Speedrunning Dandara

[TheYuriG]

This is the video used for reference and i'll give some additional input for trophy hunters going for sub 1h17m, rather than the actual WR like this dude.

Go to the game settings menu while paused and turn on both cheats. You are not as good as the speedrunner, you will take more damage than they do. Save yourself the frustration of going back to a camp unless purposefully intentionally skip a section of the game. You want both infinite energy to skip missiles (R2 + Square) and respawn in the same room when/if you unintentionally die.

Don't buy any upgrades other than straight health-up upgrades (like in the video). This will make sense later when you are doing the laser skips, or else you will make your life a lot harder by needing to manage where you leave your corpse to refill your health mid-skip.

 

(IMPORTANT) In the first room, after destroying the door target, make sure you go back to the start and shoot the faint target to skip the tutorial and save 6 minutes.

(OPTIONAL) Open the chest at (1:02) to get an extra health kit.

(OPTIONAL) If you remember the path from (2:06) to (2:43), you can skip the suicide at (3:40) and just reverse the path backward. It's more time you spend, but you can upgrade earlier, spare a checkpointed suicide and not need to recover your corpse at (8:43). If you choose to copy the suicide, make sure to disable the cheat to respawn in the same room.

In "Beautiful Avenue" (8:53), a wrong door is used and quickly recovered from. You can avoid this mistake and take the door at () instead.

The entire section from (9:13) to (9:55) can be entirely skipped if you are using the infinite magic cheat as recommended above. This section will only give you a small portion of salt and an upgrade to your basic attack which you are not using since you are spamming the Magic Missile instead.

(IMPORTANT) Make sure to use all your salt at (10:25) to buy ONLY health upgrades, since you won't be using any of the salt you collect from this point to (16:16) due to the Return to the Flag skip.

(IMPORTANT) Camps are purposefully avoided in "View of Solitude" (11:38) and "Tower Stairway" (13:19). You need to do this in order to be able to suicide later and skip a large section of the game, a mistake that I've made in the NA stack and cost my 17 additional minutes to recover from.

(IMPORTANT) The skip at (12:14) saves a ton of time. You want to get as close to the gap as possible and jump out to hit the beam as you are slightly below the gap (since taking damage will reposition you slightly higher from the damage location), so you can dash downwards through the gap. Make sure you have the "Respawn In Same Room" cheat active, so you can choke this plenty of times to get it right. This is not as difficult as the Lunar City skip later in the game, shouldn't take you too long to get this done. 

(IMPORTANT) Remember to skip the flag at (12:33) and camp at (13:19) + (15:06) so you can Return to the Flag at (16:16).

The quit skip at (14:20) just ignores some extra text. Feel free to ignore the skip if you care about the story and/or this is your first playthrough.

The skip at (21:01) requires you to have 7 or more hearts, hence why you are only buying health upgrades prior. If you don't have enough, there are 2 harder strategies that you can use to still get through. Both strategies require you to heal mid-air, but you would rather not need to use those strategies instead of just having enough health to do the skip, trust me.

• First strategy is to die halfway through the path, so your corpse is in the path and in the next attempt you can physically touch it to recover all your health, doubling the number of hits you can sustain.
• Second strategy is to place the beam in the right location, but from afar. Wait until the beam is nearly done and jump into it, taking as much damage as possible without dying. When the beam goes away, regen your health using the infusions and throw another beam to keep shooting you toward the other side. That should give you enough distance to reach the other platform.

Make sure to make a backup before trying this. The Lunar skip at (21:38) is hell to pull. What essentially you want to do is get hit at the very end of your invincibility frames AND while the floating platform is moving toward you, so you can clip through.

From (24:00) onwards, make sure to have the "Respawn In Same Room" cheat active and use only the laser attack to destroy everything. Spam the laser attack on the opposite walls from your enemies and the damage will stack sky-high and obliterate every health bar you need. Having the cheat active also helps a lot with the next skip as you don't need to come all the way back from the camp, so you end up saving about a minute on the speedrunner run.

 

Side notes:

1. I hated this game with a passion and would highly recommend doing the speedrun on your first playthrough and skipping the whole story.
2. For some reason, it seems like the game is counted my paused time for the EU stack. It certainly didn't do that on the NA. If you feel like you need to watch a good portion of the video, get into a new room and quit the game. If you want to or if you are super paranoid/anxious, you can quit to the main menu every few rooms, watch a chunk of the video and then continue the game and repeat what you just watched. You are still watching a video that completes the run in half the time required for the trophy, so you have plenty of time to pause watch repeat fuck up, and still come out on top.
3. If you are following the video, you will skip the heart tree boss and won't pop "Wide open face, hidden heart" trophy before beating the game. Again, if you are the super anxious/paranoid kind of person that thinks you gonna get flagged, banned and swatted because of it, you can make a backup before beating the final boss, go kill that side boss (see steps below) and then reload your backup and beat the final boss. This is a reminder that this thread literally exists and if shit happens you can just link it here and have it sorted. I don't have the aforementioned story related trophy at the time of posting this, but I have beaten the game in 57 minutes (due to pause time still counting on the EU stack for some reason).
   • To go beat the heart tree boss, teleport to "View of Solitude", go left, and keep moving onwards. The boss fight will trigger, and spam the lasers to quickly dispatch it. Now you can teleport back to "Guardhouse" and proceed to beat the final base game boss, but if you are really worried about getting flagged, I would just quit the game to main menu for 30 min to give it a reasonable gap between the second and the last boss, else you create yourself the problem of beating two bosses way too close together.
4. If your game is patched (and therefore has the free DLC) and you don't go absolutely nuts on exploring the map and opening chests, you will also pop the trophies for sub 35% chests and sub 75% exploration.

Edited December 22, 2022 by TheYuriG
added more info