The first ever sub 29 minute run! :D
As much as I love this game, the grind to get the speedrun to this point was absolutely brutal. The level of play required, in typical speedrunning fashion, has gone up and up, so many difficult strategies and optimizations have started being required and some even small mistakes can kill a run instantly. Also at this level some RNG was required (even tying all my non-RNG best segments together would not be a sub 29 minute time if I don't have some good luck in there).
Leading up to this run I had a week of horrendous luck, mostly on the boss Ruxxtin. Ruxxtin being the spooky boss of Catacombs and he has a 50% chance to go high or to go low. Him going high saves about 8 seconds, and in the previous week leading up to the day I got this run, I had gotten 21 low patterns out of 25 fights. The likelihood of getting luck this bad was in the bottom 0.14% of RNG.
So after resetting countless runs to the very challenging, run killing early game that is Autumn Hills and Catacombs, the majority of the runs just died to RNG instantly at Ruxxtin. But then once I finally got a good early game with the right Ruxxtin RNG, I was only about a third of the way through the run, with many challenging levels and tricks and bosses and even more impactful RNG.
Many runs that had potential either died to horrible luck or to a single costly mistake, one run in particular I remember pressing the jump button late by 1/60th of a second in 3 different rooms in Searing Crags which caused mistakes that instantly took a great paced run to being too slow now to have a chance of a sub 29.
Another great paced run I lost to some very janky sequence that caused my ninja to clip through a floor also in Searing Crags which would invalidate the run (or cause a major time penalty) since this is a no out of bounds category.
Some runs got to the late game and got bad RNG on Queen of Quills and on Colossuses or in Tower of Time and just could not survive these major time losses through luck including one run where I played within 13 seconds of my best segments outside of the RNG related things that did indeed go very poorly and kill that run too.
What it took for me to get sub 29 was starting to make me hate this game that I normally have loved, and if not for my stubbornness to achieve this goal and for the community that supported my journey, it definitely would have never happened as this had very painful moments that left me just wanting free from this grind.
Honestly going into late game on this absolutely insane pace (the best pace ever as of uploading this run) and knowing my personal best of 29:01 that I was up against had my best Tower of Time ever in it that also had a fairly rare 4 second RNG time save in it from getting a health drop from some eyeballs about half-way through the Tower almost broke me.
After all these years of speedrunning this was probably the hardest nerves have ever hit me during an attempt to get a new best time. I made a small error early in the Tower, as I was jumping off the wall in an attempt to go for the "Hail Mary" strategy, right before my ninja cleared over the corner I slashed which stood the ninja up and made him sort of bonk into the wall, even though I survived the room and backed up the situation about as good as I could have, this still lost me a few seconds.
Another mistake happened in the 3-eyeball 4-block room a little further in, I was going for a very fast way of clearing out the boxes but barely miss timed turning my slash towards the right and failed to destroy a block that I really needed to so that I could hit the crystal on the left to remove the laser at the bottom of the screen, this mistake cost me a couple more seconds. I also did not get the lucky HP drop from these eyes so I lost 4 more seconds to RNG.
Despite losing 9 seconds in Tower of Time over my PB's insane gold Tower, this was not enough to kill this run, because it was absolutely the best run I have ever had in this game.
I lost less than 10 seconds to actual mistakes or missed optimizations throughout the entire run leading into Tower even though I go for most of the hardest strategies and that is the main reason I am proud of this run and so happy to leave it behind. It broke what is probably the last minute barrier to break in this category with a run where I played at my absolute best.
And with that, I will be retiring grinding this category for the far foreseeable future, this run is one I am happy to leave behind and I wish the best of luck to anyone that wants to beat it or just feels inspired to try this game/run themselves. The Messenger is a true masterpiece of a speedrun imo, one that is easy to learn but hard to master with an incredible depth and great community.
I hope you all enjoy the run, and I'll see you in my next speedrunning adventures either in other games or in different categories of The Messenger!
Watch me live at - / grondious