I have been speedrunning by using fire mario since I am too bad with pipe jumps and 8-3 hammer bros. Also, the big size helps with easy wrong warp in 4-2. I was able to achieve a time of 5:16 recently. There is still plenty of scope of improvement in my run. I was just curious to know, as to what would be the best time possible/achieved by being fire mario. I want to know, till what time can I potentially reach while still using the fire mario strats.

Possible timesaves from my run are (without hard tricks) :

1-1 : 1 framerule 1-2 : 0-1 framerule 4-1 : 0 framerule 4-2 : 2-3 framerules 8-1 : 0 framerules 8-2 : 2-4 seconds 8-3 : 0 framerules 8-4 : few seconds (without walljump)

I guess something near to 5:05-5:07 should be possible without hard tricks and with fire mario.

Note that I lose my fire in 8-4 water section, but at least I spent time getting fire...in fact losing fire loses time due to the transition animation.

Presuming that you are grabbing power ups in 1-1 and 1-2, I think a 5:08 is a realistic time using fire starts. That’s aLao considering that you don’t attempt any particularly difficult time saves such as 8-2 blant or 8-4 walljump.

I’d suggest you watch Miniland’s 5:03 tutorial using safe starts. It removes pipe jumps and other tricky situations from your attempts. It’ll likely result in a 5:05 if you use his route except 8-4 walljump. Video can be found on YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tcNi8rLEc00

Yup that is a really good tutorial, I had watched this...even tried it a bit. But I am not consistent with 8-3 at all without fire mario, and it is really frustrating to get runs killed time and again in the second last level. Also even without the wall jump, there still is some scope to shave time off in 8-4 for me. Probably I should try shaving off some more time with fire mario, and then switch to the small mario strats.

By the way, what is 8-2 blant? Is it same as the bullet bill glitch?

I also started out using fire Mario, and switched to small-only strats after getting this run:

That's a great run..... I can try improving my run while being fire Mario by taking this run as a reference. This I guess is close to the fastest possible time being fire mario.

My run is 13 seconds slower than you, 7 of which come from 8-4 itself, and another 4 secs from 8-2. 1 sec from 4-2, and another 1 or so from 1-1 & 1-2. Need to grind 8-2 and 8-4 first.