Hello again, I'm please to announce that we've opened the Glitchless NG Any% category!

Hi! We have discussed creating a glitchless ruleset in the past, but there hasn't been sufficient interest so far. Part of the difficulty is in defining what is allowed and disallowed. This is a general truth about glitchless categories, and someone is always left confused or dissatisfied when certain things that may/may not be glitches are allowed or banned.

Here are some Okami-specific examples: Basic Techniques:

• Dash/Speed Storage/Restoration - By jumping into and out of cutscenes, we can preserve elevated levels of speed to move more quickly out of cutscenes. This is used constantly and could easily be done unintentionally. Is this allowed?
• Air-Ground Tackle / Sliding Ground Tackle - By performing a ground tackle off a ledge or a slippery surface, you can perform a ground jump while technically in mid-air. This can be easily done in a huge number of places, and seems to just be a basic function of the ground tackle move. However, a lot of tricks, skips, and sequence breaks involve this technique.
• Brush Adventure - The brush camera can be dragged around away from Ammy. Even without taking the camera out of bounds or through collision, this can be used to better frame certain brush techniques, or to take a shorter path to an objective than Ammy could take herself.

Fight Skips:

• The Green Imp fight skips in Cave of Nagi. These are as easy as walking around the triggers, but they are clearly intended as tutorials. Can these be skipped?
• The Headless Guardian fight skip in Cursed Ryoshima Coast. This also just involves going around the trigger, albeit through a Cursed Zone. Is this different?
• The Ubume fight skip in Ryoshima Coast. This is a much more precise trick, but it still amounts to just jumping around the fight trigger. There are many other similar fight skips varying precision and difficulty. Which are allowed and which are banned, and where do we draw the line?

Cutscene Skips

• In River of the Heavens, you can skip the cutscene where Issun explains wall jumping by simply doing it from the tackle tutorial area. Is this a skip? Maybe it's intended by the developers?
• Also in River of the Heavens, you can skip the cutscene after receiving Rejuvenation, where the game points out the "River of the Heavens" tablet a second time. You do this by wall jumping precisely off the torii gate right behind the trigger. There's not really a glitch involved - just basic movement options like wall jump and air tackle.
• The introductory cutscene after entering Tsuta Ruins can also be skipped with a wall jump and air tackle.
• In Tsuta Ruins, after the double Bud Ogre fight, you can skip using Sunrise and growing the mushroom by doing a sliding ground tackle off the log, wall jump, and air tackle bounce onto the upper ledge. Is this significantly different?

Sequence breaks:

• In Moon Cave, rather than going directly to the kitchen to rescue Ajimi, you can directly Vine to an upper floor and start collecting ingredients, only returning when convenient. The Vine flower/blossom is definitely there, and not even particularly difficult to reach. No glitches are really required to exploit this. Is this banned?
• It's possible to skip Moon Cave entirely by performing City Checkpoint Skip. Technically, you never go out of bounds during CC skip, and if you get Water Lily, you don't event need to do a Corner Jump (arguably a glitch). From there, you're just exploiting intended movement mechanics (sliding ground tackle, wall jump, air tackle bounce) in a precise way to get to the opposite ledge. This is a lot more extreme, but similar principles apply.
• Fishing with Benkei to raise the bridge in Sei-an Aristocratic Quarter can be skipped by doing another sliding ground tackle off a nearby tree.
• Almost all of Sunken Ship can be skipped by jumping off some slippery collision on the side of the first large room.
• The Fire Tablet can be skipped by just jumping over the lava in Himiko's palace. The jumps are precise, but not really a glitch.

There are definitely other points of discussion you could have. The intention of listing all these isn't to discourage someone from trying to create a cohesive ruleset - I would encourage it! Rather, it's to clarify that doing so is definitely non-trivial, and would probably require some discussion and consensus from anyone interested in running the category.

On the other hand, you are absolutely free to play and run the game however you wish, regardless of rules or the opinions of others, so long as you're having fun☺️

Neopronouns are legitimate, valid, and have a long history, even if they seem new to many. People should have the freedom to use them if desired. That said, even if you didn't know or understand that (though you now should), the case could still be made that the current 3-checkbox solution doesn't serve everyone. For many people, there is an important difference between, for example, she/they and they/she. People may prefer one pronoun set but accept others. Users should be able to communicate those (or any other) preferences naturally, as they would on nearly any other platform.

While even a textbox cannot capture the full nuance of gender expression, it would be a significant improvement over checkboxes or dropdown menus.

(I want to be clear about this: nobody should have to go through an administrative process to have their desired pronouns "approved" and added to a list, when we have a simpler alternative. That would be frustrating and possibly demeaning.)

I see no reason people shouldn't be able to use whatever pronouns they sincerely prefer. Moderating what options people are given is the opposite of the solution, in my eyes. Mods shouldn't have the authority to tell a user what pronouns they can and cannot prefer for themselves. Instead of assuming a user will use the textbox to troll, and trying to protect them from themselves, we should directly address the few instances when a malicious uses the field to troll, and ban or otherwise punish those users. A simple profanity filter would be a sufficient preemptive measure otherwise.

In other words, give people the benefit of the doubt to freely set their own pronouns. If someone mishandles that freedom, take it away from that user specifically.

The issue of "abuse potential" is equally present with usernames (among other things), but we don't make people choose their username from a pre-approved list. We allow people to identify how they choose and ban, punish, or censor those who use that freedom to harm others. Why should pronouns be any different?

I saw that a feature was recently added to allow users to specify their pronouns on their profile. This is great! However, I do find it somewhat strange that the only options are "He/Him", "She/Her", and "They/Them". I think it would be better and more inclusive to have at least 2 additional options: "Any/All" and an "Other" or "Specify" field with a short textbox allowing users to specify their own pronouns, whatever those may be. Alternatively, the checkbox options could be removed entirely, and replaced with just a text field. This is, for example, how GDQ handles pronouns.