Yeah each jumps costs a few frames if I remember correctly, and attacking while jumping adds a few more so i optimised the TAS to jump as little as possible, often cutting health to very fine levels, and yeah the food basket in the waterfall proved to be a real challenge to ignore it in actual runs.

Indeed most games end up relying on heavy rng/resets in order to push it as far as it can go. I remember the goal of sub 16 resting heavily on the stage 1 boss giving the good pattern. While not especially uncommon it was about as far as resetting as I was willing to make in this fun but pretty obscure game. My sum of best apparantly was 15:53 when i finished but i'm not sure personally if a few seconds means that much to me, nor do I have the time currently to really look into it without being overwhelmed at the moment.

If something somewhat significant could get found I might be compelled to jump back in next year.

[edit] After the watching the TAS a bit it seems some of the larger time saves are ignoring food baskets and getting a lucky grenade drop in level 4 springing to mind the most. There's also something on the final boss. The game gives you a generous amount of time to swing your sword during those two first phases and the Demon King's eyes will pop out after a number of swings. So when making the TAS I saved time by reducing lag not swinging the sword all the way until the mouth closes each time.

A very small time loss on your run I noticed was on the last bell ring on the train you can hug the wall/pillar when you ring it. In your run you had a bit of unecessary distance.

I'll keep looking for more stuff.

[edit2] I did 25 sword swings on each of the first two phases, now assuming that's the minimum amount (memory is hazy on whether I actually calculated it exactly at the time or whether I swung a few more for good measure)) the boss needs 50 swings for eyes to pop out. Maybe it's possible to swing to your hearts content in first phase and then cut the swing number shorter in the second for the same result of lag reduction ? Like 30/20. Again that's assuming the boss works this way at all. Also it's hard to swing optimally in the lag but hopefully aggressive button mashing overrides this problem, then it's just a case of trying to count the sword swings.

Ah yes i think I'm familiar with all those time savers. Avoiding unwanted drops in this game is definitely a small hurdle I wasn't expecting when i got round to doing runs few years back :D Keeping knives until level 3 boss is vital.

The bell in the wall jump in stage 5 I remember being quite difficult to get consistently so I didn't bother with it in runs in the end, and the stage 3 thing really could be RNG, dependent on how well the earlier parts of the level went.

I'll put this here just as a reference, in the hopes of finding something else. This run gets a 15:10 or something but it does have something missing right off the bat that I noticed just now that I did in my pb: Not grabbing the wall when collecting the bell in the waterfalI. Other than that there could be other things missing because I made the TAS well before doing those attempts and probably found some more minor stuff in that period. It achieves a low 15 due to frame advanced perfect gameplay but I'd like to see a seasoned TAS maker actually do one for this game. I was a novice when I did mine and although I went through at a snails pace scrutinizing as much as I could and used frame advance for everything I still wonder if there's some secrets that a pro would've been able to spot.

Yes adding ms seems logical at this stage, and congrats to spyriel for the recent new wrs !

I'm kinda interested to see if spyriel or anyone thinks there's any time savers left in this game ? I know when I made the TAS I didn't bother exploring the possibilities of having the circling star things or multiples of them toward the end of the run. Though it also seems like they could be a big nuisance in a run having them interfering with our attacks.