I was feeling creative and decided to do a tutorial on how to pull off Waterless.
The science behind the trick is that the game glitches out if X grabs an item with a boomerang at the same time as the game loads - or "spawns" - another item into the game.
In this case, we're looking at the impossible to reach heart tank at Sting Chameleon's stage.
The glitch causes the loaded item to accidentally spawn into X's boomerang, instead of where it's supposed to spawn.
This glitch is known as The Phantom Grab.
X needs to be positioned at the exact frame where the item "comes into existence" as the boomerang delivers the pickup.
This trick can be used in several places throughout the game, but the Waterless Jump/Heart is the trickiest because the Grab happens nowhere near the pickup that needs to be used in order to pull it off, and the road to getting there is rather complex.
Here's a Step by Step:
- You take damage at some point before doing the trick.
- You shoot the grasshopper and try to farm for a pickup. It doesn't always drop one, in which case you move to the right and back to respawn it and try again.
- Once you get the pickup, you jump down the pit and juggle it with another boomerang.
- You break the two middle blocks with a double kick, turn around and juggle with the third boomerang.
- You make a precise dash jump/wall kick off the block below you to a specific frame to do the Grab.
- You turn around right after the boomerang catches you, and right before the heart spawns.
- You mash the jump button for dear life to grab on to the platform on the left and hope you don't die.
All this has to be done in seconds as you're on the clock big time with the boomerang attempting to deliver the pickup to you.
The purpose of this trick is to make an optimal speedrun route possible; beating Sting Chameleon as the third boss makes C. Sting available in the remaining stages, and it especially saves time during the Storm Eagle fight.
There are other ways to do this, of course, but this is the perfect scenario.
You can break the blocks before attempting the trick, sometimes you need to farm for the pickup... But even if you make the other steps easier for yourself, the jump itself is hard to time and takes a lot of practice and correct muscle memory.
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