The Story of Melee's Craziest Speedrun
The video is a documentary‑style deep dive into the Super Smash Bros. Melee "All Trophies" speedrun category, the longest and most completionist run in the game. It begins with a brief history of Melee speedrunning, explains the 290‑trophy requirements and the varied unlock conditions (character‑specific, lottery coins, bonuses, RNG‑based trophies). The narrative follows three pioneering runners – NCB1221, Bwells, and aMSa – through their inaugural attempts, record‑breaking runs, and subsequent refinements. NCB1221’s first run is recounted, highlighting his routing spreadsheet, a costly 5,000‑match KO miscalculation, and coin‑grinding via crouching. Bwells improves on NCB’s route, discovers faster coin‑generation through dash‑dancing and keyboard mashing, and repeatedly lowers the world record from ~32 h to 20 h. aMSa attempts the run on console, faces hardware disc errors, bonus‑skip bugs, and a controversy over the Master Hand glitch, which is ultimately allowed for this category, earning a console sub‑record of 21 h 45 m. The video then details the evolution of coin‑grinding methods (crouching, dash‑dancing, box‑controller input), the physical endurance required (all‑night runs, sleep deprivation), and community collaboration (interviews, shared spreadsheets, TAS speculation). The host attempts his own sub‑20‑hour run using a hybrid route, a box controller, and live streaming, ultimately achieving an 18 h 59 m world record, beating both emulator and console records. The documentary concludes with reflections on the category’s difficulty, the importance of endurance over technical skill, and encouragement for future runners.
Chapters
Speedrunning. The premise is simple: beat a game, or part of a game, as fast as possible. Of all of the Super Smash Bros. Melee speedrun categories out there, one sticks out among the rest. Today, we're going to explore the absurd world of Melee's longest, most comprehensive speedrun category: All Trophies. We'll uncover the discoveries that made this run possible, and hear directly from the runners themselves. [FOREIGN] Super Smash Bros. Melee speedrunning has a history that dates all the way back to around the game's launch. During one of Melee's earliest tournaments, Toy Festa 2002. A prize given to some winners was a Melee Movie Disc which, among other things, contained some impressive Break the Targets and Home Run Contest replays. These video clips proved Break the Targets was ripe for speedrunning, as each target test was short and instantly replayable, allowing for continued practice and optimizing. Since then, Break the Targets speedrunning Speedruns have been documented extensively, with new records still being hit to this day. In 2015, Melee's speedrun.com page had 5 speedrun categories: Break the Targets, Classic, Adventure, All-Star, and Event Matches. In 2018, a runner named NCB1221 would request a new category to be added, a category that he had, in fact, just successfully ran. I decided to ask NCB about this and see if he could recall how his All Trophies run was added in the first place.
As far as I remember, um, Pokémon Master— I forget the numbers behind his name— but he ended up talking to me in the Smash Discord about it and trying to, I guess, hash out all the category rules. But at the time when I ran it, it was not a category on speedrun.com yet, so it was kind of new territory.
So what are the requirements for this speedrun? As the title suggests, you need to acquire all 290 in-game trophies in order to achieve this specific notice.
I mean, it's as 100% as you can possibly run this game unless you want to do a 100-day-long grind for 1 million messages— 1 million, uh, versus matches.
Yeah, a true 100% run would technically need to include 1 million VS matches, as a special message appears once that's happened. Otherwise, all trophies can be considered a 100% run of Melee. Did you come up with the idea of the run? Did you see it somewhere? And like, what, what pushed you to like run it in the first place?
I want to say I just was thinking about it one day, and the idea actually had gone back several years. Like, what would be the best way to to route this, I think I imagined it more of a routing problem rather than an execution problem. And so I just kind of got to work and was making a spreadsheet, trying to figure out, I guess, try to overlap the different requirements. More of a puzzle than try to like do the best execution in the game.
Trophies have a variety of unlock criteria. Some are character-specific unlocks, Some can be obtained in the lottery, others can be found randomly in single-player modes, and others are unlocked based on specific requirements, such as getting a certain distance in the Home Run Contest game mode. Two of the most troublesome trophies to unlock in this run include the Tom Nook and Discun trophies. For the Tom Nook trophy, you must have acquired a total of 1,000 lottery coins or more, which is designed to be unlocked after weeks or even months of casual gameplay. To unlock the Disc Gun trophy, you are required to acquire every in-game bonus at least once. Bonuses are awarded to players in some 1-player and VS modes for accomplishing certain feats during a match. There are 249 different bonuses to earn. Like trophies, some bonuses are based on RNG factors, such as what Pokémon you threw from a Poké Ball item. Obtaining the Mew Catcher and Celebi Catcher bonuses, for example, require throwing a Poké Ball with the respective rare Pokémon in it, which is a 1 out of 251 chance for each. However, if all players, stages, event matches, or the score display feature haven't been unlocked, you can't encounter Celebi at all. Routing this speedrun is about keeping track of every single trophy and bonus you collect, working first towards the guaranteed trophies and bonuses, and being mindful about the RNG-based trophies and bonuses as you go. This was NCB's route.
3, 2, 1, ready!
When NCB began his run, he hadn't practiced much.
The only thing I might have practiced was doing, um, like a no damage clear or something.
Yeah.
But I didn't practice anything else. To be honest, I hadn't even played the game in years prior to that.
Wow. Despite having barely practiced or played at all recently, his practice would pay off in the very first split in his run: No Damage Clear. A No Damage Clear involves playing through either Classic, Adventure, or All-Star and taking no damage. This awards you with the No Damage Clear bonus. One of 249 bonuses you need for the Discun trophy. Even on the easiest difficulty, this can prove to be troublesome. Getting hit just one time invalidates the entire playthrough. Luckily, on try 4, he was able to clutch it out. Next, he would play and beat Hard Adventure Mode with no continues. However, NCB's run would suffer from a fairly significant flaw.
I'm sure the highlight or the lowlight of the run was my gross miscalculation on the versus matches versus KOs. And I must have just misread that you needed— I knew you needed the 5,000 KOs for, what is it, Score Display. So I guess I just somehow misinterpreted that thinking you needed 5,000 versus matches as well. And I put it on my spreadsheet and I guess I never revisited it. Do I not have like all the stages or something? No, it's 5,000 matches. I wouldn't have done that. Did I? Surely I didn't. I don't know what to do. How could I make a mistake that bad?
Let's review what happened. This counts as a match, but no KOs. These count as KOs. "Wicka wicka!" Since NCB did 5,000 matches with a single SD each and no KOs at all, 10 hours of his run were completely wasted.
I like to think of it as the worst mistake in speedrun history.
Hahaha.
I can't imagine there's a worse one.
As a result, the run went far beyond what was needed and continued to run as he slept. Twice, in fact.
So after that soul-crushing realization, I knew I wasn't gonna finish it. And so I just decided to sleep and I woke up early again the next day and just continued on, but I had a few things that I needed to do on that Sunday, and so I couldn't play as much as I did on Saturday. The original intent was definitely to do it in one run without sleeping.
NCB's 5,000-match snafu wouldn't be the only time sink in the run. For even 28 hours in, he still needed the 1,000 Smash Coin trophy, Tom Nook, and he only had 95. After some quick testing and some help from chat, NCV would realize that he had two options to generate coins quickly: continually dash dance or crouch repeatedly in training mode.
I still think as far as I was approaching it, the crouching was probably the easiest way for me to go about it because dash dancing just takes So much more effort.
Yeah.
And paying attention, like, because if you're looking away or you're not really paying attention, you could be— your character might be dead and you might not— you might be mashing left and right and you're not even— you know, it's not even counting.
Crouching nonstop still meant it would take over 7 hours to generate the Smash Coins he needed. So he decided to make his time a little more exciting.
I watched Lord of the Rings while I was doing the crouch grind. I think somebody in the Twitch chat even commented when they heard the "You Shall Not Pass." I had headphones on, I think, but I think they could still hear it.
Finally, after obtaining the remaining 1-player mode exclusive trophies, he finished the run with a time of 61 hours, 11 minutes, and 50 seconds.
Yeah, I was hoping for 24+ hours at most, which I think I ended up playing in the 35— between 35 and 40 of actual playtime in that 61 hours, because I left it running while I was sleeping and at work. So it's 61 hours is, is real time, not playtime. I definitely, after playing that much in that short of time, I did not feel great. Not that I, not that I was sick, but it's just like one of those, you sit on the couch all day doing nothing. I mean, do that for 2+ days and you start to feel real lethargic and like, man, I need a shower, even though I just took one.
Uh, have you tried any runs since that run?
I didn't. I had— I think I planned on doing it one time, but I think it was around the time when Bwells was actually doing it.
Soon after his run would be published on speedrun.com, a challenger would soon vie for the number 1 spot, a runner by the name of Bwells. Like NCB, Bwells had a long history with Melee, having played it since around the time the game came out.
I was aware of like the time trial and the Home Run Derby, uh, scene for a while. Like, I'd seen YouTube videos of like Ganondorf maxing out the counter kind of deal in Home Run Derby, stuff like that. And then I just like clicked on the category Essentials on speedrun.com and saw the glory that is All Trophies. My first reaction to it was, holy crap, Melee is a huge game. 61 hours is probably be like reasonable. And then I started watching it. Like once I saw that he had, you know, 20-odd hours of just suiciding with different people, I was like, there has to be a faster way of doing this.
For his first attempt, Bwells would also make some mistakes, and a few miscalculations of his own.
As is a common trend for me in this run, there is a Smash Wiki page about all unlockables, that exists, and I just took that page as gospel. Yeah, I did Classic with everyone, All-Star with everyone, Adventure with everyone. It does not mention that you can get those trophies by just getting everyone's 100 matches trophy. So I thought that I had to do all Classic to get all Classic.
Due to some misleading language on SmashWiki, Bwells would clear each single-player mode with every character.
There's a flag that tells you if you've beaten Classic with everybody and shows you what the lowest difficulty you've beaten it with everybody is. That's not what it checks. I should have known that from NCB's run, given that he never did like Classic mode.
Mm-hmm.
13 hours in, he'd sleep for about another 6 hours before continuing, but only spend about 4.5 hours grinding for coins since he had over 300 coins already from playing all those single-player modes. How many runs have you done to date?
Completed runs? 3. Every time I've completed a run, it has been world record.
Yeah, that's awesome.
I mean, it goes to tell you just how soft the category is in some ways, right? Also, every time I have come back has been because I have a new strategy for the Smash coins.
With this newfound knowledge of coin grinding optimizations, and what he learned about obtaining character trophies more quickly, Bewild was able to improve his PB and set the world record with each new run.
I would not like to continue.
Game over.
There we go.
21:30.
32:45. That's the record. The main upgrade from the 32-hour to the 21-hour was, uh, not sleeping and not doing an hour of work in the middle of the run.
Oh, that would help.
Yeah, so I, I just did the same route with a few more suicides. Cutting out a lot of Classic and a lot of Adventure Mode, but still doing All-Star Mode with basically everybody.
So, why did Bwells use NCB's crouching method to get the 999 coins? I asked Bwells to elaborate.
The worst trophy in the game is Tom Nook Smash Coins trophy. You have to get 999 coins from the coins you use in the lottery, not like the coin battles. And the way you do that is you smash the control stick with a momentary reset in neutral, it seems like has to happen, or at the very least has to like go through center. So the best way of getting it is to just be mashing up and down on the control stick. We've also found out that you can mash shield on there, so mashing shield and mashing up and down or left right like dash dancing would also work, is the most efficient way of getting coins. You have to do this, you know, for multiple hours to get it going, and it has to be in a 1-player mode. Then if you have it in multiplayer, you are earning something like a tenth of as many coins as you normally would. NCB has the actual numbers for that.
Buel's third run would be his best time yet: 20 hours, 6 2 minutes and 19 seconds. I asked NCB how he felt about Bwells' time.
Once he got his 24 or however long his run was, I was like, "Well, that sealed my fate. I'm never doing it again." I was kind of appreciative that he ran it so I didn't have to do it again. I was fine losing my record to that.
As it stood, Bwells would remain the world record holder in this category. But NCB and Bwells wouldn't be the only people crazy enough to attempt this run. Just after Bwells' first world record in 2020, another runner would attempt all trophies. Someone many in the competitive Melee scene would recognize, the Japanese Yoshi player, aMSa. [Japanese] 5. How did you discover the All Trophies category?
So netplay was not good at the time, so I'm trying to find some content on my streaming. I'm just looking for the kind of content. So at first I'm trying the Red Target speedrun.
I'm pretty into the Yoshi speedruns, but after finishing my runs, I'm just looking for another Mario speedrun, and then I found the 100% Although aMSa wouldn't prepare much for his run, he did have two other runs to look at to inform his routing.
At first I checked Bwells on the NCB's running. Basically I did not block this. Just check my sequence, like how to get this, this trophy, this trophy, something something.
I asked AumSum if there were any issues or mistakes he made for his 2020 run.
Unfortunately, when I played the first run, my first run, I was— I messed up some stuff like the— so you know, we have to try the stamina mode.
Yes.
For the— yeah, for the character. I actually used the quick mode at the time. Do you know quick mode?
Yes, you mean like Lightning Melee?
Yeah, but the Lightning Melee doesn't count the KOs.
No way.
So I missed the 5,000 KOs.
Dude, that sucks.
That's too bad, dude.
Unfortunately for Amsa, trying to use Lightning Melee for the 5,000 KOs set him back several hours. His troubles wouldn't end there though. Streaming on YouTube ended up being a problem, as there was an issue with the VOD of the YouTube stream.
When I was streaming this category, I got over the 12 hours. I lost like 5 minutes of the recording, and then that record was not accepted.
Since YouTube caps its videos at 12 hours, the entire VOD wasn't saved. And just like that, due to a technical error, a 28-hour would-be world record was lost. Since the entire video wasn't saved, Speedrun.com moderators would be unable to verify aMSa's run. The only witnesses would be any of the livestream viewers that happened to be there. Therefore, Bewell's runs would go unchallenged. That is, until March 28th, 2022, when aMSa would attempt this run once again, this time as a charity event.
That's why I really want to try the second one. Oh, the charity event was a very good timing.
Which charity were you supporting during your run?
Gamers Forgiving.
Awesome.
Yeah, this is the event name. They're trying to support the children at the hostel with the different games.
With Gamers Forgiving receiving any of the donations during Amasa's run, this attempt was unique from the others. He'd also be running this on console instead of using emulation like NCB and Bwells did. Why did you choose to run on console instead of emulator?
Um, because of the— at first, emulator can't do anything, so I really want to try the vanilla method. I know that everyone doesn't have the emulator.
Desiring a more definitive experience, AumSum ran on console, but this came with some unforeseen consequences.
And even in 2022, the latest LAN, I met something. Yeah, I'm using a GameCube console, and after beating the Giga Bowser, the disc error happened twice.
Twice?
Yeah, after, after beating the very hard Adventure Mode Giga Bowser. That sucks.
Yes, this happened twice. He played hard Adventure, got no continues, managed to beat Giga Bowser and was forced to do it a total of 3 times because of disc read errors from his console.
"Yah!
Yes!
Freaking go! Yes!" "Mada, mada, mada, mada woka! Kanon zo!
Kanon zo!" After his 3rd playthrough of Very Hard Adventure Mode, He could finally breathe a sigh of relief. The unexpected quirks didn't end there though.
After beating the, um, Giga Bowser or Crazy Hand, we can see the bonuses, right?
Yes.
So at the time, I'm just mashing the start button, and somehow the game skipped some bonuses.
Really?
So yeah, so actually I beat Crazy Hand, but then, uh, I can't get the, uh, beat Crazy Hand bonus.
No way.
I had to try again because I think that, um, we need to scroll all of the bonuses when we see the bonuses.
Is that true? You have to scroll down to see them to earn them? I don't think—
yeah, it's actually happened to me. So I had to beat the Gear Bowser 3 times, and I had to beat Crazy Hand 2 times. So that was my worst experience.
Yeah.
Why that happen? I swear next time when I try this category, I will try the Gear Bowser and Crazy Hand at first.
Great idea. Although replaying these single-player modes wasn't a complete waste, These mysterious quirks set Oms back about an hour. Thankfully, to make up for lost time, he would use his own strategy for getting Smash Coins.
I always checking the, uh, coin per minutes in my runs. So I have the data, my CPM is 1 by using the, uh, just the cloud game. Just keep using the Marth, that's nothing. Is like the 6 or 7.
Wow, that's super good. With a 6 to 7 CPM, he could generate coins at an extremely fast rate. A caveat being that, for his own health and well-being, he would need to intersperse these Dash dancing sessions throughout the run instead of doing them all at once near the end.
Straight ahead 5 hours, that's something crazy, I can't do it.
Yeah, I don't think anybody can, or they shouldn't if they think they can. This is bad for your hands, man.
Yeah.
Yes! Yeah, we got it. Ah, that was so hard. So hard.
At 21 hours and 45 minutes, Amsa wouldn't beat Buel's time of 20 hours, but it would qualify as a world record for its own subcategory: All Trophies on Console. Since Dolphin emulator load times are generally faster than console loading times, this subcategory split was warranted.
Even 21 hours, uh, the run is— I'm so tired. I was so tired. Because I started the run like, uh, Like noon, and I finished my run like tomorrow 10 AM or something.
However, there was one problem with aMSa's run. You see, the Master Hand glitch was strictly forbidden on the speedrun.com rules for any of the Melee categories. aMSa had used the Master Hand glitch during 15 Minute Melee to take an eating break. For anyone who doesn't know, the Master Hand glitch allows you to play as Master Hand through launching the name entry menu and exiting the character selection screen simultaneously. This bug is also referred to as the "Name Entry Glitch." [Speaker:KAZUYA] I don't think so.
Master Hand glitch should be allowed on this category.
After a discussion on the speedrun.com forums, the Master Hand glitch was deemed allowed, for the All Trophies run category, deeming Amsa's run legitimate after all. I asked Amsa where he saw potential improvement in his run.
Yeah, uh, I think that for get the— do you know Disc Gun?
Disc Gun, yeah.
I think the Disc Gun took a lot of time at the time, and I also messed up the unlocking Mute City. Mute City.
To unlock the Mute City trophy, it requires you to walk a combined total distance of 10,000 meters with every character. Despite a mad scramble to get the Mute City trophy at the end of amsa's run, it only cost him about 20 minutes of the run, so it wasn't too bad. After speaking with every runner of this category, it became clear that there was some friendly competition going on, but ultimately the runners were happy to support each other.
I want to do this run on console, just so I could say that I beat Amsah at something. Uh, I was a little annoyed to find out that Amsah was on, uh, console, not emulator, so I couldn't claim superiority over like one of my favorite Smash Bros. Like, I can't, I can't say truthfully I beat Amsah. That would be just a fun thing to do.
I think I had talked to Bwells a bit in the chat, or maybe even DM, I'm not sure, but, um, I think we had talked about some similar to this, just some of my, like, what I learned and just to help him out in that, in that run. And he obviously learned from my mistakes and did it a lot better. And I've actually not seen any of Vahmsa's run.
So the question was, how fast could this run be done? Bewell's 26 world record seemed fairly optimized, but was sub-20 possible?
My original guess, like very rough estimates on like minutes per section, I came out to just under 22 hours. So to get it under 20 would be— would be great.
And that's where this video could end. But with 3 runners to learn from, 5 full runs to study, and a route not yet fully optimized, one man would challenge the All Trophies world record. That man was me. I had a little bit of experience in Melee speedrunning, running all event matches and all target tests casually. I distinctly remember seeing the All Trophies category and not believing my eyes. Surely no one would want to do such a ridiculous speedrun, but the more I thought about it, the more curious I became. Could a sub-20 hours be done? Once I saw Aumsa's run getting its own subcategory distinct from NCB and Bwells' runs, I decided I wanted to do my own run on console and try to beat Aumsa's time. Bwells shared a newly found technique with me that he actually hadn't tried in a full run yet: using a keyboard to mash for coins.
Because I play on emulator, I just have I have a controller bound to my keyboard, and up/down and the shields are just, you know, 4 keys on my keyboard that I can just mash over and over again for hours on end.
Of course, using a keyboard on console isn't possible, but I had an idea. What if I used a BOX controller? All I would have to do is release the buttons to allow the inputs to reset to neutral, and mashing would be much easier than moving a control stick. The plan was to use Master Hand in training mode as Player 3, and mash on a box controller in order to save time. I was hoping to reduce a 6-hour crouching grind on a standard GameCube controller to something closer to amsa's 3-4 hour dash dancing timer, possibly even faster. I got to work theorycrafting the perfect all-trophies route. I wanted to take the best from all 3 runners, and this is what I came up with. As I developed this, I reached out to Bwells. I ran my route by him, and we go back and forth helping refine parts of this new route. I also practiced sections of this run on emulator, using the speed-up function to skip through the more monotonous parts of the run, and using save states to jump quickly between different splits to run tests. From my testing and conservative estimations, my final time came out to 19 hours, 50 minutes, 50 minutes and 10 seconds, or sub-20. This was giving myself only 3 hours for the coin generation, which had me worried that I was too optimistic. There was only one way to find out. It was time to ask my friend Matt to borrow his box controller. Before he lent it to me, however, I wanted to practice the first half of the run for real, on console, with my streaming and recording equipment active, and all of my speedrun tools set up! My plan was to stream the first 6 to 8 hours of the run until about where the All-Star section began. Little did I know how differently my day would go... Once I pressed start on the title screen—my practice run began.
"Huh huh huh huh huh huh hu hoo hoo!" "Ready?
Go!" "Huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh." The run started off strong. I clutched a Hard Adventure Mode and Giga Bowser KO with no continues, and completed a no damage clear Classic as Fox first try. After getting a gold 5 cruel Melee KOs time, my first 3 splits were looking extremely promising. After 400 matches and a 6-minute lead overall, it was time to clear Hard Classic with Marth. And this is where I made my first mistake. I messed up my Marth Classic run split by getting a continue, so I wasn't able to get the Crazy Hand KO, Master Hand trophy, or Roy unlocked as a character. So another 200 KOs later, I had to try again. Another problem was I noticed my notes and splits were not saying the same thing, so after taking quick inventory of the character trophies I had so far and the ones I still needed, at the last minute I swapped from playing Yoshi to SDing as Link for the final 200 BS matches, and I am very glad that I did. Going off of my flawed notes could have cost me 30 minutes. Ganondorf Classic Split went very well, getting no continues despite being on Very Hard difficulty. To earn the Very Hard clear bonus, you can still get continues, but every time you do use a continue, you lose lottery coins. Splits, so I was grateful to hold on to those. Game Watch Classic, Training, and each of the Multi-Man Melee splits went well too. For Home Run Contest and Target Test, these were some of the most played, heavily optimized parts of Melee, and CB was the master of this section. "There we go." But rather than going for the most optimal, I just went for what I knew I could get consistently. Remainin' Adventure Modes went well too, and I finished the Adventure Mode exclusive bonuses on my list. Then, All-Star began. During All-Star Hard with Ganondorf, I got 4 continues, losing 40 lottery coins. This wasn't good. Losing coins meant a more difficult lottery later in the run. The split wasn't all bad though. At around 2.5 hours, I was 2 2 minutes faster than my normal time, and 45 seconds ahead overall. At this point, I started to consider that maybe doing a full run might be worth it after all. However, I still didn't have a box controller. Thankfully, Matt stopped by the stream and was interested in potentially passing me his box controller later that day if I did decide to do a full run. Finally, I hit the 15-minute Melee section. I had only taken one bathroom break during the VS matches section, and I was very hungry. So I ended up using the entire time to stand up, stretch, and take a break. Somehow, 8 hours into the stream, it had only felt like a few hours had passed by. I had gotten 3 minutes faster than normal on my event matches split, and was now sitting at 7 minutes faster overall. [MUSIC] At this point, my mind was made up. I was going for it. However, I had one huge problem. Since I hadn't yet collected the Birdo trophy, that meant I hadn't unlocked Mushroom Kingdom 2 yet, which meant I couldn't modify random stage select. Modifying random stage select is important for this next split. It allows me to reset every controller for the fastest maximum KOs per match, and to always get Yoshi's Story. Resetting the control stick analogues for each controller, is the method Amsa used for this part of the run. Luckily, I had a backup plan. I was now forced to go hunting for trophies in Adventure 1-1 much sooner than I had expected, and I didn't know what impact this would have on the run overall. Nearly 10 hours into the stream, I wasn't about to give up. But if I spent more than 30 minutes hunting for the Birdo trophy, it may cost me the world record. Despite this setback, I would receive more support than I was expecting. It was around this time that my girlfriend Essie made a visit. She also mentioned that Matt was on his way with his box controller, which he would let me borrow for the run. This was really happening. 40 minutes later, I finally encountered the Birdo trophy and was able to progress. This misstep had added 35 minutes to to my split and about 24 minutes to my overall time. After achieving 5,000 KOs, I was ready for the rare Pokémon encounters. In just a minute and a half, Mew appeared. After 26 minutes of throwing Poké Balls, I also finally encountered Celebi. I'm here to help. At this point, I wasn't sure how this run would end. My timer had a dark red +22 minutes, meaning I was over 20 minutes slower than I should be at this point. It was time to do an inventory of the bonuses I had so far to finish them. The biggest problem bonuses were Floored and Hammer Throw. Although on Smash Wiki and even in-game it mentions you're awarded Floored by taking over 50% of damage on floors, in actuality it requires taking over 200% damage. Hammer Throw is a notoriously difficult bonus to earn. And most Melee owners have simply never gotten it. It's a frame-perfect input where after you grab a hammer and you get knocked, you have to press Z just as your tumble animation finishes. Mashing Z did not work well for me, but I eventually did get it and obtained the Disc Gun trophy. Despite taking much longer than I wanted to, I was actually still 18 minutes faster in the Bonus split than when I had practiced. This meant I was only 3 minutes behind now. Finally, the untested part of the run had arrived. I was 15 hours into the run, and had reached the biggest unknown split of the entire route. Box controller in hand, I wondered, how many coins would I get? I decided to test my CPM after 15 minutes to set my expectations. First, I tried it with just tapping left and right without pressing L or R inputs on BOX. I was hoping for around 100 coins, or about what I got from using my keyboard when I had tested. 15 minutes later, I checked. I got 89, or a CPM of 5.9. Definitely not as much as I was hoping. I tried for another 15 minutes, this time using left, right, and L and R inputs. When I checked 15 minutes after that, I only got 70 coins, or about 4.6 CPM. This was frighteningly close to my GameCube controller CPM. Why was it so much lower? Based on the knowledge and findings by NCB and Bwells, using L and R was better. However, in my own personal testing during the live run, I found the opposite to be true, at least with BOX. I decided to go with my gut and just focus on left and right input. Puts. Although at 4 AM my brain wasn't exactly functioning at full capacity, I decided to try for an hour and see what the results were. I was hoping to see at least 500 lottery coins at least. If I had that amount, I would only need to do about another hour or so to reach the amount that I needed and have a shot at the world record. [MUSIC] 589. With a bit of hope, I went right back to training to grind for another 50 minutes. I didn't fully understand how, but I was almost 7 minutes ahead of my theoretical best time. Using the Box Controller had saved me time, after all. At this point, I still had roughly 80 more trophies to collect. If all was going according to plan, the remaining trophies would either be obtainable through the lottery or 1-player I had to spend my 909 lottery coins carefully here. Every last coin counted. I rounded every roll up to around the 90% likelihood mark, and thankfully only came across 2 duplicate trophies. Once I spent all of my lottery coins, I checked my trophy total: 279. The quest for the 11 final trophies had begun.
3, 2, 1, go! Go! Go! Go!
Things started off strong as I immediately found the Like Like trophy, and soon thereafter, a Warp Star trophy would spawn. In just under 40 minutes, I had snagged the remaining 1-player exclusive trophies. Only 3 trophies remained. With the 13 coins or so I had accumulated from searching for trophies, I would use those to try to get the final trophies in the lottery. I spent all 19 coins I had to get the Fire Kirby trophy. So with 0 lottery coins to my name, just 2 trophies remaining to collect, I decided to grind for the Mute City trophy first. I selected Bunny Hoods as items, picked Captain Falcon, selected Dream Land, and started running. I had no idea how many meters I was away, from 10,000. I prayed I wasn't too far away. After 11 minutes of running with Captain Falcon, I would finally obtain the Mute City trophy. This meant I only had one trophy left to collect: the Great Fox trophy. [MUSIC] I rushed to the lottery to see how many coins I had. 2 coins. A 5.7% chance wasn't nearly high enough to risk spending them for the final trophy. I decided to save the coins I had and begin Dash Dancing. I didn't bother with the Master Hand glitch or using the Box Controller this time around. Nothing else was on my mind except grinding to get those 17 coins. However, about a minute into Dash Dancing, I looked at the timer. Man, I was pretty close to sub-19. Heck it, let's roll the dice. Sub freaking 19. I did it. 6 coins at a 25% chance to get the Great Fox trophy was all I needed. My final time was 18 hours, 59 minutes, 46 seconds. Nice. That was worth it. That was worth it. Not only had I beaten Amsa's world record in the console subcategory, but I even beat out Bwell's emulator world record too, by over a full hour, no less. What started off as just a casual practice run turned into my first full run, and also a full-blown world record. Despite a few mistakes, my new route combined with using the box controller worked. I was so grateful to Twitch chat for keeping me company during the entire duration of this insane run, and to Esti and Matt for each driving all the way to my house to support me. Looking over this run now, I can't help but wonder what an even more optimized run might look like, with fewer mistakes, better RNG, and a better knowledge of the bonuses. An emulator run would almost certainly be faster with the keyboard mashing time save alone for the lottery coin grind. And there's still a lot more to learn about what generates lottery coins. Could a historically 7-hour split become doable in under 2 hours?
I still one day would love to see a TAS run of this because I think it could be done in certainly under 10 hours. Although, to be fair, I don't know the limit, like Can you do a dash dance every other frame? If that counts, if you can do that, I think I calculated it, and it's only like a few minutes where a TAS could get all the coins. There's basically no coin grind because you can do it in other parts of the run.
But that adventure is for another day. Once the run was over, I decided to raid Melee veteran Armada. Got a world record in the dumbest speedrun category of all time? Wait, what's the dumbest speedrun category of all time? Oh, all trophies in Melee? Oh, what was your time? You got sub-19? Damn. I used to try to speedrun, uh, all trophies in Melee back in the day, but sure as hell took longer than 19 hours, so good shit. If Armada has attempted this before, maybe there are more crazy people out there that have done this run after all. I wonder who else is out there. What would you say, generally speaking, to any individual interested in running this category?
Uh, if you're good at pulling all-nighters, if you enjoy the completionist runs, this one is pretty light on tech skill. It's really just a question of can you physically do it. Like, if you, if you enjoy Melee and you enjoy some like endurance challenges, this is, this is the run.
I would say don't copy my video. Don't, uh, don't follow the same strategy I did in the video. But really just, you have to know that you're in for that, that grind. And I, I knew that there was going to be that coin grind and the KO grind, but I I vastly underestimated it. And I think it'd be a much more enjoyable run without that part, but hey, that's part of the game, right?
Not a lot of people want to try this category, but then 24 hours or something, oh, this category is pretty hard. But if we made it to like 17 hours, it's not bad, not bad, not too bad. And then some people want to try. Maybe, maybe.
I really hope that more people get into the run. It's a slog of a run, but like, it's honestly not that bad if you're into like longer runs.
It's a good run. If you want to hear the full interviews I had with NCB, Bwells, and Aumsa, it's available on my Patreon to patrons at any level. If you enjoy Melee deep dives, you'll probably enjoy the other videos on my channel too. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time. So, question on your 27-hour run. I mean, dude, that— you're staying awake for over 24 hours.
Like, yeah, I was just sleeping while dash dancing.
Oh my God, imagine being able to dash dance in your sleep. Yeah.
