A speedrunner has beaten the recently-released Pokémon Shining Pearl in only 33 minutes and 10 seconds, potentially setting a new world record.
As reported by NintendoLife, speedrunner Werster posted a video of their run of Shining Pearl on YouTube yesterday. Their completion time for an “any percent” speedrun, which means that they “beat” the game rather than completing all of its content, was 33:10, which is thought to be a new record, according to NintendoLife. The speedrun was completed on version 1.1.1 of the game, which is current at time of writing.
In the video and an accompanying list of all the glitches used, Werster describes exactly what it takes to pull off a run like this. They turned the music all the way down throughout the run to skip the sound effects that play when obtaining an item, for example, which makes things move faster. The most frequent glitch they used was one they call Menu Storage, which enables the player to open multiple menus at once and move while they still have a menu open. They also used animation interrupts and out-of-bounds tricks to Surf on land and skip cutscenes and trainer battles that would otherwise take a long time to clear.
On the glitch list, Werster claims the game is “very” busted, which is what enabled so many of these glitches and bypasses. It’s unclear how many bugs Nintendo is aware of and will try to fix in the next patch—and therefore how long runs like this will be possible. But for now, players can take full advantage of Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl’s numerous exploits in pursuit of speedrunning glory.
