This one was a long time coming. Unlike Mega Man Legends, there was no right way to play this. You're going to take damage. You're going to get hit. The game is going to kill you a lot. There are critical attacks that you can avoid, can't avoid, and sometimes must even manipulate RNG to avoid.

There really isn't much for me to say, let me get a few things out of the way.

Jumping is marginally faster than running. I don't know why or by how much, but it does save some time

Stutter Shot is overpowered in this game, it is performed by tapping up while shooting. It even works on most special weapons!

I took damage on the final boss because my thumb started bleeding midway through Saul Kada (Fire Ruin) making my jump button sticky. That's somewhat why my jumping isn't as accurate past that point. If the sloppy jumping/movement over the last half hour is distracting, I apologize.

My menu management was subpar at times because it was my first completed run with this route, and Zenny drops are randomized, meaning I end up with slightly different money every time. This comes to a head in Kimotoma City when I do the menus in the wrong order. You'll see why I was willing to look past that pretty quickly.

Because this game is so divided into Areas, I'm going to split up my comments that way.

Flutter Fire

This is probably frame perfect; all you can do is die in a fire. The only way to make it faster would be to take falling damage, but I don't believe it to be possible

--Calinca 1

I have some minor movement errors in the flutter. This started out as a test run, so I wasn't going to reset over half a seconds worth of errors.

I buy the stuff I need, flubbing the menus. I'm less than two seconds behind my par time going through the gate, so, it's nothing huge, just disappointing looking back.

Going to the ruin, Zakobon almost hit me. They're jackasses and pop up randomly, nothing you can do if they spawn right under you while jumping.

In the ruin I attempt siblicide and run past a bunch of reaverbots, before talking to some old guy who pays me with a refractor to kill a giant reaverbot. As I affectionately call him, Spikey Ass Robot has a one frame trick where you can hit him without triggering his invincibility period. Unfortunately, sometimes it doesn't detect him being hit and can be annoying. He goes down averagely, I didn't get any double damage on him, which is disappointing.

I'm about one second behind par time, because I got the Zakobon jump in the rollerboard room, which saves a second.

I go to the flutter, make my jetskates and head to The Forbidden Island

--Forbidden Island

Pausing causes audio to not get loaded and saves marginal bits of time skipping text. Nothing important happens until the wolf shows up. He just gets stuck on walls because of expert placement and decent stutter shots. I can't actually complain about how he went in this run, just that usually he ends up getting further away. Anyway, I get the zenny I needed from them anyway.

The Mammoos go poorly because on the third one I miscount the number of shots by one. It costs me at least a second for no reason. The charging ones that you have to jump are really easy. Their collision boxes are a bit disjointed, but your jump height is ridiculously good in this game.

Rush Mammoo is an asshole of a boss. He has a Critical Attack he randomly does that costs 9 seconds, and he has a multitude of invincibility attacks I cannot avoid.

This goes horribly after the first two stuns. He turns the wrong way so I can't do triple damage to his snout during his anger animation, this makes it so I don't skip the third jump. To boot, he does his invincibility attack. If I get perfect RNG, I can probably save 12 seconds on this fight.

--Sulphur Bottom

Talk to people, more messy movement (I hate that I was in a test run mindset at first) and then I make the bottle rocket and prepare for the biggest run ender of the game.

--Manda Island

The Crabbot can combo you with up to six shots, kill you very easily with any of her attacks, and has a critical attack that costs a whole minute. First things first, we don't let her do that invincibility attack, instead, we make sure that once she gets to 1/4th health, she never gets to do another attack. This is where the stutter shot saves my ass. Without it, skipping her invincibility would either be impossible or close enough to impossible that going for it in a run wouldn't be worth it.

She actually was very kind. Ground pound as first attack is perfect, then a spin. If she had stopped the rapid fire one turn sooner, it would have been a perfect fight.

I get the drill stuff, and go to the ruin.

This ruin goes subpar, I probably would have reset had I not wanted to test this route. I miss the first jump and have to ledge grab. I get both frog dodges though, which is very good. Bola 1 gives me the bad luck. If he spawns high, he cannot hit you and you just kill him before he finishes firing. I got the lower spawn and just have to make do.

I don't know why I jumped into that plant, I call bull on the hitbox.

I roll off because of frame perfect bullcrap. The Yellow Pellet Room (1) of doom goes perfectly. Bola 2 always goes perfectly because you can manipulate him. I go through the ruin and loop around to get to the upper floor now that the bridge is up. The Frogs hit me because I noticed they were in the wrong position too late for the second dodge.

And then I run into Yellow Pellet Room 2, where I miss the spot ever so slightly. It probably costs ten seconds, and is disappointing considering how cool it looks when I actually get it.

The thing that hits me after drilling is purely random and has never happened before. At least I mindgamed the frog.

Movements for the rest of the ruin are VERY specific to avoid taking damage or stuff falling on my head. If I go left while jetskating on the grating, that means you have to go left. Everything else goes fine for the rest of the ruin, and I grab one of the parts I need for later.

Frog Boss goes perfectly.

On the way back to the flutter I grab the bowling ball as the second part of the Ground Crawler, which is pretty broken in this game. Unfortunately, it only sees limited action. It's the source of my route change, because grabbing it saves about twenty seconds overall, even taking into account the money I use for upgrading.

The fact that I upgrade only the attack on the homing missile is huge. The range increases my changes of survival hugely, but, because I'm grabbing ground crawler, I need the money for it.

--Sulphur Bottom 2

My movements seem to clean up, because I still am marginally ahead of my record.

--Nino 1

This island has a lot of timed segments, so it's a bit of a relaxer after Manda. First things first is buying parts to make things faster when I can.

Door 1 is timed, and... that's it. I can chill on the lever for most of it, but there's a slight chance of them destroying the door if I do, so I play it safe.

Door 2 has literally nothing to do. I could just sit there and destroy birdbots as they came to the door and save no time.

Door 3 is not timed, and is instead goal based. This is where one of the most exact tricks in the run come up. The missiles give enemies a lengthy invincibility so you can't stack damage on them. But, if the EXPLOSION hits the enemy and not the missile? They get no invincibility and you can shave off their lifebar extremely fast.

Area 4 is timed

The Fantastic Five, as I call them, go poorly. I'm supposed to kill it on the second dive, but the lack of range makes the fight marginally harder. It's not too much time lost, and I'm still ahead of my other runs at this point.

After that, I get permission to go kill the pirates and leave. I heal for Missile Ammo

--Calbania 1

Hardest part of the game hands down, this is where most of my runs lose a huge amount of time. I have to take some kids to the base and have them let me in. Problem is, they can run wherever the hell they want.

Glyde Base 0 is the outside. Here is where the kids are a problem. Their AI routine makes no sense at all and should not be trusted. I've waited over five minutes with the field fully cleared of enemies and they've still not come to the spot that triggers the cutscene. So, what I do is I kill as much as I can as fast as I can, and pull out the lifter to force them there. By miracle, one of them actually do what their supposed with the other not far behind! This was extremely good.

Glyde Base 1 is the hardest section of the game. It's Random whether the turrets hit you at the start and make it impossible to shoot down grounded planes. It's random when the planes take off. It's random what the lock-on will arbitrarily decide to lock onto. Getting 6/7 of my intended kills to start is good, but the fact the planes stay JUST out of range when I try to finish them is very annoying. I was so close to saving another 15-20 seconds here. But, considering I skipped the range upgrade, I knew this would be hard, and breaking even with my old run was a blessing.

Glyde Base 2 is pretty easy. The Birdbots spawn in patterns, and one of them has event armor, where you can't kill it in normal cycles. I want to conserve missiles for three, but I don't go slow in doing so.

Glyde Base 3 is a mess. Just tank the hits and kill them as fast as you can. That's all you can do, hopefully get enough invincibility to stutter shot

Glyde Base 4 has a bit of a skip. I like it. Axelryman showed me the fastest way to do it. It's not as risky as it should be. Normally you're supposed to stack up two boxes, but the guys will throw them away, so you have to kill them all first and it takes forever. This skip does not. Killing the birdbots in the room rescues her.

Glyde Base 5 is just dodge bullets and hope that you trigger the loading zone before the tanks murder you.

I finally leave Calbania, making the aquajets, which are required for the run.

--Nino 2

Here, Glyde makes his last stand. It's really easy, but I get bad luck that costs no time. The damage doesn't end up hurting me, so, chalk that up to who cares. I do miss not being able to throw a missile at Roll though :(

After that, I go to the ruin, and prepare for the most involved section of the game.

During the above water parts, I make no major mistakes. Once under water, I switch to aquajets and then almost immediately do a block puzzle. If my jump were a little better planned, I could have saved three seconds by landing on the boxes and immediately jumping, otherwise, that was fairly clean.

The next real challenge is another of the big run-enders; The Jellyfish. These monstrous assholes have a huge amount of health, are unaffected by water physics, fire orbs that are undodgable underwater in the worst of cases, and give you paralysis if they hit you, paralysis that sends them into taunt mode so they won't go near you. Paralysis slows you down to a snails pace, and even worse under water. If one dives at the start, I only have a fraction of a second to roll out of the way.

Well, I have no comments about how it went. It was over a minute faster than anything I've recorded in a run before. It is perhaps the luckiest thing that has ever happened to me in any game.

The rest of the ruin goes okay. The whole riding a fish thing, I have to be careful on. You'll see me try to jump once and the jump getting eaten. 90% of the time when I do that it actually gives me a slight jump and I fall off the fish. I was very lucky.

Once the ruin is drained, and I get the key. We fight Klaymoor. No further comment.

Escaping the ruin is a challenge of precision jumping and platforming. If jumps didn't have a slight delay, it'd be easy. I do miss a trick I wanted to get, which is jetskating off a ledge, hitting a box, and boosting over to the platforms. It would have saved two seconds, but I barely missed.

Klaymoor 2 pisses me off. It cost very little time, but for what should be a free fight, it's embarrassing. I don't think I've ever messed that up before now.

I heal at data and switch to the ground crawler, and upgrade it. It represents the biggest improvements over my previous runs coming up!

--Sulpher Bottom 3

Nothing happens of interest

--Saul Kada

Kimotoma city is where another of my more recent improvements. The prisoner key skip is very obviously one of the most precise, annoying tricks in the game. Anyway, skipping all that boring stuff, I go to the room where it says get past the bonne defenses. Then the magic happens. All the damage I take is intentional (except the explosion at the end) and everything works. This trick is maybe doable maybe a fraction of the time. The gate timing can be wrong, and you won't get the damage boost. The damage boost can send you backwards, the bombs will hit you all the time, sometimes the tanks will fire and make it harder to kill them. There's just so much that can go around.

After that, we get to the messy menuing I was complaining about. It's just the random zenny drops mixed with the unfamiliarity of the route. I could have sold first and saved a little bit of tie, but it's not too bad.

Blitzkrieg: To think I used to think thirty seconds was a good time for him.

Saul Kada Ruins are strenuous, difficult ruins. They lack an annoying boss like Nino, nor the annoying enemies of Manda. I'm going to state right now that this ruin goes 100% perfectly in terms of tricks. There's a few minor slowdowns when taking out enemies on the first floor, but otherwise? I don't know what to complain about. Most of my commentary is about mistakes or tricks, but, this is almost all execution.

I guess I should mention that there are floor traps literally all over the place. And, the lava detection is inclusive, if even a millimeter of your feet touch lava, you catch fire, and it drains your health to redlife. Other than that... yeah. I go through a bunch of rooms and unlock stuff.

The Pillar of Lava "Boss" goes pretty well. Bon Bonne is an asshole and can miss throws, but he didn't do too badly today. It was about twelve seconds faster than my last run and previous WR. I noticed my thumb was bleeding around here, but, I couldn't stop the run after those jellyfish!

The actual giant reaverbot boss goes fine as well. Most of his attacks aren't well suited to you just standing there and firing at him. He relies on failed dodges to hit you, but if you just stand there, you're virtually indestructable unless an orb flanks your buster shots. If he does the flamethrower attack, there's five seconds to simply step to the side and avoid it. Yeah, he's pathetic.

I heal after that mostly because the Righteous Lava Skip (named after one of the users that pointed it out) will take all but one or two HP when I pull it off. Anyway, I go back through the upper floors with the remixed enemy locations. There are tons of floor traps, so, hitting the walls is almost unavoidable.

Every dungeon to this point has a "bullshit" room. Yellow Pellets, A fish that can go the wrong way and cost me two minutes or I can get stuck on it for no reason. This ruin has the first floor giant chicken missile room. This room is nearly impossible to do normally, and fighting the bots takes forever. Thus, the righteous lava skip was born. It doesn't actually skip lava, it rather skips getting hit and dying in here by deciding lava is less painful than missiles, and hoping I have at least a sliver of health left for the bosses in case they hit me. Spoiler, they don't.

There isn't much to say about the Gustaff, other than that the camera angle does make it go faster

There isn't much to say about Bon Bonne other than stutter shot.

That's it, then I leave Saul Kada with a very healthy lead over any previous run.

--Sulpher Bottom 4

This is about where I realize that having the sulpher bottom as a major destination doesn't make sense for commentary.

--Calinca 2

First thing I do once I land is buy the Buster Unit Omega. It allows me to hit the boss while maintaining 6 Damage buster shots. After that, plot stuff, the only skippable door cutscene in the game, and perhaps the best song in teh game.

The Train Battle is mostly scripted and abuses stutter shot a lot. There are parts of the train that flash, but don't actually do damage.

Part 2 has missiles I can't catch. I get 5/7 of the missiles, which is pretty good. I've only gotten 5/5 once in a run. Other than that this is again stutter shot to victory. Strangely enough, even if I hit this thing with the Ground Crawler, it doesn't do much damage.

Calinca is the most broken of the ruin, considering we skip a large portion of the ruin with the Red Key Skip. I don't know who discovered it, but kudos, because it's awesome. I'll explain the actual mechanics of it when I get there, but I've never actually run the ruin without the skip, so don't expect me to know the specifics of the normal route. I just know it saves a TON of time.

The actual ruin becomes a problem very quickly when I realize that I'm about 2000 zenny short of my required Zenny. I slow down and kill a few enemies that usually hit me anyway. That gives me more than enough; I probably killed one too many, but it saves time anyway on the way back. I almost fall when I'm hit by the spinning blades, too!

After the blue key and laser manual, I unlock the blue barrier, and move forward. I dodge a forcefield enemy, and it all goes well. The REALLY, REALLY close jetskate jumping is the Red Key Skip. I nearly fall off during the second portion of it. Close call.

The Rush Mammoo Traps go perfectly. And then, it is time for the Bullshit room of Calinca. The three keys that run away from you if they see you or if you shoot at them. With a Giant Chicken, spawning paralysis Zakobon, and random shit everywhere. I'll just let you watch, because this time is actually slightly above average despite all that happened. With godly luck, you can do this room in forty seconds, but, anything around a minute is usually very good.

I grab the key and prepare for the Jello-Boss. Honestly... he goes as well as he can. Using the new strats I have, I skip one of his lengthy attacks. It's actually faster than the Shining Laser fight later on, even. The problem with this strategy is that it requires expert timing, and very, very good movement, aiming and knowing exactly when his attacks will happen. The camera reveals how close I was to death; and it nearly gave me a heart attack too!

Other than that, I leave, heal, and prepare for the end-game

--Sulpher Bottom 5

Oh great, another usele- wait, something happens? That's right, Geetz attacks. Not much to say other than I got within one hit of a three cycle, but ended up settling for a four cycle. It's random, depends on attacks, and manual aiming to get a three cycle. This isn't horrible, especially without the range upgrade, but disappointing simply because of how close I got.

--Calbania 2

I'm lumping this in before defense zone. I get the shining laser's other part, make it, upgrade attack, and go to the defense zone.

--Defense Zone

I have one minor hiccup fighting the gorugoru's early on, where I forget to shining laser before using buster shots. That's how rarely I get this far into the run! I straighten up quickly and do the rest of the area absolutely great. I even get past the barrier enemy toward the end. The mini-boss goes as well as it can too. That's all there is to say, really, there aren't any tricks to this.

--Residential Zone

Movement isn't that great here, but I have to watch out for Fire Zakobons, so it's a good to be a little cautious. I heal and prepare for the boss refights.

--Mother Zone

The Boss refights are pretty tricky, either due to weapon differences, or stage differences.

Frog is standard; if he jumps, you lose time, if he doesn't, you're happy and kill him.

Jello Boss is pretty much given at this point. I get pretty awful damage at the start for some reason, but make it up during the platform part.

The next part is the absolute most annoying part of running Legends 2. These Jellyfish in the high gravity area have a 66% chance of firing fast enough orbs to knock you down before you can do anything, and in high gravity with their spinning attacks, easily kill you with the very fast homing orbs. When I first started running, they killed over 50% of the runs that got to them. I developed the very precise opening movement to mitigate things. A jump while I run because jumps are slight faster, pausing to trigger an animation glitch that makes me able to stop earlier for double damage, and of course hoping they just die.

Giant Reaverbot is exactly the same, except with more health.

The last step of the game is Sera. Here, for part 1, you have to be able to manual aim and find the double damage locations that require impossibly precise angles. How far away you are, how high she is hovering, what animation she is in, everything affects where you need to aim for double damage. In my previous run, I went three for three. Here? I get about half of the double damage, but she also gives me a pretty awful attack pattern

Sera 2 is more straightforward. Her body takes more damage, so manual aim. Also, you will need to reload, so, when she does an attack, it's good to let it recharge enough to finish her. She gets a shot in on me, but, that was intentional. I was hoping she'd die before she hit me, but it just wasn't meant to be. After that, it's over. I have to skip the credits because in-game timer runs during credits.

Overall... running this game was a pain in the ass. I'd normally throw a special thanks on here for all the people who helped me... but the list would be too large and I'd hurt feelings. Pretty much includes a lot of the people who talked to me on SDA, SRL and MMLS about running the Legends series, as well as my loyal viewers on Twitch.tv (http://www.twitch.tv/JMC4789)

Archive of Times and my thoughts on them

6-1-2012 1:56:19 (First Single Segment Time)
8-23-2012 1:42:43 (First attempted Speedrun)
9-15-2012 1:38:30 (I stated that it was a good run, with maybe 2-3 minutes of possible improvements looming)
1-1-2013: 1:36:58 (Stated that 1:35 would probably be submittable)
1-2-2013: 1:33:50 (I didn't understand how this happened. Stated a few days later that 1:32 was definitely the limit.)
1-6-2013 1:31:12 (Stated that this run could have been sub 1:28 if everything went perfect)
1-10-2013 1:27:25 (Righteous Lava Skip and OoB stuff distracted me after this. Stated 42 seconds could be cut out with perfect play, mulled submitting this for a long time.)
2-5-2013 No time, but I discovered the prisoner glitch which made me realize sub 1:26 could be possible.
6-11-2013 1:26:31 (Didn't submit because I was fifty seconds behind previous run halfway through.)
6-27-2013 1:24:53 (Brand New Route adding the Ground Crawler, who knows, maybe sub 1:23:xx is possible!)

To Be continued...