I'll try to keep this short and sweet, like a good Any% ;)

The Good

-Higher base jump height means she can make certain jumps that Beck couldn't.

-The higher jump, combined with her hover means Ekoro effectively gets the best of both worlds. A higher base jump and a way to do horizontal air movement. Sadly no speed boosts from hovering. That said, she can do some ridiculous gap clearing with her hover jumps.

-Hover will automatically activate the moment Ekoro stops getting vertical movement if you're holding Jump. This means at the top of her jump, or if you hit a ceiling, she will start hovering.

-Hover comes in two flavors: Slow descent and no descent. No descent appears to last 3 seconds. Slow descent appears to last until you touch the ground. You can also spend extra CP to lock her facing direction. Good if you're using hover to line up shots and want to be able to move while doing so.

-She only needs 50% of her Heart Gauge filled to go invincible, but it lasts longer the more you have beyond 50%.

-Eating food boosts her heart gauge by 10% per item. This means if you do have to use food in a boss fight, you can at least make the time up with her invincibility (which also comes with an attack buff).

-Custom wise, she has all of Beck's options aside from different looking shots. So basically, Gunvolt's single bullet type, but all of Beck's customs (Homing, diagonal, etc). With hover being available, she may not necessarily need the Diagonal shot in Any% though. Her high jump + Hover will likely let her line up ideal mashing shots.

-Invincibility is ridiculous. Plus the attack buff on top of it. While you obviously lose about .5 seconds activating this, the tradeoff is boosted damage and the ability to avoid any damage whatsoever. Will probably be very helpful on bosses that required damage boosting for fast kills (Cryosphere). Can't wait to see what this does with the 1.5x ATK modifier added.

Now, the bad.

-What seems like less than half of Gunvolt/Beck's base health. Damage boosting with her will have to be a much more tactical decision and health pickups are far more important. Seriously, you cannot afford to just take every hit in the game as Ekoro.

-For maximum Heart meter gain, you need to get burst kills. Not always viable when trying to go fast as you effectively have to time your last shot to be point blank. You'll get a chunk of meter on a burst kill, and 2% meter on a normal hit. this means you need 25 hits minimum to have the meter for invincibility.

-If you do die, you lose all your heart gauge, even if you had some at the last checkpoint.

Long story short, Ekoro has potential, but players like me who are used to being able to damage boost through everything or not worry about taking excessive hits have a lot to be worried about here, as Ekoro ¤cannot¤ take hits. You basically have to be efficient in gaining meter and popping invincibility in dangerous spots to maximize her movement speed, as she lacks any sort of increased horizontal speed options. Her higher jump has its uses though, as does hover.

Invincibility on demand? Yeah, that's going to open up some fun options for her, or at the very least, provide safety windows in areas where being hit would be a time loss and let her just run right through with zero risk of knockback.

Not sure about hover usefulness yet, depends on how long she can maintain it.

Was kinda wondering why she doesn't have any% and 100% boards yet.

Hey, so I'm debating trying to get into speedrunning two of my favorite switch games, Mighty gunvolt burst and blaster master zero.

I noticed you can link your Twitch account here, and there was a [nosrl] tag to prevent stream notifications going up here. Should I be using that ANY time I'm not doing a speedrun? Or can I leave it alone if I don't care about people noticing I'm streaming?

I ask because I do a lot of casual playthroughs too, and wasn't sure if that's something that needed the [nosrl] tag on it.

Other than that, well, I'm kinda coming back to speedrunning in a way. I used to do ingame time leaderboard speedruns of Castlevania SotN on X360. used to be #1 on the leaderboard for a month or two, then Romscout came and destroyed the records and pretty much became the god of SotN runs. I knew I could never quite get to that level, so I kinda dropped out of Speedrunning at that point, especially as my SotN runs were never RTA, always using the ingame clock. (I had to reload a LOT of saves for Richter skip, I could never get it down 100%).

I've noticed Beck has no times on Normal Any% for Mighty Gunvolt, so I was debating trying to start a trend and see what could be done with Beck in that category.

Anyway, looking forward to trying to get back into going fast.

Just wondering...Seems odd there's no NG Any % runs for him. was debating getting into this, and noticed the lack of Beck...