Hey all, I am a casual Herc’s Adventure player and have an interesting story to tell and question to ask.

I play a co-op playthrough with my brother every few years or so, and our last one had a very interesting occurrence. We can’t remember the exact chain of events, but somehow we were able to duplicate “Io the cow” thus allowing us to receive 2 Hera keys in Elis. I remember we delivered the first cow in some strange way, and were then able to trigger Hera’s initial dialogue rather than her usual “get outta here” dialogue. Upon returning to Sparta, io the cow was back in her cage ready to be brought to Elis for a second time. Delivery of the second cow yielded another Hera key.

Recently during a new playthrough we have attempted this again, but with no success. Hera simply accepts the first cow regardless of how we deliver, and never gives the initial quest giving dialogue.

There are lots of variables to consider in the order of operations; whether we talked to Hera BEFORE the first trip to Sparta, whether we officially delivered the first cow or simply left it on the ground during the first trip, whether console differences could have caused a “bug” (original instance may have been on ps2 90k w/ FDS active; currently testing on ps1 original)

My question is this: if collecting 2 Hera keys in Elis can be consistent, could it be useful for the speedrun? What are Hera keys useful for, and would a second trip from Sparta to Elis be faster than another method of acquiring one?

That's interesting. I have a vague memory 10+ years back of that same thing happening on the PS1 original.

Unfortunately, off the top of my head, I don't think it saves too much time (At the moment). On my current routing, The 2nd H key is used to unlock the catapult to Sparta (Which leads to a quick way to get fire spears > hydra, and also to leave Egypt otherwise you have to go amazons > Athena and then double back.. to Sparta). You get this key via traversing back to the Lamias room with the P key for lipstick. This takes less than a minute (~45s?) detour after picking up the passwords and on the way back from Egypt. It'll take 1.5-2 minutes to get the cow back to Hera for another H key if I'm reading this right.

Of course, there could be something else found from this but at the moment I don't see it being too beneficial.

Sounds about right, I figured there would be another way to get the key faster. Ill keep playing with this glitch, but I’m not certain that it’s consistent. It very well may be hardware related. Thanks for the quick reply!