A Pokémon player has beaten Pokémon Shining Pearl in just over 50 minutes, a speedrun that currently stands as the world record for the recently released Nintendo Switch game.
Pokémon Shining Pearl, and its companion title Pokémon Brilliant Diamond, released last week (November 19), both remakes of the classic 2007 Nintendo DS games Pokémon Diamond and Pearl. While the updated versions offer players roughly 30+ hours of gameplay for the story campaign, YouTuber Werster has seemingly cracked it in 50 minutes, 36 seconds (as spotted by Kotaku).
You can watch the entirety of Werster’s playthrough here:
Werster uses a few tricks to speed up the generally sedate pace of a Pokémon game, such as zooming through the set up by entering a character name of “1” and selecting the first option for the friend character’s name, setting the in-game text speed to “fast”, and turning off battle effects to cut down on the length of encounters. Random encounters and trainer battles are also mostly ignored.
While there doesn’t appear to be any specific hacks being used to shorten the total play time, Werster does use several glitches to get around some of the game’s normal progression gates. These are listed on the YouTube description as “Menu storage (and double/triple variants of it), Door Storage, Cutscene Clipping to OoB, Trainer-Menu Storage, Poke Doll Battles, Surf on Land, Early [Elite Four battle], Fast Cynthia [the campaign’s final boss].”
However, that so many glitches were there to be exploited may not be something to celebrate, with Werster saying that the Diamond/Pearl “remakes are so broken you can beat them in under an hour”.
Ultimately, the speedrunner adds that “this run was far from perfect, but I believe it’s the first ever sub [one hour], so really happy with the progress made.”
As ever in the world of video game speedrunning though, the big question is: how long will this record last?
In related news, players may have found a tease of the next Pokémon game, January 2022’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus, buried in Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl. A new book found in the Canalave Library tells a story that points to locations that don’t exist in any other mainline entry.
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