Victory Ascent Course 4: After the Starstorm - Goodbye Forsaken World / Secrets (Savestateless)

Welcome to my playthrough of Victory Ascent, a collaborative meme remake of Super Mario Treasure World. In this video, I obtain the secrets star in After the Starstorm, an edit of After the Rain created by ShiN3. Enjoy!
Enjoyment: 6/10
Attempt Time: 9 Hours
I'll be honest, I really underestimated this star at first. It obviously has a few jumps that stick out in particular, but I really didn't expect just how difficult it would be to get consistent even at the easier sections.
I actually spent my first couple of hours purely practicing thins (1:57). They took forever to build any consistency on, but after I'd become able to hit them like 10-20% of the time, I decided to move on to the rest of the star. Compared to thins, I managed to gain consistency at everything else surprisingly quickly, and I was soon ready for attempts.
Throughout most of my attempt sessions, I actually used a different route: You can choose to do the star 1 path (0:40) either at the very beginning or at the very end. It's a pretty short path and its jumps are really tough, especially when you're nervous, but they do add 40 seconds to the beginning of the every attempt. And when you're dying to something like thins, a section that's usually like a minute into the star, 90% of the time, you really don't want to postpone it by another 40 seconds (most likely more, since, the s1 path is nowhere close to being 100% consistent).
After about 6 hours though, my thins consistency suddenly jumped and I started to get lots of attempts past there. At this point, I was regularly getting to and passing the umbrella section (7:25), which is filled with many scary and tight jumps. However, a new problematic jump emerged: My third attempt past the umbrellas died to the WWM wallkicks (13:11). My fourth did as well. And so did my fifth! And once I finally started to get past them, I began dying to the s1 path. Now that I'd built up some great consistency on the star though, I finally switched to the final route, and I managed to close it out pretty quickly, pretty much on one of my first attempts past thins!
Honestly, it's been a while since I've felt this happy about getting a star in SM64. My grind didn't go particularly well and in my opinion, this is the second hardest star I've gotten so far, harder than TsucnenT's Dream and easier than TsucnenT's Despair, although I might be wrong. I could've pause buffered the thins timings which would've definitely made this quite entire thing quite a bit easier, but I don't know, that would've been kind of lame. Also, I was the first person to beat this star which is pretty cool!
Now, did I enjoy grinding this star? I'm not really sure, to be honest. I did enjoy the jumps in this stage, they're really satisfying to pull off and get consistent at. But, I spent the majority of my grind mostly just dying to thins over and over, occasionally getting past them and usually dying to something stupid. I can't say that I hated that part of playing the level, but it definitely got pretty mind-numbing after a while. That said, I genuinely believe that this level is pretty good. It doesn't really feel like a regular Victory Ascent level where it's just a TW/TWDE level with a wacky and/or interesting gimmick slapped onto it, it actually feels like a well-made edit of After the Rain, even though it has its rough edges.

[@bellringgames8225]

And to think ShiN3 did not believe me when I told her this stage is definitely harder than TD GG on getting this

[@a__random__player]

Thanks Belling! I feel like it's pretty close honestly, if anyone else gets this star, it's totally possible that they find it easier. Or idk, maybe I'm also just completely underrating it lol