Grand Poo World 2 is a Kaizo Super Mario World made by the incredibly entertaining BarbarousKing and is considered one of the most difficult non-TAS Kaizos out there. It is also one of the most popular. Every single jump of every single level of the game is very hard and can kill the player multiple times, so some serious grinding is required to beat the game by the first time. Despite the steep difficulty, the game and level design is truly incredible — and the whole game is extremely fun to play. The setups in each level seem to work perfectly, which is hard to accomplish while making a Super Mario World rom hack. This makes each death only the player’s fault and not the game itself.
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I have never played any Kaizos before. I knew the existence of Kaizo while watching SGDQ 2019, where MitchFlowerPower ran Grand Poo World 2 and Dode ran Invictus (not to mention the Kaizo blind relay race).
I thought I would never be as good as them, so I didn’t even bother playing.
On April 2020, I finally decided to play GPW2 for the first time just to get the impression, and started to love it every minute of my playthrough. So I decided to beat it and stream all of my progress. There were a lot of deaths, and I fell for some genius trolls during the gameplay.
I was able beat Grand Poo World 2 with around 60 hours of gameplay, and some experienced Kaizo players told me that was a great time for a 1st beat. Since I loved the game so much, I decided to speedrun it.
So it was my very first time to Kaizo, to stream, and to speedrun. Everything was new to me and I met a lot of awesome people from the community. The category I chose to run was Any%. In this category, the player must choose the alternate path at the level called “Thalassophobia” to save time. MitchFlowerPower did the normal route during his runs, and I wanted to do the same as a shoutout. I never thought I would go for the World Record. The goal was only to be the best brazilian on the leaderboards.
Another Brazilian, Guilty14, showed up and started to compete with me when I got to the sub 1 hour mark. It was a whole month of competition until we got down to 55 minutes and Guilty said he had reached his goal. Technically I got to my goal too, but then I realized I could go for more.
When I got a time of 53min, I started to ask myself if I wanted to go for world record or not. What I was thinking was “I still love playing this game, so why not?” — but I still wasn’t sure yet. That’s when NobletOfU asked me what was my goal was for Grand Poo World 2, and then saluted and wished me best of luck after read me saying “I think it’s world record”.
I was extremely hyped and decided to go for it.
From there, it was 1 or 2 months of grinding to finally get the World Record. I got to 48 minutes pretty quickly and then got “stuck” for a week or two. And then, one day, after ending my stream, I decided to start stream again and make a few extra attempts. On my very last attempt, I finally got to 46:53.
