Espyo | What if you could enter Emergence Cave on day 1? - Pikmin 2 @srb2Espyo | Uploaded October 2016 | Updated October 2024, 4 hours ago.
Could entering the Emergence Cave on day 1 help speedrunning the game? Could it create new challenges? Does it simply result in a glitchy mess? To answer these questions, I moved the paper bags out of the way and recorded my findings. I might've not tried everything that you can do, but I still documented the most interesting bits. Long story short, there are a lot of glitches, but no real breakthroughs for speedruns.

There is an Action Replay code that makes the game ask if you want to save before entering a sublevel. This is the code I used; it only works on the European version:
04515154 00000001

Table of contents:
0:00 Introduction and simply entering the cave
1:30 Spherical Atlas on day 1
1:47 Emergence Cave challenge (repaying the debt with corpses)
2:15 Bringing 15 Pikmin instead of all of them
2:46 Courage Reactor on the same frame as entering the cave
3:44 Entering the cave before the game is ready - before switching to Louie
4:43 Entering the cave before the game is ready - before reuniting leaders
5:54 Pikmin extinction on day 1
6:48 Utter Scrap on day 1