Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are but a week old today, and yet a speedrunner has already figured out how to get through them in well under an hour. The secret? They’re “so broken.”
As spotted by TechRaptor, YouTuber Werster has completed Shining Pearl in 50 minutes and 36 seconds. Which is bonkers, given the game’s supposed to run to about 30 hours. You can watch the whole thing right here:
“It was extremely fun to do the glitch hunting,” explains Werster in the video, as he hammers through the opening sequences and conversations. Correctly, he then picks Piplup, and off he goes.
“The remakes are so broken you can beat them in under an hour!” Werster explains in the video’s description, before listing the glitches used to achieve the time. “Menu storage (and double/triple variants of it), Door Storage, Cutscene Clipping to OoB, Trainer-Menu Storage, Poke Doll Battles, Surf on Land, Early E4, Fast Cynthia.”
He adds that the run was “far from perfect,” although credits himself with what is believed to be the first play through to come in under an hour. Of course, this implies that faster times should be appearing soon.
I love how completely silly speedrunning looks when it’s a slow-paced, genteel little RPG like Pokémon. Even the glitchy cheats are done so slowly, so calmly—check out around 7.30 for when he so quietly drifts his way through the map to reach distant lands when he shouldn’t oughta.
If I were a major game publisher, I’d be hiring as many speedrunners as I could during the QA period. There’s no better group of people to discover every glitch and flaw in your game, get those all tidied away long before release.
Clearly, Werster had a good time building up to, and delivering, this run. His narration throughout—although sparse—is mostly very good natured. Even when he realises he’s gone into battles without the monsters he needs. As he says at the end of the video’s description, “It’s been fantastic. Blessed game.”