I was just watching Bioice's speedrun of the original Starcraft, and I noticed an interesting tactic used around 36:30.

https://www.speedrun.com/run/zn88lkvz

A little background here: the goal of this level is to bring a certain object to a certain destination, which sounds relatively simple, but because this destination is in the center of the enemy encampment, and because only the weakest unit can carry the object, the implication is that you have to destroy the enemy encampment to achieve this goal.

However, the game also gives you use of a certain unit that happens to have the ability to put a protective shield around any other single unit. By putting a protective shield around the weak unit and marching it straight into the camp, he beats this level in about thirty seconds. It's not a very straightforward tactic, but because the only requirement for this level is to transport the object, it is a brilliant approach.

So I was wondering what other interesting / unique approaches you all have seen in speedruns? I'm not talking about glitches or game physics abuse, but where someone uses the tools provided to them in an unorthodox manner to achieve some goal much faster than it might have been done the conventional way. I'm really interested in that kind of stuff, and I would very much appreciate any recommendations for runs that employ imagination rather than brute force to solve a problem.

Thanks! You guys and gals are awesome!

In Kingdom Hearts 1 (all versions) we use the Dumbo summon to speed up movement throughout the Hollow Bastion level. Dumbo is a summon that is meant to just give you invincibility while you fly around on his back shooting water to damage enemies. He can rise and descend a bit to hit various flying enemies as well. Overall, it's a useless summon since it's very weak in most cases.

However, in Hollow Bastion, we abuse him to do some interesting movement tech that allows us to bypass parts of the world. It doesn't actually skip anything other than reducing the amount of movement and fighting we have to do and preventing us from having to enter more rooms in the world. When you dismiss Dumbo, Sora does a front flip kinda "jump" off of Dumbo as he disappears. This gives you just enough height to grab on to ledges you should normally never be able to reach. By doing this, we can bypass a number of extra rooms and a forced fight that we would otherwise have to do. We do it three times in the run and when you factor in the time to get Dumbo, it saves a minute overall.

Not a glitch by any means, but is quite the little exploit for a normally useless summon.

In a few GTA games (3 and VC for sure, not 100% sure of the other 3D games like LCS or VCS) you can make replays. They're coded like crap, so you can actually pick up things through replays (like a rampage or bribe star). You can use this mechanic doing anything from picking up bribe stars over and over to duping and therefore skipping entire missions.

LCS and VCS don't have replays because they're console games, and in VC bribe star replays don't do anything. Just, y'know, clearing some thngs up.

In Lego Batman Robin has the ability to cling to walls for a short moment. If you find a gap short enough you can wall-jump with him to get out of bounds. Not used in many places but saves a chunk of time in a level it's used in where you, as usual with OoBs, skip over a puzzle.

Yeah hoXyyy I should've clarified that. My bad.

That's a pretty cool bit with the Dumbo summon and using a temporary stick to wall jump, but in the GTA games, what exactly ¤is¤ a replay? Do you mean you can replay a mission? Store a certain series of actions, then replay it? Something else? I'm one of the few people who never really got into the GTA series (school and what not), but they've been on my to do list for a while.

I believe it's you can use it to store a short clip and then rewatch it later. So as was said, if you pick up a bribe badge in a replay, when it ends you'll be a star lower. Watch it several times and you can almost instantly lose the cops. The most I've seen it used is in 100% GTA:SA runs where they use it to spawn cars where they're not meant to be in order to make the car collection side-missions a bit more bearable.

In Neverwinter Nights you can cast invisibility on yourself, allowing you to run past every non mandatory fight. There is also a pool that you can pick up dropped plot items that can be used to duplicate key items by dropping them, picking them up from the pool, then picking up the original. More on the glitch side but you aren't breaking anyway the game works, just exploiting safety nets. There's dialogue with a demon that gives you experience for when you start the dialogue, allowing you to pause the game and just click on him for about 2 minutes to get enough experience to get over leveled. And you can use a panther to walk through walls and doors, but that's exploiting shoddy hitboxes.

So, I have no personal experience with this trick while attempting a run, and it's very RNG reliant, but in Star Ocean the Second Story there is a really neat trick you can attempt in either a run or casual play. The way you start this trick differs based on which main character you pick at the beginning of the game, but partway through the first disc the character, Claude, will be in a tournament. If you picked Rena, you get the weapon automatically by supporting the poor old man. In Claude's scenario, you can get it from the old man after losing in the last tournament round.

Then, with this weapon, the Sharp Edge, at hand, you need to get the the customisation skill to level 8 to have any chance of proceeding. Once you have it, you save then spend your SP on the skill Radar. Each time you level it up, you gain one random item from a long list of potential items. You basically just spam levelling this skill on all your characters, then check your inventory. If you gained 2 mithril, you save again. If you don't, you reload and keep trying Once you have 2 mithrils, you customise the Sharp Edge. If you succeed you'll end up with a weapon called the Minus Blade, which is awful. You then customise the Minus Blade with a mithril and you'll end up with the Eternal Sphere, which is one of the main character's ultimate weapons.

As far as I know, it has the 3rd strongest damage out of any of his weapons. It also offers resistances to several elemental attacks. Whenever you perform a basic attack with the weapon, it'll shoot out a spray of stars, each of which hit the enemy as hard as the basic attack would. Most importantly, the weapon is strong enough to allow you to steam roll pretty much everything in the game.

I think this trick is avoided by most people because the odds of getting 2x mithril are dreadfully low, and made even lower by having few spare SP to level Radar with. You can get the weapon later in the game without terrible RNG by picking up mithril on the 2nd disc, but if you had the supreme luck of getting this trick to work quickly, you can steam roll the game.