Boss Strat - Renald 1; Simply Lose 3 Times

The first fight against Renald has an interesting quirk to it - if you lose to him three times, Marlowe interrupts things like he normally would if you had gotten him to half health. We can take advantage of this by simply dying 3 times to Renald instead of trying to fight him normally. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MUl60MpWnc

Damage Strat - Sword Flurries

Gestalt boasts a pretty robust animation cancelling system. Grounded attacks can be cancelled into dodging or jumping. Aerial attacks cancel on landing. We can take advantage of this by using a 'Sword Flurry' pattern of rapidly repeating;

1. Attacking on the ground

2. Cancelling the grounded attack with a jump

3. Attacking the in the air on the way up

4. Attacking on the way down extremely close to the ground and cancelling on landing

5. Repeating steps 1 through 4

Timing here is fairly precise. Jump needs to be pressed a precise period of time to have enough air time for both air attacks to come out - too short and you're too low, leading the second attack to not come out at all, and too long and you'll go too high, slowing down your attack pattern. Against shorter enemies, you'll need to do a rising downward aerial attack to connect on the way up. 

Proper execution leads to much faster attacks than simply attacking on the ground. A great way to deal damage and build up a ton of energy very fast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsNF4eXJYNI

Death Warp Skips - Fornax Valve and Scrap Sea

Gestalt has a pretty lenient death system. Whenever you completely lose health, you respawn back at the last tether save point (or other story checkpoint, in some cases), but you still keep some progress you made - all experience earned, items gained, story beats triggered, etc. We can take advantage of this to warp back to specific save points to save a little time.



# Fornax Death Warp Skip

In Fornax, there's a phase where we need three different valves to progress, and we need to sidetrack to three different areas for each one, backtracking to a main central room each time. The backtrack isn't terribly long, but we can shave a little time off of that by death warping back after each valve instead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VPZb8-j8Eo



# Scrap Sea Death Warp Skip

We can do something a little more complicated and save even more time with a death warp in the Scrap Sea. Normally we would head deep into the Scrap Sea, defeat the Raider Brute boss, collect the charge shot and then backtrack to Faria's hut. Since dying respawns us at the last save tether we've actually activated, though, we can manipulate that a little bit to skip that backtrack process. If we skip out on the save points on the way to the Raider Brute, defeat him, and then lose all our health immediately afterwards, we'll death warp all the way back to Faria's hut and skip through a good chunk of backtracking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtX6_RnbvFs

Dive Kick Skips - Fornax Escape, Tartarus, and Sylva Waterfall

The Dropkick (aka divekick) is an extremely useful tool for speedrunning. On top of being just a general fast mode of movement, if you divekick an enemy, Aletheia will bounce off of them and regain her divekick (ala SotN). We can use this against several different flying enemies to gain some extra height and skip up some places we normally wouldn't be able to access.



# Fornax Escape Divekick Skips

Much of the zigzagging second half of the escape sequence in Fornax can be skipped by some select divekicks off of the local Driller Wasps and Spinning Turrets. (Note that the route shown here is a little suboptimal - it seems the better route would be to divekick up one level and then take the conveyer belt quickly to the right instead of heading straight up. A harder route, since the enemies after that are harder to set up for an easy divekick ascension, but it does seem faster if you do it right.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p88Lrmg1-0



# Tartarus Bee Skips

Bees are harder to divekick off of than your standard enemy, since they're once of the few enemies in the game that damage Aletheia on contact. With a little understanding of divekick hitboxes and with some manipulation of bee movement, though, we can skip a couple of platforming segments in Tartarus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNbOFPomDCY



# Sylva Waterfall Skip

This is a big one. We can set up bee divekicks for multiple levels up the central Waterfall room in Syla, circumventing the need to venture into side rooms and all the usual backtracking that would be required to activate the fan system. A huge time save.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5GyaNJ8fis

Divekick Cancel Wallclimbs and Lab boss Skip

# Divekick Cancel Wallclimb

Once we get double jump and therefore divekick, we can utilize some animation cancel shenanigans to infinitely climb any solid wall that we can find. Divekick immediately changes our aerial momentum to the direction we're divekicking in, and we can instantly cancel divekick into an aerial attack to not lose vertical height from it. 

So to break it down, a divekick cancel wallclimb would look like;

1. Make contact with the wall in question

2. Walljump off of said wall

3. While holding back towards the wall, press the heavy button to begin a divekick in that direction

4. Immediately after, cancel the divekick in an aerial attack and move back to the wall

5. Repeat steps 2 through 4 until the desired height is reached



# Lab Wallclimb Skip

In R'lyeh in particular, we can take advantage of the wall just before the Berserker squad boss fight to wallclimb our way up and avoid the fight entirely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv686MjFaSM

Name	Author
Boss Strat - Renald 1; Simply Lose 3 Times	Sethlon 10 months ago
Damage Strat - Sword Flurries	Sethlon 10 months ago
Death Warp Skips - Fornax Valve and Scrap Sea	Sethlon 10 months ago
Dive Kick Skips - Fornax Escape, Tartarus, and Sylva Waterfall	Sethlon 10 months ago
Divekick Cancel Wallclimbs and Lab boss Skip	Sethlon 10 months ago