Hey friends, I wanted to bring up a pretty important topic here in regards to KH1FM on PC.

As you are probably aware, purchasing JP on PC is near impossible ever since Epic removed the option to use Amazon Pay as a payment method. To purchase JP, you need someone from Japan to purchase the game for you, since PayPal requires JP phone number verification; or you need a prepaid Japanese VISA card with enough funds to pay for the game in full.

Therefore, I am proposing some time normalization on the leaderboard, where we subtract time lost to JP from non-JP runs (i.e. subtracting 45.6 seconds from every Beginner Any% run on English). I realize we would have to modify about 80-90 times on the leaderboard, which I'd be happy to help with if need be. For other categories we would need to figure out the time loss, but that shouldn't take long. Runners shouldn't have to jump through hoops to have a fair shot at competing.

Hi everyone, hi Vio!

I'd like to respond to this idea with my shaky English. I don't know how long it's been, or how complicated it's become to get the JP version, because for my part, I was able to buy it with just my bank card and a VPN.

So I can't gauge the frustration of a runner who wants to optimize but can't.

I understand the idea, but that doesn't stop me from having mixed feelings, because from my point of view, switching to the JP version isn't just a "financial" investment.

People who switch to JP have to learn a few extra things, as the small differences between the two versions and the language require a good knowledge of the game.

On the other hand, it's certain that this idea, if implemented, will make the game more accessible to newcomers.

So I don't have a definite opinion on the matter, but I wanted to share my point of view because it seems relevant to me.

Heyya,

we as the KHFM moderators have thought about this proposal for a few days and came to the conclusion that we will not adjust any of the times to accommodate for the differences in the two different version. There are multiple reasons for this:

A: Every single category would need to be retimed to make this a fair change. It wouldn't be fair nor would it make sense to only do this for Beginner Any% on PC. All other categories would have to be retimed as well which would not lead to a lot of extra runs needing to be adjusted, but we would need to research the time difference for every single category.

B: The differences are more than just the textboxes. We are currently aware of a few more differences in which ENG behaves differently from JP (Being able to move immediately after talking to Leon before the Earthshine cutscene, different spawn points after PC1 and Opposite Armor, an extra screen fade before Oogie Manor to name a few). All of these would need be accounted for as well. Furthermore this also means that just patching the game to be JP is not an option due to those gameplay differences that would need to be ironed out as well.

C: The 45 second time difference was determined by myself through this comparision I made It does include most of the differences I referred to in point B, however it was only timed to get an idea on what the difference between the languages would be by using two runs from the leaderboards. To get an accurate timing we would need a comparison that encompasses every difference and uses an auto-clicker for the textboxes to eliminate any human error. This would probably change the result by only a few seconds, but if we decide to go the path of retiming runs we'd rather do it in the most accurate way possible than just eyeball a difference.

D: FPS matters as far as I've observed. The textboxes are different in speed between 30 and 60 fps (That's why Sonic got 51 seconds as the difference several years ago as opposed to the 45 seconds I got here). This means that potential framedrops could affect the time it would need to be adjusted by.

Now obviously we don't want to deny this proposal without offering a solution to this issue. Currently we are aware of three ways, some more reasonable than others, to still be able to legally obtain a JP version through Epic Games:

1: As stated in this thread before by Violin there is the option to purchase prepaid Japanese Visa Cards. There are multiple ways to purchase those, two example are listed here: https://www.play-asia.com/v-preca-5000-visa-gift-card-japan-account/13/70cvb7 https://www.g2a.com/vanilla-visa-10-000-jpy-key-japan-i10000338113019 Play-Asia offers cards up to 5000 Yen which would work well should the game be on a big sale while G2A offers cards up to 10000 Yen. Those are able to cover the entire purchase of 7980 Yen.

2: Another method would be using a VPN service to change your location as mentioned by Shikikairi. VPNs are not hard to access nowadays and many popular VPN services like NordVPN and Surfshark even offer a 30-day back guarantee meaning you can cancel your VPN right after should you not need it anymore.

3: This solution works in conjunction with the aformentioned 2 methods - Epic Games does not kick you out of the account if you're logged in on multiple devices simultaneously. This means that account sharing is something that can be done as well. This solution of course requires having a connection to someone in the community who already owns the game, but it also allows multiple people to band up for a purchase which would make the option of prepaid Visa cards a much more reasonable ways to access the game.

We understand that these proposed solutions are still hoops one has to jump through just to get your hands on a JP copy of the PC release and that's why we made sure to weigh out the positives over the negatives. The 40-50 second time adjustment is a rather small change in a 2+ hour speedrun that has many ways in which time can be gained or lost. As of right now it's even possible to still reach a Top#5 time with ENG which underlines how small the difference truly is. Ultimately this isn't big enough of a difference to justify reworking the leaderboards, whether this would be through a category spilt or retiming of the runs. We're happy to answer any upcoming questions and feedback on our decision. Thank you for your time reading this.

Sincerely

• desa (On behalf of the KHFM moderation team)

In fact, you do not need to buy the Japanese versions. Just go to the settings and change the language to Japanese, and this video will explain how.

Thank you for the response, Desa!

For clarification, when I made my proposal, I was only using Beginner Any% as an example; but I did in fact want this for all of the categories. However, upon reading your response I do not think this is an issue anymore. While I am very hesitant about the prepaid VISA card method, as I have been scammed by 3rd party websites before when trying to buy gift cards; I tested the VPN method on a cheap Japanese game and it worked! I'm glad that this has lead to a productive discussion among the mod team and we were able to find some more information regarding this issue.

As for what killerman suggested, you actually cannot change the language on the global version to Japanese, as Japanese is not a supported language in that version. Furthermore, JP and Global are two separate versions of the game, with various differences beyond the simple text scrolling speed. Some examples are the Secret Waterway Clip in Traverse Town not being possible in JP, certain animations and dialogue behaving slightly differently, and so on.

Huge thanks to the mod team for your time! I'm really happy to know that JP is still easily accessible through the VPN method.