Playthrough of the basic "normal game" mode, which would be your regular Any%. Despite it being seemingly impossible, aside from the boss fights, to save time in an autoscrolling shoot 'em up, it can be achieved through lag-frame reduction. This makes Recca, as well many other NES shmups (even though the potential could be significantly lower in say Silver Surfer due to little to no lag when enemies appear) much more speedrunnable than how it looks at first glance. Shoutouts to timmyshotgun for his previous efforts on this game, being able to learn optimal weapon pick-ups for the boss fights was tremendously helpful. The original plan was to turn a casual run into a speed-playthrough and leave it at that, but it was way too tempting to ditch that idea after discovering how much the lag-frames add up to. Although I'm not so sure that I saved much time from the actual bosses (sans the super lucky last one), I still managed to squeeze more than a minute over the normal pew-pew'ing of everything compared to the last WR. This run is also deathless, which was the last thing I would've expected given how much randomness there is in the final boss battle. - Summer Carnival '92 - Recca leaderboards, runs are timed going by SDA standards (first frame of character control until it is lost before the credits roll).
