It took Okikurume just over 17 hours to collect every moon in the latest Mario game. He completed this feat of focus and determination late yesterday and is now the world record holder for doing so.
Lots of players have been racing one another to try and beat Super Mario Odyssey as quickly as possible. Since the game came out a couple weeks ago, world records have gone back and forth as everyone improves and finds new glitches and tricks for finishing the game even faster. Australian speedrunner Okikurume took a different approach. While most of the game’s speedrunners have been competing in the Any% category, he decided to take a crack at the 100%.
This might sound straightforward enough but the rules for what counts as a 100% run through of the game are very specific. Okikurume had to collect every moon in the game, yes, but he also had to get a bunch of other stuff as well. Collecting every hat, for instance, as well as every costume and souvenir. You can do all of that and the run still won’t fulfill the requirements of the 100% category unless you’ve also captured all 52 enemy types and filled out the entire music list which includes 82 different songs. It was that laundry list in addition to getting the game’s 999 moons that kept Okikurume playing for 17:20:49 straight.
Unlike Any% runs where speed is the most important thing, the goal of the 100% run makes thoroughness and stamina just as, if not more, important. Speedrunners in the former category have found ways to skip levels and bosses, but that wasn’t an option for Okikurume. Instead, while they’ve perfected special jumps and tricks Cappy-specific maneuvers, he’s been busying grinding for coins. There are moons in Mario Odyssey that can’t be found, only purchased. That means players who want to collect them all will need to have accrued some serious coin as well.
Okikurume did this by running a special bonus level near the end that’s full of them. He did this again and again. In fact, several hours of his run consists only of speeding through that mini-stage. At one point during the stream he simply lays in bed answering questions from viewers in the Twitch chat while trying not to let his eyes get too droopy. Each run of that segment netted him about 180 coins and he needed around 33,000 total to complete the game.
The most surreal part of the marathon run came at the end though. Part of fulfilling all of the above requirements means Okikurume to perform one last particular requirement as well: throwing Mario’s hat 5,000 times. He’d somehow managed to collect just about everything there is to collect in the game and still not throw Cappy that many times.
That’s why at the very end of the world record stream you’ll see Mario convulsing as the Mushroom Kingdom hero chuck’s his haunted-headware at a wall. Once he had finished that weird bit of business, he was able to collect the final moon and speed along to the game’s secret ending. How Okikurume was still awake and able to function after all of that is beyond me, especially considering how recently he’d practiced for it with another almost day-long Mario Odyssey session.
“Run didn’t have a route and was based on previous experiences and that the potential for the category is way, way, way lower,” he said in an email. “There’s people working on routes at the moment for it but I wanted to see how it would go just based off my previous experiences for fun.” You can watch the run in its entirety in an act of solidarity with its author below.