Question regarding Spider Queen glitch
Connecticut, USA

Are there any rules or regulations for using the Spider Queen glitch to speed level on the GameCube version of the game. Which speedruns allow it and which do not?

For those of you not familiar with the glitch. If you go into the Spider Queen fight with multiple stacks of Super Shot you can kill the boss without ever being in danger of taking damage. A side effect I found, way back when, was that doing so makes the game think that you're killing the boss at a much lower level than you actually are. You can do this a couple times in order to skyrocket your character's level+stat. As a side note: you always make enough money at the end of the fight to refresh your Super Shot stock.

California, USA

Using super shot to kill a boss is not a glitch or unintended, and we already use it to kill pretty much every boss. You gain a lot of levels killing bosses through any method and I'm not sure getting a bunch of levels is even that relevant when all you really want to do is max your speed which will already be done by the time you reach spider queen.

Connecticut, USA

I don't know the specifics, I've never done a speed run of GDL before. Been considering doing it one day when I get a capture card that actually works, so was just a bit curious. :)

I can confirm that it does give boosted XP though. From my comparison when I killed normally at lv.50 the boss leveled my toon to 55. When I killed normally a second time I went from 55->56. When I killed with SS only I went from 56->63. This is really the glitch I had been asking about, but it sounds like it's OK and not really something that would end up being used.

Ontario, Canada

I will say for the PS2 version you are also able to gain about 2 levels no matter what whenever you kill the spider queen using the thunder hammer. This is just what I've seen from experience of course. Could be interesting though if we were doing skips that required us to have a higher health or to fight bosses that we may not have the money to stock up for.

California, USA

I wonder if it giving more EXP is unique to just spider queen or if killing things with super shot just gives more EXP in general

Connecticut, USA

I'm not sure about that one. I never thought to try on other bosses or mobs or such back when I found it.

Ontario, Canada

We could probably do a simple test on it, say with lich. The end-of-level screen does show us how much exp we do gain.