it really is an amazing game

mine too! my mother bought me a disk with Aquaria when I was seven, now I've completed it several times and it's still one of my favourite games. I even made something like a recreation of Aquaria in Terraria. Glad to see there are people who also remember Aquaria.

When collecting the rocks to build the statue, I eat one of the jellyfish in beast form. Then, before the statue is finished building (which triggers the boss fight), I "shoot" the jellyfish projectile while not holding any direction which leaves the projectile sitting still right where the ghost mother spawns. This skips waiting for the boss to spawn those red jellyfish.

Thanks! Most of the routing wasn't done by me. The first route I found was by vayarda who came up with the route Energy -> Fish -> Nature -> Beast -> Sun (temple skip) -> Sunken City -> Ending. The first time I took the record I had only slightly modified his route by stopping to farm fish occasionally for meat+oil to make speed soups. Later RCHelicoptr picked up the game and found the Spirit form glitch, which lets us skip basically all of Mithalas and move at boost speed w/o wall grabbing. He then rerouted the middle section of the run to get the include this new trick. As for my latest improvements: a lot of it was movement optimization. There were only some minor route changes: I began skipping the first HP after Bind and changed the route of The Body to use the Spirit Form glitch more and skip the extra poultices. How optimized is this run? I'm sure it can go lower, I lost a bit of time at the end due to losing the lobster in the dark. I could save about 15 seconds there but ended up losing time instead. However, this run was incredibly lucky and I had almost no extra farming for soup ingredients. I don't think this is a game with a lot of discrete improvements like zelda games where time gain/loss depends if you get a trick first try. In Aquaria, a large amount of time save comes from efficient wall bouncing which is a very unique kind of movement. Its a system that feels like it has limitless potential to be optimized. So its tough to say just how "good" this run actually is.

cast the song (but don't release the last note) while drifting into a screen transition