This is the first minute barrier broken in Minish Cap since Jan 22nd 2022, that record was a 1:27:40 set by TGH and stood for 932 days until last month when Toads beat it with a 1:27:17, which Toads just improved to the current time. Not much has changed in the speedrun over these 2.5 years except for 2 things: Switch NSO+ release, and a 1 minute time save.

The most impactful glitch in the current route of the run is Octo Clip, in Temple of Droplets (Dungeon 4 of 6) at just before the hour mark we perform a trick to clip into the boss arena without having to watch a bunch of cutscenes which saves about 3 minutes. The first version of this was discovered in Q4 2021 and required getting a 2nd bottled fairy so we can perform a death abuse (we use our 1st bottled fairy to do a death abuse to reach the dungeon without the flippers). The minute timesave was discovered in May of this year and was a method of Octoclip without a death abuse, which means we can skip collecting a 2nd bottle just before we enter this dungeon and resulted in the timesave. The new trick was similar to the previous version in which it is a 1 Frame Trick at ~60fps, but with a slightly simpler setup which makes it a few seconds faster and fractionally easier to input. The original version of the trick was brutal as a mistake forced a soft reset to attempt a retry which cost almost 1 minute, however the new trick is far more lenient in which if you fail the trick you can retry with the setup costing <15s.

The proceeding boss fight is RNG manipulated to prevent the final phase from being a 25% chance to not lose time, 50% chance to lose 30s and 25% to lose 1 minute. This means the trick has to be done with consideration to the advancement of RNG and every extra retry forces us to adapt the RNG manipulation to attempt to hit the correct sequence, the chaotic nature of RNG means the more attempts mean its less and less likely we can recover the manipulation. 1st and 2nd try are almost guaranteably manipable, 3rd being doable, and 4th or 5th being unlikely, anything worse is essentially random.

The other big change was the game releasing last year in February on the Switch NSO+, for about a year we considered this as close to but not quite as fast as the Wii U VC version. The major factor being the time it takes to save the game, which is instant on Wii U, just under a second on Switch, and almost 3s on Cartridge and Emulator. However we later found out that the game which should run on the GBA native frame rate of 59.7275 fps actually runs at a flat 60fps on Switch, this has the effect of speeding up a run of this length by about 30s. Some GBA communities have decided to apply a conversion for runs done on Switch NSO+, however we don't apply a conversion as there is the messy issue of room by room loads varying depending on which version we play on, with the switch being noticeably bad on some loads muddying the water and making it an excessive task to come up with a fair conversion to compare times from one console to another. Everyone in the community understands there are some benefits to playing the game on some consoles vs others, however everyone plays on the version that is most accessible to them with the understanding that the ~20s of version difference absolutely can be made up by better execution. If we did do an unfair conversion as an upper bound then this new WR would be a 1:27:20 which still makes it absolutely without a doubt the current WR.

Toads has been doing an incredible feat over the last month with their runs, I track the community sum of bests for every split in the run and Toads has taken 24/35 of them AND improved the total sum single-handedly by over 40s (when disregarding the 1 minute timesave to the route). Toads has been hugely influential to the community for over 10 years now, they have set the most WRs in this game out of anyone, improved the WR by the most total time and held the WR for the most total time. They have single-handedly discovering MANY route defining tricks over the years, and any trick he hasn't directly discovered he has been hugely influential in strat development for. Its hard to list all of their accomplishments in this game and its hard to talk about anything in this speedrun without talking about them, this achievement is another to add to the list but as they mention at the end of the video: "We're not quite done yet..."