It was only a matter of time, really.
Nintendo's newest game has finally gotten the speedrun treatment, with a crafty and clever player managing to finish what's supposedly a pretty lengthy game in just less than 90 minutes.
Speedrunning Community Takes On 'Super Mario Odyssey'
That's right — Super Mario Odyssey has been completed in a jiffy. Many have already attempted to finish the game as quickly as possible — as with any newly released title — but Twitch user IMtendo managed to clock in the fastest record, at least at the time of writing. He beat the game in 1:28:45, nabbing 124 moons. The whole playthrough is available on Twitch.
By the time this article is published, it's perfectly plausible that another speedrunner has beaten the game faster than IMtendo's current record. There's no denying that he's an extremely skilled Mario player, of course, but IMtendo's speedrun still features multiple deaths, several missed jumps, and uncollected moons. That said, it's still pretty impressive.
As expected, IMtendo only grabbed the bare number of moons necessary to advance to the next level, often opting for the easiest ones to reach, all in the purpose of finishing the game as fast as possible. Attempting to collect every moon available would have been much, much harder and would have required a longer time to finish. To save even more time, IMtendo also skipped all the cutscenes.
IMtendo himself acknowledges that his speedrun isn't particularly a good one.
"This is bad," he says. Later on, he predicts that other players will be able to finish the game faster than he did — perhaps even in less than an hour — once they manage to figure out better and more efficient routes.
IMtendo also noted that 100 percent speedruns of Super Mario Odyssey might be a tad bit difficult, simply because there are so many moons to collect, and some moons can only be obtained by purchasing them with in-game currency. It's going to be pretty interesting how the speedrunning community plans to categorize different Super Mario Odyssey speedruns. As it stands, there's one for nabbing 253 moons, and one for nabbing 503 moons, which entails beating the real final level.
Super Mario Odyssey
Super Mario Odyssey launched on Oct. 27 exclusively for the Nintendo Switch, the console's first-ever proper Mario game after Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was released in April. It fuses elements from Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy and has touches of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's open world concepts. It currently sits at Metacritic with a 97 rating and is the 8th best video game of all time, according to the site's rankings.
