Uploaded May 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago

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I spent the past few days trying to reverse engineer the mechanics of this particular Vine Flower / Konohana Blossom using Cheat Engine, and managed to discover a significantly faster movement pattern for Igloo Turtle Skip. This saves around 3s.

When I first started running Okami, we had a very poor understanding of how this trick worked. We used a method demonstrated here: youtu.be/k88UtutOe3g?t=6924. This method had a lot of inconsistency issues and nobody really knew why.

Then, around a year ago, I had a bout of serendipity and found some alternate ways to open the flower. I did some experimentation and formed a hypothesis for how I thought it worked, alongside and improved method for the trick. This is documented in the description of this video: youtu.be/6FsajWiG7tE.

Looking back, I had some good ideas, but I was wrong about a few things which made the trick slower than necessary. I realized that loading the flower was important, but not that you don't have to get nearly that close to load it. I also thought that you had to get a line-of-sight to the flower which was unobstructed by invisible walls, which was completely wrong, and lead me to do a big jump when moving backwards. This turns out to be both unnecessary and counterproductive.

A few days ago, I noticed that SaunderZ was doing a different movement pattern in their NG+ 2017 runs, which challenged some of those aforementioned ideas. They didn't jump or move as far as I thought necessary. Since I've been messing around with Cheat Engine a lot lately, I decided to apply it towards reverse engineering some of the mechanics of this flower so we could have a more accurate explanation, and potentially a faster technique.

While I still don't know 100% of how this works, here's a rough explanation:
- When the flower is first loaded, it will only open when we get within a cylindrical distance of 500 units. This region is too small to reach from behind the Igloo Turtle trigger and the collision around the Guardian Sapling.
- If we load, unload, and then reload the flower, it will instead open up when we get within a *spherical* distance of 800 units, which is just big enough to reach from behind the Guardian Sapling. I don't know why this happens exactly, but it's the condition we must satisfy
- Loading the flower requires us to get within a spherical distance of 1100 units.
- Unloading the flower requires us to get outside a spherical distance of 1200 units.
- We spawn at a distance of roughly 1157 units, and a single ground tackle covers about 39 units of distance.

If we put all these pieces together, we arrive at the following optimal strategy for NG Igloo Turtle Skip, which is what's demonstrated in this video:
1. Tackle towards the flower.
2. Continue to dash forward for a split second.
3. Turn around and dash directly away from the flower for a couple seconds.
4. Turn around again and go to the guardian sapling to set up the Vine.

For some visualizations, here are some images:
- Spawn point: media.discordapp.net/attachments/267650771774865408/848617028097146920/unknown.png
- Point where the flower loads: media.discordapp.net/attachments/267650771774865408/848617134703902740/unknown.png
- Point where the flower unloads: media.discordapp.net/attachments/267650771774865408/848617296875749376/unknown.png

Ideally, we'd be able to visualize the load spheres in-game in order to show exactly what's happening, but we don't yet have that level of technology. Keep in mind that, because the flower is above Ammy's spawn point, and because the load/unload thresholds are spherical you do not want to jump when moving backwards to unload the flower. This is because jumping would bring Ammy closer in height to the flower, which would increase the distance she needs to move horizontally to get outside the unload sphere.

The reason we don't jump to reach the load sphere sooner is because this would reduce the time we spend building dash on the ground.

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