's a demonstration of its normal operation:
As you can see, you get all your health back, but when you go into the menu you find that your armor is gone. A small price to pay if you're facing the final boss at the time, of course, but as it turns out going into the menu is just as important as losing your health for making the armor disappear. Let me demonstrate by taking LIZARD-MAN up against the final boss wearing the Hades Armor:
I actually find it's a much easier fight with LIZARD-MAN than it is with HAWK-MAN, aside from the tiny amount of damage you do (note that I've got the Legendary sword equipped) and the huge amount of damage you take (but I did equip the worst shield so I'd die more quickly). Scoring hits is easier with the projectile attack, and being able to duck is occasionally very helpful. Anyway, what I want you to notice in that .gif is that the Hades armor activated twice: it turns out that it doesn't actually disappear from your inventory until you activate the menu. And since you can't get into the menu during boss fights (normally it's reached with the pause button, but against bosses the pause button just freezes the screen until you hit it again), if you equip it against a boss you can't lose. In normal play, it's only accessible to HAWK-MAN, so it's most useful for cheesing the Vampier Dragon.
So, there are the secrets and glitches. Now let's try applying them. Probably the thing you most want to figure out in this kind of game is stuff that lets you sequence break, right? I've mentioned a few things already, but let's take a look at things that can be skipped:
SEQUENCE BREAKS:
If you want to get through the game having seen as little of it as possible (but with no regard for time wasted), what you want to do is grind for charm stones against the seaside enemies. As LIZARD-MAN, start in town, go through the sewer to the sea, and kill crabs until you've got 99 charm stones. This'll take approximately forever, but you'll get there eventually. You need to go to the end of the area to pick up the key to unlock the tower, and then you can take the hidden door to the Vampier Dragon. With some luck (you'd need to pull it off without taking any hits), you'll be able to beat the dragon and finish the game having skipped pretty much all of it. This might be the way to go for a tool-assisted speed run, if you were able to manipulate the drops so you got a stone every time.
Alternatively, you can skip most of LION-MAN's stage and all of PIRANHA-MAN's by going underground as MOUSE-MAN (after you get the Thunder saber), picking up the Tasmanian sword, and using it to transform into HAWK-MAN.
There are a few places you can get to early with the Magical saber glitch (all the components are available once you've reached PIRANHA-MAN): You can cross to the Dragon's Castle:
I had thought you'd be able to get the thunder saber early by bypassing the swimming area, but you can't get the magical saber without the thunder saber, so no dice. I also thought maybe you could climb up to reach HAWK-MAN's stage, but it was not to be:
I've also tried that in other forms, but best as I can tell it's impossible to place a block and land on it when you jump up from one screen to the next. There is another approach, though:
If you manage to go across from the tower in town, you won't go off screen and so your blocks won't disappear. Unfortunately, when you make blocks you have to stand on them to make the next one, so you'll tend to go upwards and will eventually go reach the top of the screen and be unable to proceed. Unless you're LION-MAN. His swing hits below his feet, so it's possible to create a straight bridge if you destroy all the blocks he makes except for the lower one:
It's uh, harder than it looks. I got there eventually:
And by "got there", I mean I created the first block of the bridge. Do that about fifty more times, and you're there. I don't have the patience for it, I'm afraid. I actually think it would then be impossible to clear HAWK-MAN's stage, since you can't fly. It is possible to create blocks and climb that way, but I think you'd run into the same problem I had trying to climb to the door: you'd have to jump up screens, and I think you'd fall back down without reaching ground level on some of them.
How about something that might actually work? MOUSE-MAN has access to LION-MAN's stage. Can he complete it? To find out I sent him in via the back door in town, after arming him with the Legendary sword and 99 shots of lighning magic, just in case:
As you can see, I wasn't able to jump high enough to hit the Dragon. So I started using my magic. Unfortunately, the most damage I could do was one hit point, and sometimes not even that. Since the dragon has 100HP and I can't carry more than 99 shots of magic, I'm forced to declare this fight: Impossible. But there are other magics:
Fire ball magic is a little trickier to aim, and unfortunately is only doing similar damage to what I got with lightning. Then I realised that I still had the Tasmanian sword equipped after I'd used it to transform. I sent him back in with the Legendary:
That's more like it! Still, this is taking forever. Let's cut to the end:
Kaboom! So it is possible to kill the Daimyo Dragon as MOUSE-MAN. Unfortunately, pre-Daimyo MOUSE-MAN doesn't have access to the Legendary sword (without exploiting glitches). Let's try equipping the next best thing, the Crystal sword:
Doesn't look good! Hmm, what else can I try?
The boomerang seemed like a good idea: it comes back, so even if the damage is pathetic you can catch it and use it again. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem possible to throw it high enough to score a hit. You know what though? I've got a little trick for increasing my own height. All I need to do is equip the magic saber and a few other things...
Wha? Aww. Turns out trying to put blocks into the room causes the game to crash and reset. Weaksauce.
ETCETERA:
Well, I'm pretty much out of ideas. Maybe it's time to explore around the edges of the game. I've seen what happens when I glitch through a wall, but what'll happen if that wall is on the edge of the screen?
Well, I didn't expect that to happen. How about I try a wall with no stage beyond it?
OK, so I fall offscreen and from there into the screen below. I guess that makes sense. Let me just try a couple more places:
Wierd. What you can't tell from the .gif is that the entering/exiting water sound effect played while I was offscreen. I don't really get how I ended up at the top of the screen like that. Anyway, next I'm gonna try the edge of the world:
It's that upjump again. Ah well. Now, there's a spot in Mouse-Man's stage that can't be reached in normal play (it's on the right side of the second-to-bottom level). I'll show you how to get in:
I start with WE5T 0NE and take the shortcut to MOUSE-MAN's stage. I equip the Tassie sword and convert to a size better suited to navigating this area:
Hey, wait a second! What's going on with LIZARD-MAN's attack there?
That's odd. Anyway, carrying on:
I get into position to glitch through the wall, create a block to jump under, equip the Tasmanian sword, and change back to HU-MAN again:
OK, so that didn't work. It's kind of strange that I managed to glitch offscreen here. After my trials earlier I'd've expected to go upwards instead.
Obviously that last block was too high. Let's try this again:
Aww man! Looks like I might not be able to get in there after all (the change to LIZARD-MAN is from the Tasmanian Sword transformation thing, not the jump attack teleport glitch). The glitch only seems to work with HU-MAN, and I can't set the roof any lower and still have him fit under it. Say, though: what happens if I try to fit someone two blocks tall into a space only one block high?
I prepare the lab for my experiment.
Success! PIRANHA-MAN is too big to fit in the space he has, and is flung backwards, from where he falls off screen.
Those green potion tiles are strange, huh? Usually when you create a block and then smash it it deletes whatever was behind it and just leaves the background, so you wind up with a sky tile in the middle of a building or whatever. Apparently here the background is miscoloured potions? Anyway, I manage to wander off the left edge of the screen and somehow find myself on the upper edge of the next screen rather than the lower. Now that I can see myself, I transform into HAWK-MAN.
I fly around the edge of the area and build myself some ground to stand on. Then I change into MOUSE-MAN and enclose myself. Then:
I change into PIRANHA-MAN again, and slide into the sealed area! Mission accomplished. I take the time to check for hidden doors.
I find nothing, and move off the side of the screen into the normal start of the stage.
So I was back in town and I wanted to see if using the Magic saber glitch with LIZARD-MAN would result in a line of blocks. Instead, I got the above. I played around a bit and I think what's actually causing that is transforming with the Tasmanian sword, and the Magic saber thing makes no difference. The glitched projectile stops when you go through a door. I guess the flame sprite doesn't get loaded to the appropriate spot in memory when you transform with the glitch.
OK, well, that's pretty much everything. Except:
Turns out that if you go back into the Mecha Dragon's room after getting the Legendary sword there you can get some cash. A lot of cash, in fact. I got almost 3500G there, and that's without the Lucky sword. Wish I'd remembered that when I was grinding during my main run.
Actually, going back to the Dragon's Castle reminds me of something that I unfortunately haven't managed to replicate: sometimes when you finish the intro to the game, there are little castle things on the clouds in the cutscene where the Dragon's Castle collapses. I have no idea how to make them appear or if it's anything other than random. I played through the opening several times hoping they'd appear, but no dice. They do appear in this speed run, though. Take a look if you're interested.
Oh, and here are a couple of interesting passwords. They aren't really secrets or anything, I think it's just coincidence that these almost coherent phrases happen to fit the password algorithm:
"Y0UR G0T F0UR EYE" starts you as HU-MAN with a fairly random set of gear, a few stones, hearts, and magic, and no money. This was found by a dude insulting his friend through the password system, according to a comment on this facebook post.
When you go to the pig after starting with this code the one he gives isn't quite the same for some reason.
"OPEN THE GREN D0R" gets you HAWK-MAN and some stuff. No idea how this was discovered. To my knowledge, there's no way to get this set of gear and thus this password through normal play: you need the thunder saber to get the magical saber.
OK, well, I think that that's all I know, so I'm gonna stop here. Thanks for reading, hope you've all enjoyed it. To finish, here's HU-MAN fighting each of the dragons (Mecha aside, since he's done that already):
SECRETS:
OK, so I'm starting with my endgame password from the main run. I don't get to start with all my health and I've lost most of my magic, but for some reason I have a heap of extra cash. I'm not really sure what that's about. Possibly your extra magic gets converted to money? Could've saved myself some grinding time using that. Oh well. The important thing is I still have all my stones. I take them up to the floating platform next to the tower in town and something interesting happens:
! Turns out there are a bunch of secret doors in town that take you just outside of each boss door. You can only open them if you've got 99 charm stones. I could've saved myself the effort of going through the last stage! In fact, if I'd really wanted to I could've ground for charm stones as Lizard-Man and skipped straight to the final boss. Beating it would be another matter, of course. I think it'd be possible, but luck would have to go my way.
Here are the locations of the other doors. Pretty neat, huh? It's kind of funny, actually, because ordinarily if you make your way back to a boss room after beating it then you just get taken to where you'd come out after the fight without having the fight first. I wonder if having 99 charm stones makes all the bosses come back to life?
To find out, I head back towards the mummy dragon's lair. I stop by the sphinx treasure room on the way, because I know that restoring from password refills all the treasure chests in the game (something I could've used to save grinding time, by the way). While there I accidentally find out something I actually didn't know about:
There's a hidden door above the roof of the sphinx room! In fact it turns out that by pressing up while standing anywhere along those roof blocks you can open a door to the end of the catacombs. Man, I'm glad I found that before making my way through the whole pyramid yet again. Anyway, having reached the end of Lizard-Man's stage I charge through the boss door to find out if it's in there. It is not. Ah well. Time for the next secret. I hit reset, and enter a password I know by heart:
What what what?! Yes, this nifty password (WE5T 0NE 0000 000, the name of the game's developer) starts you off in town in HU-MAN form with a full set of equipment, 99 stones, the apparent maximum amount of magic you can get from a password, all the life hearts, and even a key! It's pretty sweet. Unfortunately the human form, aside from having maxed stats, isn't actually all that useful. Which brings me to the next section of this update:
GLECRETS:
Now, I'm not sure if this is something the developers intended for you to be able to do or if it's a straight-up glitch. There's speculation on the internet that it was a debug feature that got left in. Anyway, what you do is equip the Tasmanian sword, as I've done. Then you hold down button 2 on controller two, jump, and attack while in the air:
Pretty neat, huh? This is way faster than changing in the transformation rooms, plus you can do it anywhere, plus it lets you change to any form regardless of which dragons you've defeated (it's the only way to get back to HU-MAN after changing away in game. If you use a transformation room after WE5T 0NE you can get to any animal form, but not back to normal). Just like the 99 stone doors, it's a way to sequence break: you can get the Tasmanian sword once you've reached Piranha-Man form and gotten the Thunder Saber by entering Lion-Man's stage as Mouse-Man. Then you can change to Hawk-Man and head straight to the final stage.
Here's another equipment-based glitch that some say might be a debug thing left in accidentally. I think it's just a glitch, but who knows? Anyway, you just equip the magic saber along with the top right item in each other screen (Knight shield, Goblin mail, and Fire ball), then swing your sword:
Hey presto! Blocks from nowhere! Normally you can only create blocks on top of star blocks, which only exist in two rooms making the mechanic pretty pointless. With this glitch you can make them wherever you like. There are a few places you can access early using this (you could bridge the gap over to the Dragon's Castle and get the legendary gear before Hawk-Man, for example), and it's pretty useful in combination with the next glitch for getting places you aren't supposed to be.
I switch to the thunder saber to bust out of the prison I've created for myself.
I switch back to the magical saber but enequip my fireballs just to confirm that you need them equipped for this to work. Looks like you do. Anyway, that's the last of the things that I think could maybe have been included on purpose. Time for out and out
GLITCHES:
So if you stand under something, jump, and swing your sword at just the right time, you'll be knocked back slightly. The game's environments are all fit to a grid of little squares, and this pushes you back in line with the square behind you. Dunno why it happens, but it does. What makes it interesting is what happens when there are solid blocks behind you when you do it:
Yowza! You get pushed back through the wall and keep going until your passage is unobstructed. The graphics get all messed up, but the level geometry remains intact. You just can't see it. Scrolling the glitchy bit off screen and coming back fixes things. This is most easily done with HU-MAN, but I'm pretty sure I've done it at least once or twice in other forms. I don't have any evidence of that, though. There's a similar trick with MOUSE-MAN if you use the Tasmanian sword to transorm into PIRANHA-MAN while standing in a space only one block high, which I'll be demonstrating a little bit later. For now, here's a different PIRANHA-MAN trick. Remember how HAWK-MAN can gain height without using the jump button by turning back and forth? The same thing happens with PM, though it's not as pronounced and is much more difficult to keep going. It's also more interesting, though:
Ordinarily, if you reach the surface of the water you're swimming in, you'll jump out of it. If you're gaining height without the jump button, though, you'll keep swimming out into the air. It's really tricky, at least for me, so this little .gif is all I've got to show of it. If I were better at it, I'd be able to swim up to the screen above and get a chest that ordinarily only HAWK-MAN can reach. Alternatively, I could swim out of the ocean off to the right of here and up to the Dragon's Castle to get the legendary gear.
So, the Hades Armor. You might remember me saying it refills your health when you die while wearing it? Here's a demonstration of its normal operation:
As you can see, you get all your health back, but when you go into the menu you find that your armor is gone. A small price to pay if you're facing the final boss at the time, of course, but as it turns out going into the menu is just as important as losing your health for making the armor disappear. Let me demonstrate by taking LIZARD-MAN up against the final boss wearing the Hades Armor:
I actually find it's a much easier fight with LIZARD-MAN than it is with HAWK-MAN, aside from the tiny amount of damage you do (note that I've got the Legendary sword equipped) and the huge amount of damage you take (but I did equip the worst shield so I'd die more quickly). Scoring hits is easier with the projectile attack, and being able to duck is occasionally very helpful. Anyway, what I want you to notice in that .gif is that the Hades armor activated twice: it turns out that it doesn't actually disappear from your inventory until you activate the menu. And since you can't get into the menu during boss fights (normally it's reached with the pause button, but against bosses the pause button just freezes the screen until you hit it again), if you equip it against a boss you can't lose. In normal play, it's only accessible to HAWK-MAN, so it's most useful for cheesing the Vampier Dragon.
So, there are the secrets and glitches. Now let's try applying them. Probably the thing you most want to figure out in this kind of game is stuff that lets you sequence break, right? I've mentioned a few things already, but let's take a look at things that can be skipped:
SEQUENCE BREAKS:
If you want to get through the game having seen as little of it as possible (but with no regard for time wasted), what you want to do is grind for charm stones against the seaside enemies. As LIZARD-MAN, start in town, go through the sewer to the sea, and kill crabs until you've got 99 charm stones. This'll take approximately forever, but you'll get there eventually. You need to go to the end of the area to pick up the key to unlock the tower, and then you can take the hidden door to the Vampier Dragon. With some luck (you'd need to pull it off without taking any hits), you'll be able to beat the dragon and finish the game having skipped pretty much all of it. This might be the way to go for a tool-assisted speed run, if you were able to manipulate the drops so you got a stone every time.
Alternatively, you can skip most of LION-MAN's stage and all of PIRANHA-MAN's by going underground as MOUSE-MAN (after you get the Thunder saber), picking up the Tasmanian sword, and using it to transform into HAWK-MAN.
There are a few places you can get to early with the Magical saber glitch (all the components are available once you've reached PIRANHA-MAN): You can cross to the Dragon's Castle:
I had thought you'd be able to get the thunder saber early by bypassing the swimming area, but you can't get the magical saber without the thunder saber, so no dice. I also thought maybe you could climb up to reach HAWK-MAN's stage, but it was not to be:
I've also tried that in other forms, but best as I can tell it's impossible to place a block and land on it when you jump up from one screen to the next. There is another approach, though:
If you manage to go across from the tower in town, you won't go off screen and so your blocks won't disappear. Unfortunately, when you make blocks you have to stand on them to make the next one, so you'll tend to go upwards and will eventually go reach the top of the screen and be unable to proceed. Unless you're LION-MAN. His swing hits below his feet, so it's possible to create a straight bridge if you destroy all the blocks he makes except for the lower one:
It's uh, harder than it looks. I got there eventually:
And by "got there", I mean I created the first block of the bridge. Do that about fifty more times, and you're there. I don't have the patience for it, I'm afraid. I actually think it would then be impossible to clear HAWK-MAN's stage, since you can't fly. It is possible to create blocks and climb that way, but I think you'd run into the same problem I had trying to climb to the door: you'd have to jump up screens, and I think you'd fall back down without reaching ground level on some of them.
How about something that might actually work? MOUSE-MAN has access to LION-MAN's stage. Can he complete it? To find out I sent him in via the back door in town, after arming him with the Legendary sword and 99 shots of lighning magic, just in case:
As you can see, I wasn't able to jump high enough to hit the Dragon. So I started using my magic. Unfortunately, the most damage I could do was one hit point, and sometimes not even that. Since the dragon has 100HP and I can't carry more than 99 shots of magic, I'm forced to declare this fight: Impossible. But there are other magics:
Fire ball magic is a little trickier to aim, and unfortunately is only doing similar damage to what I got with lightning. Then I realised that I still had the Tasmanian sword equipped after I'd used it to transform. I sent him back in with the Legendary:
That's more like it! Still, this is taking forever. Let's cut to the end:
Kaboom! So it is possible to kill the Daimyo Dragon as MOUSE-MAN. Unfortunately, pre-Daimyo MOUSE-MAN doesn't have access to the Legendary sword (without exploiting glitches). Let's try equipping the next best thing, the Crystal sword:
Doesn't look good! Hmm, what else can I try?
The boomerang seemed like a good idea: it comes back, so even if the damage is pathetic you can catch it and use it again. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem possible to throw it high enough to score a hit. You know what though? I've got a little trick for increasing my own height. All I need to do is equip the magic saber and a few other things...
Wha? Aww. Turns out trying to put blocks into the room causes the game to crash and reset. Weaksauce.
ETCETERA:
Well, I'm pretty much out of ideas. Maybe it's time to explore around the edges of the game. I've seen what happens when I glitch through a wall, but what'll happen if that wall is on the edge of the screen?
Well, I didn't expect that to happen. How about I try a wall with no stage beyond it?
OK, so I fall offscreen and from there into the screen below. I guess that makes sense. Let me just try a couple more places:
Wierd. What you can't tell from the .gif is that the entering/exiting water sound effect played while I was offscreen. I don't really get how I ended up at the top of the screen like that. Anyway, next I'm gonna try the edge of the world:
It's that upjump again. Ah well. Now, there's a spot in Mouse-Man's stage that can't be reached in normal play (it's on the right side of the second-to-bottom level). I'll show you how to get in:
I start with WE5T 0NE and take the shortcut to MOUSE-MAN's stage. I equip the Tassie sword and convert to a size better suited to navigating this area:
Hey, wait a second! What's going on with LIZARD-MAN's attack there?
That's odd. Anyway, carrying on:
I get into position to glitch through the wall, create a block to jump under, equip the Tasmanian sword, and change back to HU-MAN again:
OK, so that didn't work. It's kind of strange that I managed to glitch offscreen here. After my trials earlier I'd've expected to go upwards instead.
Obviously that last block was too high. Let's try this again:
Aww man! Looks like I might not be able to get in there after all (the change to LIZARD-MAN is from the Tasmanian Sword transformation thing, not the jump attack teleport glitch). The glitch only seems to work with HU-MAN, and I can't set the roof any lower and still have him fit under it. Say, though: what happens if I try to fit someone two blocks tall into a space only one block high?
I prepare the lab for my experiment.
Success! PIRANHA-MAN is too big to fit in the space he has, and is flung backwards, from where he falls off screen.
Those green potion tiles are strange, huh? Usually when you create a block and then smash it it deletes whatever was behind it and just leaves the background, so you wind up with a sky tile in the middle of a building or whatever. Apparently here the background is miscoloured potions? Anyway, I manage to wander off the left edge of the screen and somehow find myself on the upper edge of the next screen rather than the lower. Now that I can see myself, I transform into HAWK-MAN.
I fly around the edge of the area and build myself some ground to stand on. Then I change into MOUSE-MAN and enclose myself. Then:
I change into PIRANHA-MAN again, and slide into the sealed area! Mission accomplished. I take the time to check for hidden doors.
I find nothing, and move off the side of the screen into the normal start of the stage.
So I was back in town and I wanted to see if using the Magic saber glitch with LIZARD-MAN would result in a line of blocks. Instead, I got the above. I played around a bit and I think what's actually causing that is transforming with the Tasmanian sword, and the Magic saber thing makes no difference. The glitched projectile stops when you go through a door. I guess the flame sprite doesn't get loaded to the appropriate spot in memory when you transform with the glitch.
OK, well, that's pretty much everything. Except:
Turns out that if you go back into the Mecha Dragon's room after getting the Legendary sword there you can get some cash. A lot of cash, in fact. I got almost 3500G there, and that's without the Lucky sword. Wish I'd remembered that when I was grinding during my main run.
Actually, going back to the Dragon's Castle reminds me of something that I unfortunately haven't managed to replicate: sometimes when you finish the intro to the game, there are little castle things on the clouds in the cutscene where the Dragon's Castle collapses. I have no idea how to make them appear or if it's anything other than random. I played through the opening several times hoping they'd appear, but no dice. They do appear in this speed run, though. Take a look if you're interested.
Oh, and here are a couple of interesting passwords. They aren't really secrets or anything, I think it's just coincidence that these almost coherent phrases happen to fit the password algorithm:
"Y0UR G0T F0UR EYE" starts you as HU-MAN with a fairly random set of gear, a few stones, hearts, and magic, and no money. This was found by a dude insulting his friend through the password system, according to a comment on this facebook post.
When you go to the pig after starting with this code the one he gives isn't quite the same for some reason.
"OPEN THE GREN D0R" gets you HAWK-MAN and some stuff. No idea how this was discovered. To my knowledge, there's no way to get this set of gear and thus this password through normal play: you need the thunder saber to get the magical saber.
OK, well, I think that that's all I know, so I'm gonna stop here. Thanks for reading, hope you've all enjoyed it. To finish, here's HU-MAN fighting each of the dragons (Mecha aside, since he's done that already):
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