Talk:Sequence break

Scope

This article was created to be a better place to document the exploits that allow parts of the Pikmin games to be skipped. The out of bounds article wasn't the best place because it has more of a focus on locations and methods of going out of bounds, and the main glitch articles weren't the best place either since often there were no glitches past the initial out of bounds movement. So now we have this article. But what exactly should this article have? What should it cover in each game?

Here are my thoughts. The only tricks that should count as sequence breaks are those that break the sequence of major events in the story, such as unlocking a Pikmin type. Thus skipping a wall to access a cave faster wouldn't count, even though it's a faster way to get to the cave, unless it also allowed you to get to the cave before unlocking a Pikmin type intended to be used to get there. This definition has different effects for different games. For Pikmin, it leaves very little counted as a sequence break because of how few major events it has. Getting a few ship parts without Blue Pikmin is basically all that can be counted. For Pikmin 2, it leaves a bit more considering how more major sequence breaks exist and are used in the 5 day run, but there still aren't many, considering it excludes most of the napsack tricks that are already documented on the path oversights article. For Pikmin 3, it's much more broad considering the linear story, and there is the potential to document loads of tricks to get fruits before the intended type. For this reason, I don't think fruits (or treasures in Pikmin 2) should be discussed in this article, only ship parts. This definition isn't perfect, as it's hard to define exactly what a sequence break is. But for the purposes of this article, is it good enough for now? — Soprano_(talk) 17:43, August 24, 2021 (EDT)

When designing the game, the lead game designers had a certain sequence in mind, like what order stages should be visited in, what order Pikmin types should be unlocked in, etc. With that established, they hand it off to other designers to create content with these aspects in mind, like the area designers. That said, the area designers themselves also have an intended sequence of events within the area, at least for some parts of it. Like "before getting to this item, the player must first push this box and then open this gate", or "before accessing this boss, the player has to have a certain Pikmin type to complete a puzzle", etc. Both these "macro" and "micro" sequences count as designed sequences by the designers, in my book. So any exploit that allows skipping any sequence should be documented.

As for sequence breaks that do skip content, but don't allow the player to get back onto the main sequence, i.e. exploits that leave the game unwinnable or let it crash, I don't think those would count. However, for the sake of completion, I reckon there could be a section just for these scenarios. — {Espyo^T} 13:41, August 26, 2021 (EDT)

I’m a little late, but here’s my perspective on the matter. While, yes, skipping a wall may not be as grandiose as something like Pikmin 2’s early Blues, it still is breaking the sequence intended by the developers, and is therefore a sequence break. And while it may seem like not including them may make sense at first, we still should document them somewhere, and they don’t really warrant their own article for the sake of their similarity to the content of this one. Therefore, they should be included here. On the other hand, grouping Early Tremendous Sniffer with Early Pink Pikmin still feels off, so perhaps for each game we could make two sections: Major and minor. Major should handle things like early Pikmin types or more complicated cave earlys like Shower Room Early, while minor could have simple yet still important tricks like Tremendous Sniffer early or Glutton’s Kitchen early.

Also, why should we skip over the Napsack tricks? The Path Mistake article only says where the tricks are and gives a vague idea of their benefits at most. This article could go into further detail on what the exploit allows, while the Path Mistake article can go into some practically useless but still notable exploits, giving each article its own purpose.

This is a message from Lord Breadbug, “I await you on the Bread Isle,” 21:41, August 30, 2021 (EDT)

You've both raised good points. I see why breaking the sequence of events within an area should count; after all, the Pikmin 3 sequence breaks already documented do this. But at the same time, making that consistent across all the games would involve documenting a bunch of napsack tricks that are already on the Path oversights article on this article. Would they be on both articles at different levels of detail, or would the napsack tricks that allow for sequence breaks be documented here and not there? It's hard to answer.

As for the other issues, I don't know of any sequence breaks that make the game actually incompletable, because Day 1 escape in Pikmin 3 does let you continue with the game if you do the right things, plus it can let you skip defeating the Vehemoth Phosbat in the regular Distant Tundra visit, so it can still break the sequence in a way that doesn't break the game. So we won't need a section for those. In my opinion, we also don't need a section for minor sequence breaks, because if we documented every way to get a fruit or overground treasure early, this article would be really long. Plus, it can be difficult to define what counts as early. (I wouldn't call the Tremendous Sniffer trick a sequence break, for instance, since it's just bypassing a single wall in a way that requires an extra day in the area.) Only ship parts are unique enough and in low enough numbers to justify being documented here, I think. But what do you think? — Soprano_(talk) 01:55, August 31, 2021 (EDT)

Hello again! Just here to defend a few of my points. For the Napsack tricks, I kinda agree. Yes, it makes sense to try and keep each article at a high level of detail, but why can’t we re-tread done ground? I know it isn’t usually preferred, but both articles cover different topics that need those tricks to make any sense, and are different enough to the point where they can’t be merged. If there were just a few Napsack tricks in Pikmin 2, then sure, we could just link to that article, but it’s more in the realm of 60% of all breaks. As for true cos that level the game in an impossible state, I 100% agree with you. All I can think of is one, that being early Shaggy Long Legs if you lose more than 5 Pikmin, and even then, it wouldn’t fit in that section. We don’t really need a section for that.

Admittedly, overground treasure skips wouldn’t bloat the article up much. There are actually less overground treasure then there are ship parts in Pikmin 1 (26 to be precise) and even fewer have skips. all I can think of is: Utter Scrap, The Blue Paint, Healing Cask, Air Breaker, Chance Totem, Globe 2#, the Vlasic Lid, the Can Opener, The lid behind the Electric gate and stream, and the Conifer Spire (I also don’t remember all their names in case you couldn’t tell). Even then, if we go with the more major/interesting skips only, the only ones that would count are: Utter Scrap, Blue Paint, Air Breaker, Globe 2#, Lid with gate and stream, and the Conifer Spire. Whichever method we go for, it’s still around the same number of early ship parts in Pikmin (I think, don’t quote me on that). Though fruits are larger in number, we should still include them if we include ship parts and overworld treasures. That however, brings up your point of article length. Even then, the length of the article shouldn’t be that big of a problem. Take all the glitch articles, for instance. One of those would be about as long as this article when it’s completed, and they’re all acceptable.

This is a message from Lord Breadbug, “I await you on the Bread Isle,” 08:07, August 31, 2021 (EDT)

Alright, it makes sense that all notable sequence breaks to get collectible items should be documented. But only the notable ones: the ones that achieve something significant (the Decorative Goo clip), or the ones that skip several tasks. This is because if you try to document every small sequence break, it becomes very hard to define what is or isn't a sequence break. Does taking a roundabout route to collect a fruit count as a sequence break if it allows you to get it without building a bridge? I don't think so. (If it did, half the fruits in the Tropical Wilds would be in this article.) I was recently discussing sequence breaks in Pikmin with speedrunners of the game, and it turns out that it's possible to get almost all the ship parts with just Red Pikmin, mainly because of the object nudging glitch. Most of these, while they could technically be described as sequence breaks because they allow you to skip Yellow Pikmin and Blue Pikmin, would not be useful to document. There needs to be some vague notability standard before a sequence break is documented here. — Soprano_(talk) 21:58, September 2, 2021 (EDT)

I feel like all sequence breaks should be documented, but not all of them deserve a section. Tremendous Sniffer without bomb rocks can be included in a "Minor breaks" section, under a single bullet point, and be described in one or two sentences. It's still there, documented, but it's not taking up an entire section, since it's not as important as something like Early Winged Pikmin. I think it's best to document too much rather than too little – as long as it "breaks" any intended sequence, it's a sequence break, and it's not like minor, debatable breaks are useless. They're useful for people who want to know every little sequence break out there, and in games, quite a few important sequence breaks stemmed from very minor discoveries.

As for the path mistakes article having duplicate information, it's really hard to decide. I feel like the "correct" thing to do would be to document each glitch location and results in the path mistakes article. Then document the ways a user can exploit that mistake in this article. Finally, each article would also cross-reference the other for the complete picture. But that would suck, since people would have to hop back and forth between articles just to understand everything. Usually, it's preferred to stick to one article instead of spreading the same info over two articles, as to avoid copy-paste and forgotten update problems, but in cases like this, we can't just leave the user experience to suffer! An alternative approach would be similar to what was said above: use the path mistakes article to document silly mistakes, like Pikmin getting stuck against a wall, and then include a "See more" section or something that points to this article. In this article, we would document other path mistakes that are more important, given a much more detailed description, and given an explanation of how they can be exploited for sequence breaking. This way the path mistakes article would still teach readers all known path mistakes (even if it has to point the reader to a different page to do so), but the sequence break article can still have everything it needs to be useful and practical in and of itself. — {Espyo^T} 11:11, September 5, 2021 (EDT)

Multiple Methods

I was trying to document some information on the Early Shower Room skip in Pikmin 2 and found that there are actually three different methods of preforming it (a faulty piece of collision that you can climb, a death plane warp, and a wollywog bounce). I was curious as to just how skips like this one that have multiple methods should be documented. I presume that we should write down every method, but what if they each have their own advantages and disadvantages? Both the wollywog bounce and death plane warp require the Napsack while the collision doesn’t, but the death plane warp is by far the easiest method. Should the section recommend one over the others or simply document all three and leave it up to the reader as to which they choose? Going to withhold on documenting any skips like this until we can reach a consensus. — This is a message from Lord Breadbug, “I await you on the Bread Isle,” 19:57, October 5, 2021 (EDT)

This is a difficult problem, and one I've tried to deal with before. For example, when documenting the Formidable Oak light skip, I documented a simpler version of the trick, rather than the fast method used by speedrunners, meaning the explanation is incomplete at the moment. There are some situations where this problem is even harder. For example, the Distant Tundra sequence break currently documented only skips building the bridge, but it's possible to skip much more of the area through the Backdoor Phosbat trick. But if one sequence break supersedes another one, is it worth documenting both of them, or just one of them, or having a subsection within the more substantial one about the less substantial one? It's a difficult problem. For your Shower Room example, I'd recommend documenting the easiest method in the "How to" section, and then, if practical, documenting alternate methods in the "Notes" section, along with their different prerequisites. But it's worth discussing this more to decide how to cover sequence breaks with even more diverse alternate methods. — Soprano_(talk) 00:08, October 6, 2021 (EDT)

I think that different methods and different versions of a glitch should all be documented in their own section. Different methods have different prerequisites, difficulty, videos, etc., and most of all, different how-tos. Not just that, but it becomes much harder for the reader if we just mix and match everything in a single entry. A player is only trying to perform one specific version of one specific glitch on one specific console. They would be forced to skip every other sentence that refers to a different method/version. So in conclusion I think one section per method/version is the way to go. If it makes sense, a given glitch can be a section, and the different methods and versions can be sub-sections. — {Espyo^T} 15:30, October 9, 2021 (EDT)

But then we'd have a mess of overlapping sequence breaks that would make the article really long. For example, we'd have "Formidable Oak light skip (Wii U version)", "Formidable Oak light skip (Deluxe easy version)", "Formidable Oak light skip (Deluxe hard version)" in one section of the article, and "Backdoor Phosbat (Wii U version)", "Backdoor Phosbat (Deluxe version)", "Distant Tundra bridge skip (Wii U version)", "Distant Tundra bridge skip (Deluxe version)" in another, and lots of other confusing situations like that, with lots of information duplicated between them. It would be a mess. What if we separated Pikmin 3 sequence breaks by area? — Soprano_(talk) 17:46, October 9, 2021 (EDT)

The article being long isn't wrong per se. Well, I think we can also make different splits. Like using bullet points inside of the "how to" part, with each bullet point referring to one method/version. Otherwise yeah, splitting the article sounds good. I think anything sounds better than turning the paragraphs into a plate of spaghetti... — {Espyo^T} 07:24, October 10, 2021 (EDT)

Now I'm confused; the splitting by area was a separate suggestion to my main one, which is that similar sequence breaks should be documented in the same section, reducing the amount of duplicated text. The idea of having different instructions inside the "how to" part is a good idea, and some sections do it already.

Perhaps it would be worth not using the glitch template for these situations, or developing a new template? I say this because having an organized way to show different instructions with different demonstration videos and reproducibility is difficult with the current setup.

Another idea: having a branching system for sequence breaks. The Day 1 Escape section already does a bit of this with its layered dot points. An example of what I mean by this: In the Distant Tundra, you can go out of bounds near the Swooping Snitchbug. The method of doing this varies by game. From this position, depending on where you go, you can push down the iron ball early or you can go all the way to the Vehemoth Phosbat arena. A branching structure could allow all these tricks to be described in 1 section, minimizing repeated text. — Soprano_(talk) 18:21, October 10, 2021 (EDT)

Splitting by area might not make sense, since some sequence breaks let you skip content of multiple areas. As for a new template, what fields could the template have? Every method/version can be split in so many ways: different difficulties, different game versions, different requirements, different execution times... Maybe we shouldn't even use the glitch template at all. I remember saying before I wasn't a fan of using the template in this article in the first place, but I can't remember why. I'm not sure how a branching explanation could work 1. with text, 2. inside the template. Got an example? — {Espyo^T} 13:27, October 11, 2021 (EDT)