Hello, speedrunners! With Brutal Katana v2.1.0 the game introduced Persistent Timer, and the "100% (Full Game)" will now utilize it to relax the "No retrying" rule as well as avoid the tedious task of manually summing up level completion times.

All full game runs for Brutal Katana v2.1.0 and higher now require you to enable the Persistent Timer and prohibition to retry levels was removed:

All runs in this category must complete all 48 levels of the game with Persistent Timer on (Setting -> Game -> Persistent TImer)**. Resetting the Persistent Timer invalidates the run. ... The total completion time of runs submitted to this category is the time shown by the Persistent Timer after completing the 48th unique level.

The rules remain unchanged for Brutal Katana runs on versions without the Persistent Timer (i.e. BK v2.0.2 and lower):

**This is not required if playing a game version lower than v2.1.0. In that case, the total completion time is instead the sum of completion times of the individual levels, and retrying levels is not permitted.

Have a good sunday!

Brutal Katana now has an official Discord server (and this leaderboard is also now fully official too)! Read the Steam article for details: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2741610/view/497190789924782333

Hello, speedrunners! Brutal Katana v2.0.0 came out 5 days ago (sorry for being late..) with 24 new levels, 2 new themes, 3 new mechanics, and other goodies! I recommend you check out the Steam post for exact details.

To reflect these changes and to better set the leaderboard up for future potential game updates, i have implemented the following changes:

• Added levels 25 through 48.

• Split all submissions by major game version into subcategories. The current ones are v1 and v2. All future submissions are expected to use v2, but v1 will remain unarchived so that the "old" records can still be viewed. I made it a hard-splitting subcategory instead of an annotation because some categories (by which i mostly mean Full Game runs) now have 2x the amount of levels to complete, meaning v1 runs cannot be fairly compared to v2 runs.

• All runs also now require an annotation called "Exact Game Version", which should be self-explanatory. I made it an annotation instead of a subcategory because levels (or the game mechanics themselves) are unlikely to be meaningfully modified between regular patches, so it wouldn't make sense to functionally reset the leaderboard after every bugfix, but knowing the game version may still be occasionally useful.

I un-orphaned all existing runs and annotated them with correct game versions based on submission date, so the v1 leaderboard should be intact. The rules had no change besides the level count number change for the "100% (Full Game)" category.

Aaand that's it. Happy Tuesday!

Hello, speedrunners! I've made a little reform regarding the rules. Now, individual levels don't have rules, instead, the "100% (Level)" category (which all levels belong to) has this clause that covers them all:

All submitted runs must complete the relevant level. The total completion time of a run is the time reported by the game in the "Current Time" field on the "Level <number> Completed" screen that is shown upon level completion.

The "100% (Full Game)" category now has a clarification as to the reason behind allowing levels to be completed in any order:

**This is primarily because that way one can complete levels from hardest to easiest. Since dying on hard levels is more likely than on easy ones, failed attempts, on average, will end much earlier, saving significant amounts of time that otherwise would've been spent completing the easy levels only to die on a hard one.

Additionally, both categories ("100% (Full Game)" and "100% (Level)") now include this recommendation:

It's strongly recommended to wait for at least a second before leaving the "Level <number> Completed" screen (by ending the recording, continuing to the next level, etc.), as otherwise the completion time can be hard to see.

As an aside, the leaderboard recently gained a bit of theming, such as custom icons for 1st/2nd/3rd places, a cover image, and a background. Happy Saturday!