In Mega Man II Mega Man goes nuts when Dr. Albert "Doc" Wily goes back to the future and time paradoxes ensue. It's up to Mega Man once again to beat up whatever critters Wily brought back with him and shoot Wily with a gigantic missile when he can no longer defend himself.

Yes, this is an improvement to the previous Mega Man II GB run in 25:46, and none too soon if you ask me; it was a bit awkward since everyone and their dog could beat the run. It's not all the runner's fault, though. The run is one of the oldest ones on the site (at least on the non-Quake side), the standards have gotten higher and the knowledge about what you can do with the game is vaster now.

Quite the few players went for the record over the years, but apparently none of them were satisfied with their results as none of them were submitted (even though the improvement was several minutes) - at least as far as I know. When I saw there was potential competition going on I decided to give them a nudge in the right direction, and here we are.

There are a few things in the game play mechanics that serve well to ruin fast game play, namely:

• The sliding, which cannot be interrupted once it's started. This is why I sometimes walk instead of sliding if the platform is slower to cross by sliding instead of walking/jumping. Then there's...

• The climbing mechanics. If you push your D-Pad even a little to the side, Mega Man refuses to move anywhere. In that case you cannot let go of the ladders, either, as Mega Man will immediately grab it again, which resulted in a lot of frustration until I realized I can just use the analog stick (when playing with Game Boy Player and a GC controller) if I need to let go of the ladders. The former problem continues to annoy me in this run, though: You'll see me stopping for short periods of time that it takes me to realize Mega Man stopped moving and change my grip on the controls.

• Everything and everyone has a recovery time, so the normal strategy to just spam insane amounts of bullets doesn't work. On the other hand, the bullets do not disappear if they don't hit the enemy or go out of view, so you can pace your shooting so that the next bullet will hit on the very first possible moment after the enemy's invincibility period wears off. You could also technically spam bullets to kill two adjacent enemies nearly simultaneously. The latter trick isn't used in this run.

It's not all bad, though. For example, Rush Jet is the best iteration in the series by far. It's incredibly versatile and it only uses weapon energy when you're standing on it, ie. you can travel long distances without using much weapon energy if you jump constantly (see Magnet Man, for example). Most of the other weapons have their uses, too, and I use every one of them except Needles in the run. Air Shooter is only used against Clash Man, though.

This run is done on the European version. This manifests in a few differences compared to the American version: Top Man's stage is missing a one square-sized wall (which saves probably a second) and a platform in Wily's space fortress doesn't exist in the European version (makes no difference, really). I also think the horns in Air Man's stage are timed slightly differently than in the American version; I got to slide better in that stage when I tried the American version. All in all, there are differences, but they more or less nullify each other. There might be more differences than I've spotted, but I doubt it's anything vital.

I've planned the energy abuse to be fairly tight because it's faster to take damage in a lot of parts. I grab a total of three E-Tanks, the purpose being having some refills to not having to hold back anywhere. It balances out the fact that I cannot trust to get refills from enemies whenever I need one.

Since most of the stuff that happens in the run is pretty self-explanatory, I focus on whatever things I did wrong or otherwise went wrong. I don't think the run is downright bad (I wouldn't have even submitted it in that case, and at any rate you wouldn't be reading this text because it would've been rejected outright by the verifiers). However, it would be foolish of me to think it's perfect, so I include some pointers where to start in case someone else wants to give it a shot.

The Air Man fight went beautifully until the last hit. That cost me a bit of time. The stage went well enough.

I mistime my jump and later take an extra hit on Clash Man's stage. The boss went down nicely, considering I didn't really lose time in the end despite the fact that the next hit would've been fatal.

In Metal Man I failed to slide through the first enemy, cost me a bit of time. I got some extra health that I didn't abuse because normally I wouldn't have such luxories and I didn't really notice it until I started to use it. Recommended health for the Metal Man battle would be one bar, so there was a lot of extra health left.

I shoot a metal blade in a wrong direction in Wood Man's stage, causing me to collide with a rooster. I slid into the robo-rabbit at a wrong pace, costing me time.

I took some unnecessary damage in Magnet Man's stage, but the worst (and time-consuming) part was when I didn't start climbing down immediately. You'll surely spot it yourself, too.

In Hard Man's stage you can slide through the first bees, but I didn't manage to do it this time. Despite the reflected Magnet Missiles, the Hard Man fight wasn't so bad.

I could've slid a couple of more times at the end of Top Man's stage. I could swear the controller just wasn't taking my input.

I missed with two Leaf Shield shots, setting me up for a costly mistake as I didn't notice I didn't have any of them left, so I jumped one too many times when I tried to destroy the cannon. I had a spike following me as a side effect, so I used it to my advantage. I also chose the wrong weapon as I was trying to replenish my health in the ceiling spike section.

I missed a shot on Quint, which looks a bit awkward and ended up being one of the most costy mistakes in the run.

Again, I did a small jump instead of sliding in Wily's space fortress. I didn't want to risk dying when I was getting to the sub marine this time, which cost me maybe a tenth of a second... I missed Wily with a couple of shots, too.

I counted approximately ten seconds of mistakes in the run (could be more, could be less, I wasn't too obsessed with it), making a sub-20 minute run possible but difficult unless the route is drastically changed. The current tool-assisted speed run (if you don't know what this means, check SDA's knowledge base) record by dezbeast clocks in at 17:49 or something like that, but it uses some extensive luck manipulation, which is typical for a TASer to do, but isn't too useful a guide line if you're trying to do a single-segment run like I was, so I made my own route. I did take a lot of notes from that TAS, so my thanks to dezbeast for making it.

The game gets annoying after months of playing (mostly due to Air Man's randomness and some of the frustrating game play elements), so I'm submitting this because I'm satisfied with the results at least for now and I couldn't stand running it for much longer anyway. It's not unthinkable that I'll play the game again some time and improve my time, but I have many other games that I want to run, too, so it'll take a while after I get back on this, if I do. Mega Man II is easy to pick up and play, though, so who knows!