Pokemon Shining Pearl has been beaten in under an hour by a speedrunner.
Earlier today, YouTuber Werster posted a video to their channel, displaying a sub-one hour run through Pokemon Shining Pearl. The speedrunner uses a combination of glitches and exploits to beat the game in under an hour with a few minutes to spare, which is quite the feat considering it only launched last week.
This speedrun is simply to get from the start of Pokemon Shining Pearl to the end, and so falls under the 'Any%' category speedrun. If you're unfamiliar with the term, this is when a speedrunner beats a game regardless of how much they've seen or played of it, whereas a '100%' speedrun would task a runner to find every collectible in a game for example, or in this case, catch every Pokemon.
As far as we can tell, this appears to be the first ever sub-one hour speedrun for either Pokemon Brilliant Diamond or Shining Pearl. In fact, as of right now, Speedrun.com doesn't even have a single entry for either of the Nintendo remakes, and the entry for the two games on the community-run speedrunning website isn't even completely filled out.
However, we're likely to see this speedrunning record for Pokemon Shining Pearl broken pretty soon. The speedrunner themselves acknowledges that the run was "far from perfect," but also writes that the "remakes are so broken," so it's entirely possible there are various exploits for saving time and skipping parts of the game still out there, waiting to be found.
For what we made of our time with the two Gen 4 remakes, you can check out our full Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl impressions for more.
