Uploaded January 2019 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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If you've seen an All Flags run on Current Patch you might have known the category as a 2-part run where you play through the first half of the game normally, you buy whetstone from the shop, and finish the game trying to make use of that charm as much as possible. This not only generally saves time on bosses but also made the Beppi Glitch more consistent and allowed to perform Octopus Skip in Perilous Piers which saves around 10 seconds.

This run did none of that! Ever since the Lobber optimizations I've wondered if just using the All Bosses strats was better off. The whetstone IGTs are deceptive in a sense that every time you parry, the In-Game Timer on the results screen gets paused for 0.16 seconds, so even though you can get much better IGTs with whetstone, when going by loadless time it actually doesn't save much compared to Lobber strats and Luigi Swaps on ground and plane stages respectively.
By forgoing whetstone a lot of time is saved between skipping coins, overworld movement and not shopping.
One downside is that I can't do Octupus Skip since I don't have the heart charm, so the two routes are still pretty close together in terms of viability.

Jason2890 is going to keep using whetstone so I'm really looking forward to seeing how the two routes compare.

(And to clarify, I'm not the first one to use this route, I had the idea originally but Grondious ran this route before I did and he even held World Record for while)

My controls:
Jump: Right Bumper
Shoot: Left Trigger
Ex Shoot: A
Switch Weapon: X
Lock: Left Bumper
Dash: Y