Pokemon Scarlet Speedrun Guide

How to Actually Run Pokemon Scarlet Fast

Most people start a speedrun and immediately make it take twice as long because they don't understand the routing. The Pokemon Scarlet Speedrun Guide covers a lot of the basic theory, but theory doesn't mean much when you're five minutes in and your save file is three hours deep. I need to talk about what actually happens at the controller level. Any% is the category most people go into first. It runs roughly around 15 to 18 minutes if you execute cleanly. That's fast, but only because you cut out nearly every optional interaction. The game wants you to explore. Speedrunning requires you to ignore everything the game throws at you. There's a specific sequence you follow starting from the very first frame. The starter choice matters significantly. It determines your early routes and which enemy types you need to counter. Cyclizar as a ride Pokemon saves time that adds up fast, but the starter you pick changes your encounter matchups around halfway through. I learned this the hard way. On my first clean run attempt, I grabbed Sprigatito because the type advantage looked good on paper. I hit the second gym and absolutely failed the routing because I hadn't accounted for the type matchup at that specific point in the game. It took me another week and a half of resets to get a sub-18 minute run. I switched to Quaxly after that. Different route, different matchup advantages, and it actually fit the faster path.

The Glitch That Changes Everything

There is a specific sequence break you can use around the third town that lets you skip a whole section of the story. It involves a trick with the bike movement combined with a jump animation cancel near a specific NPC. Most casual players never notice it because the game doesn't hint at it anywhere. Once you do it, you save approximately two minutes. That two minutes is the difference between a sub-16 and a sub-17 run for most people. The edge case that always catches people is the NPC positioning. If that NPC happens to be slightly further away from the wall than the standard frame data expects, the sequence break fails and you just end up running into a rock for six seconds. I spent two weeks chasing this and couldn't figure out why it wasn't consistent. The problem was the NPC randomization seed. Different playthroughs place them at slightly different offsets. The workaround is to memorize the wall distance instead of targeting the NPC directly. You aim for the gap between the wall and the collision box, not the sprite itself. This makes it consistent regardless of the seed variation.

Battle Routing Nuances

Speedrunning battles requires a very different mindset from normal play. You don't try to win. You try to end them as fast as possible. That means super effective moves, often at the cost of your own Pokemon's health. A Pokemon fainting mid-battle doesn't cost you time. Running back to a healer does. You keep fighting with whatever you have left until you either win or your entire team is unusable. Then you heal at the nearest Pokemon Center. Another thing beginners miss is that you should never switch Pokemon in a battle unless it strictly saves time. Switching costs frames. Every switch takes about a second and a half of animation. If your current Pokemon can finish the battle in one more move, you do it. Don't switch. The instinct to switch to a type advantage is wrong here. Time is the only thing that matters.

Common Pitfalls

The biggest time sink is the story events. There are a lot of cutscenes and dialogue sequences that the game triggers automatically. You can't skip most of them. What you can do is minimize the time spent triggering them by making the fastest possible routing decisions. Every decision point has a left and right option. The left is almost always the slower one. The game is designed to make you explore, so the exploration routes are longer by design. Stick to the right side of every intersection. Data warping is another technique, but it's more advanced and not recommended for first attempts. It involves manipulating the game's memory to teleport yourself to different map locations. It cuts the run down to under 12 minutes but is considered a separate category in most racing communities. If you're just starting, stick to sequence breaks. They're consistent across different firmware versions and won't get disqualified in any official race.

What This Method Doesn't Fix

A speedrun guide can't teach you controller inputs. You have to practice the route repeatedly until your hands know where to go without looking. A typical route requires around 400 distinct button presses in 15 minutes. That's roughly one press every 2.2 seconds on average, but the distribution is uneven. Some sections are extremely dense with inputs while others are nearly idle. The dense sections are where you lose time. I've seen runs lose 30 seconds in a single 20-second stretch because someone mashed the wrong button during a jump sequence. If you're getting stuck above 20 minutes consistently, the problem is almost certainly routing errors, not input speed. Go back and check your sequence. Compare frame by frame with a top runner's footage. The differences are usually one or two wrong turns that cascade into losing a full minute later. One wrong turn at the three-minute mark can cost you a minute and a half by the ten-minute mark because you miss the window for a later sequence break. Get the route down to muscle memory before you worry about optimization. Most people skip this and try to shave seconds off a broken run instead of building a solid foundation. A clean 18-minute run is better than a messy 15-minute one because the messy one will fall apart the moment conditions change even slightly.