Pokemon Shining Pearl has been beaten in 15 minutes thanks to a series of game glitches and a tactical speedrunner.
VTuber Carolio (opens in new tab) managed to beat Shining Pearl in just over 15 minutes, a new speedrunning record that was previously held by YouTuber Werster (opens in new tab) who completed the game in just 33 minutes just last week. According to How Long To Beat, Carolio’s efforts took 24 hours and 45 minutes less time than it usually takes people to complete the main story.
This incredibly quick turnaround is possible due to a number of glitches in the game, which YouTuber SmallAnt demonstrates in one of their videos. This speedrunner manages to complete the game in 17 minutes – just over Carolio’s record – and did so by using the broken elements of Pokemon Diamond to their advantage, for example triggering a glitch with the menus which allows them to explore the world without being interrupted by any NPCs or any Pokemon.
SmallAnt also recommends playing with the settings at the start of the game for instance making text appear faster on-screen and turning off the battle sounds and background music as this apparently also makes the game run faster and could shave seconds off of your completion time.
Unfortunately, not all bugs found in the remastered Pokemon games came in handy as Nintendo recently released a Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl update which fixed a bug that “prevented the game from progressing under certain circumstances,” what exactly these circumstances were though remains a mystery.
In more positive Pokemon news though, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are currently the Switch’s second-biggest launch in Japan.