[WR] Phineas and Ferb: Ride Again Any% (Emulator) -

Behold! The Melon DS Emulat-inator!

Here are some of the strats and technique advice I've come up with.

1-1 Zero Screw: My first discovery! Collecting a screw for the first time is a timeloss of ~1s, but 1-2 has a lot of cycle-based movement, which means if you collect your first screw while waiting for a spinner to rotate, you never lose that second. Keep in mind that you need 10 screws for your first upgrade in 1-4. Overall this saves 1 second consistently.

   • zero screw 1-2 all fastest paths demo  
1-2 All Cycles routed for Zero Screw: After this run, I experimented and found all of the fastest paths through 1-2 depending on how fast you do the initial drillclip. I did the wrong path in this run, though.

   • RTA more viable setup for 2-1 elevato...  
2-1 Elevator Jump setup: Inspired by the TAS, I found a much more forgiving and slightly faster setup to make this cycle; there is no reason not to learn this over the trash can jump, as this can be done 90% of the time with minimal practice. By contrast, only 2 of the other 7 leaderboard runs attempting trash can jump were successful.

2-1 Bridge clip: While running with Ferb on the invisible bridge, you can run NE between the wall and the 1st bridge stanchion from the right instead of the single drillclip later, which saves 1-2s.

2-3 better Drillclip spot: After the hover pack upgrade, I realized you can stay north of the toolbox and drillclip SE, saving a fraction of a second over running around to the south and doing the same.

2-2 Balloon Jump safety strat: It is possible to hit this trick in stride, but it's much more difficult to land on the correct part of the balloon and time your 1st jump because the balloon is offscreen while you fall. With this movement, I can get the snap about 60-70% of the time, and it saves 5-10s (10s if you no-stop). It's only faster on the 1st try.

   • faster 2-1 respawn on prop manip  
2-1 Faster Prop Manip: I discovered that falling north instead of south saves over 1s from a quicker respawn.

   • PAF: Ride Again | New glitch with goo...  
2-4 Goo Hypersliding - Mim found this. Rare win for keyboard users - it's often faster than with any controller's C-stick, as you can see me easily mash right to clip with almost no resistance. It's also supposedly faster to do as Ferb.

   • helicopter helicopter more consistent  
2-4 Prop Manip setup: This strat works very often, it's the most consistent setup that I know of.

3-1 Prop Manip/Drillclip setup: I discovered that this works consistently as long as your two drillclips are good (drill as soon as Ferb starts facing diagonally). If either are late, you often don't get far enough into the wall. If you do a third drillclip, usually you phase through the wall and die.

3-2 Consistent OOB setup: After getting the 10th toolbox, I discovered that holding down+left about half a second after the drillclip always lands Ferb inside a wall, which was already known to provide an easier and faster path through the rest of the area. You can switch to Phineas if you want to bother trying to stick the landing, I decided it wasn't worth it.

4-1 Keyboard Noseclip technique: On controller, the precise diagonal inputs are much easier. My keyboard solution is to hold left and then hit down+L at the same time to switch to Phineas, which consistently gets through in 3 noseclips. My run did this poorly the first time and wasted about a minute flailing to get back OOB.

4-2 Prop Manip setup: I improved this strat! RealMim found a fast setup: jumping OOB to kill Ferb, then hovering back inside the wall to save+quit, reload and jump onto the semi-surface to switch to Ferb and respawn farther into the stage. My improvement is that you can simply run across, double jump and quickly hover over the gap to kill Ferb without moving on the Z axis, which is easier and 3-5s faster.

This run could go below an hour and even theoretically get faster than Tyll's console record since emulator has strictly faster loads. I'm pretty happy with this run, it may not be sub 1 but I think this is the kind of run I was hoping to grind out. I hit basically every trick, including one that I never got in practice (3-2 ladder skip), aside from Huge Gap Skip which makes me want to throw up. Also, it's PB and emu WR by 2 full minutes so it's hard to complain.

The game has been utterly broken. It's a skill-based, wildly technical speedrun and it was a huge challenge to learn, but an enjoyable one. Phineas and Ferb: Ride Again is an awful casual experience, it's almost 14 years old, it only has maybe a dozen runners on the leaderboard, and before me, no one had submitted a run in over a year. Yet the sheer scope of technical knowledge the community has discovered and documented is completely absurd. This game's community is absolutely insane and I couldn't have done this without them.

Set on August 13th, 2024, this run finished 2 minutes and 15 seconds ahead of the previous World Record (1:02:49 - DoctorDirigible).