Speedrun Strategies for Super Ninja Adventure: Go Fast, Die Less

Why Even Think About Speedrunning a Casual Platformer?

Fair question. Super Ninja Adventure isn't positioned as a hardcore speedrun game. It's a fun, accessible platformer that anyone can pick up and enjoy. But here's the thing — speedrunning doesn't have to mean world-record attempts and frame-perfect inputs. For me, "speedrunning" just means trying to get through the game faster and more efficiently than your last run.

And it turns out, chasing efficiency in Super Ninja Adventure is genuinely one of the most entertaining ways to play it. When you start thinking about the game as an optimisation puzzle — how do I get from A to B the fastest possible way — every level becomes interesting in a completely new way.

I went from "I'll just enjoy this casually" to "wait, if I do that jump here and roll immediately after, I can skip that whole enemy encounter" in about two hours. And now I can't play it any other way.

The Foundation: You Need Clean Movement First

Before you can go fast, you need to go clean. This sounds obvious but it's where most "I want to speedrun this" attempts fall apart early.

Going fast while making lots of small errors — clipping walls, mistiming jumps, getting hit by avoidable attacks — is actually slower than going at a controlled moderate pace with zero errors. The time lost to deaths, knockback, and recovery animations adds up extremely fast.

My benchmark: if I'm dying more than twice on any given level attempt, I'm going too fast for my current skill level on that section. Speed should come from efficiency, not from pressing buttons faster. Once a movement sequence feels automatic and clean at normal speed, that's when you start pushing the pace.

Practically: play through the full game twice just focussing on clean, zero-death runs. Get comfortable. Then start thinking about going faster.

Enemy Skipping: The Core Time-Saver

The biggest time savings in any Super Ninja Adventure run come from skipping enemy encounters entirely rather than fighting through them. Most enemies, when not triggered, simply won't follow you past their patrol territory.

Here's the key insight: enemies have an activation radius. If you move quickly enough — specifically, if you can cross through their detection zone faster than they can register you and begin an attack animation — you can blow past many enemies without engaging at all.

Where this works particularly well:

• Standard Guards on wide platforms: Sprint past at full speed while they're mid-turn. They can't react fast enough.
• Archer sections: Time your approach during their reload animation. Sprint the entire distance and you'll clear the zone before they can fire again.
• Groups of Jumpers: The moment Jumpers are airborne, their detection resets briefly. Sprint through the gap during a jump cycle.

Shield Bearers are almost never worth skipping — they tend to be positioned in bottlenecks where you need to deal with them. But for everything else, seriously consider whether you need to fight at all.

Jump Routing: Taking the High Road

Most players naturally take the ground path through Super Ninja Adventure's levels. It feels like the intended route. But the high path — jumping over obstacles and enemies, using elevated platforms to traverse sections — is almost always faster.

Here's why: the ground path tends to funnel you through enemy encounters (because enemies are placed there to challenge ground-level movement). The elevated path, by contrast, lets you cruise over many of these encounters entirely. You're trading ground security for aerial speed.

The elevated path requires better jump timing and platform confidence, which is why it's harder. But in a speedrun context, that skill investment pays off massively. Start identifying high routes in each level. Ask yourself: can I get from here to there by jumping over rather than running through?

A specific example I use regularly: in the mid-game forest section, there's a long ground stretch with three guard encounters in sequence. There's an elevated log platform running parallel to the whole section. Jump up to the log at the start, sprint the full length, drop down at the exit. Three encounters, zero time spent fighting.

Optimised Boss Strategies for Speed

Bosses are fixed encounters you can't skip, but you can definitely optimise them significantly. The goal is to identify the fastest possible damage rotation and execute it consistently.

Phase Transition Attacks

Every boss in Super Ninja Adventure has a phase transition — a moment where they shift from one attack pattern to another. This transition is always accompanied by a brief animation that leaves the boss vulnerable. Most players wait for the transition to complete before attacking. Speedrunners attack during the transition.

The damage window during a phase transition is often the largest in the entire fight. It typically lasts 2–3 seconds. Landing 3–4 hits during this window instead of 1–2 can shave significant time off a boss fight.

Avoid the Chip Damage Trap

Chip damage — taking small, unavoidable hits while dealing damage to the boss — feels acceptable in a normal playthrough. In a speedrun, it's a trap. Health pickups take time to collect and often require a detour. Going into the next section with low health creates risk. Stay disciplined about dodging everything, even small hits, and maintain a safety margin.

Skip Recovery Pickups

After boss fights, health pickups often appear. Unless you're critically low, skip them. The time to collect them and the positioning to pick them up isn't worth the safety margin unless you genuinely need it.

The Dodge Roll Speed Trick

I touched on the dodge roll in our mechanics article, but there's a specific speed application worth its own section: the roll-sprint chain.

When you complete a dodge roll and immediately input a sprint direction, your character maintains slightly higher velocity for about half a second. It's a small speed boost, but chained repeatedly — roll, sprint, roll, sprint — across open ground, it's measurably faster than sprinting alone.

This technique is most useful in wide-open sections between combat encounters, particularly the later levels which have longer travel corridors. In the platforming-heavy sections, stick to regular movement since the roll chain requires flat ground to work reliably.

It took me a while to feel this difference, so don't be discouraged if it doesn't seem noticeable immediately. Time yourself over a long flat section with and without the chain — the difference becomes obvious once you're measuring.

Segment Practice: The Speedrunner's Secret Weapon

Nobody learns a speedrun by doing full runs repeatedly from the start. That's an incredibly slow way to improve because most of your time is spent on sections you've already mastered.

Segment practice means picking a specific section — say, a particular level or even just a single difficult room — and practising it in isolation until you can execute it perfectly and quickly. Then move to the next segment. Only when each segment is clean do you start putting them together into full runs.

Super Ninja Adventure's checkpoint system actually makes segment practice easy. Deliberately let yourself die at key checkpoints, then practice the next section from the checkpoint. You can isolate almost any part of the game this way.

The specific segments I'd recommend practising first: the transition from the first to second biome (there's a tricky multi-enemy corridor), and the final boss fight. These are where the most time is lost in a typical run.

Putting It All Together: Your First Sub-X Run

Here's my recommended progression for someone who's never thought about speedrunning Super Ninja Adventure before:

1. First goal: Complete with no deaths. This builds clean movement habits and level familiarity.
2. Second goal: Identify and learn all available enemy skips. Note which encounters you bypassed.
3. Third goal: Learn the elevated path routing for each level. Map out the high-road option for every section.
4. Fourth goal: Optimise boss fights. Learn the phase transitions and maximise damage windows.
5. Fifth goal: Put it all together in a full run. Your first optimised run will feel shaky, but the time reduction versus your casual pace will be eye-opening.

The process itself is incredibly satisfying. Each small optimisation compounds with others. The game you already enjoyed becomes something entirely new when you're approaching it as a puzzle to solve rather than a challenge to survive.

And honestly? Even if you never care about times or records, learning to play efficiently just makes Super Ninja Adventure more fun. You feel like an actual ninja — quick, purposeful, in control. That's the real reward.