Despite only being out for a week, a speedrunner has already gone viral by beating Pokemon Shining Pearl in under an hour.
The main campaign of Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl is estimated to take around 22 hours to complete. This is according to HowLongToBeat.com, where users can record how long it took them to finish a game. However, upon seeing that, one speedrunner said “hold my beer” and set about finishing the game as quickly as possible.
The speedrunner, Werster, beat Pokemon Shining Pearl in under an hour. They also streamed their achievement on Twitch, so nobody could dispute their claim.
Pokemon Shing Pearl speedrun
Werster’s full stream lasted over six hours, but his Pokemon Shining Pearl speedrun clocked in at just 50 minutes and 36 seconds.
Check out his final timestamp on a Reddit clip below:
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How did the speedrunner beat Pokemon so fast?
How Werster was able to beat Pokemon Diamond and Pearl in under an hour is unknown, but they can be seen skipping enormous portions of the game in their stream.
Some Reddit users theorized that Werster was using a hacked or modified version of the game, or a hacked Nintendo Switch console. One said, “Speedrunners use specific versions of the game due to the leader board not requiring a specific version, set the switch to offline, download no patches, and you’re good.”
Others complained that speedruns will become impossible once Nintendo gets round to patching the game. With one saying, “It sucks that it is going to probably be patched because it’s a modern game, so new speedruns after it’s patched will have to be version marked.”
Until then, however, we can enjoy Werster’s speedrun of Pokemon Shining Pearl, marveling at how he achieved it in such an impressive and short period of time.
You can watch the whole Twitch run on YouTube.