I'm gonna do some more runs tomorrow, and we can definitely talk about it then. I think I have the route figured out but I might be overlooking something.

Additional new route notes:

1. Since we do not actually need to complete Down the Tubes anymore, we can simply exit the level after freeing the friend, foregoing the need to swim to the finish token.
2. Getting the letters in Barrel Blast I believe is faster than getting the letters in Spin Dizzy - I will time that shortly - so we can activate the level skip from Barrel Blast, keep it into Spin Dizzy, and then exit the level once we free the friend to keep the level skip active and save more time. This also means that we'd have to do Spin Dizzy without dying, which we all know is extremely annoying and difficult.

I'm planning on making a video of this soon, but I just discovered a way to skip the gate in Ghost Island, allowing you to enter the 6th world without completing all of the levels in the 4th and 5th worlds. It involves using disc manip to get inside of and then on top of the small railing that runs around the edge of the path leading up to the gate. Once on top, you can bounce through a certain part of the mountain to the right and then zigzag your way back to solid ground behind the gate.

Differences to the route:

1. Only the key needs to be collected in Barrel Blast - obtaining the level skip from this level is no longer necessary.
2. Spin Dizzy remains the same - collect the letters and free the friend, and then activate the level skip. This level skip will be used to skip Ghostly Garden.
3. Clowning Around no longer needs to be done twice.
4. Using the level skip to complete Clown Prix and Krome Keeper is no longer necessary.

This new skip will save a couple minutes I believe, but it is very difficult and also extremely risky. If you die attempting gate skip, you have the level skip glitch active, so you totally screw with the game and basically have to reset or, to be safe, save after Barrel Blast and re-do Spin Dizzy, which still might be faster than the old route. I'm going to do some attempts of this later tonight, and I have a feeling that with a really good run, sub-45 is now possible. We'll see what happens.

The most consistent setup I've found involves holding up + right near the upper portion of the wall. This should eventually clip you into the wall, and once you are inside the wall, tap down + right together until you can just barely see Pac-Man's hand sticking out - this should require either one or two presses of down + right. Once you see this, just mash right on the d-pad and more often than not you will clip through. Be sure to mash right until Pac-Man is completely free from the wall, otherwise you can get pushed back through it the wrong way. This is the best I've come up with, and it is relatively consistent - it tends to work in 3 tries or less. If you want to run Any%, I suggest practicing this quite a bit before doing runs so you get the hang of it.

Yeah, I thought so. I hadn't seen anything anywhere on it, which is why I was wondering. Thanks for the reply!

So I recently picked up Spyro 2 for the Get Yourself Speedrunning race that just happened, and while learning/practicing it I found an interesting glitch that has been discovered before but I haven't been able to find anything regarding allowing/disallowing it in speedruns. Whenever I was playing in a save file that had collected the permanent fireball and all the other abilities by watching the final cutscene in the theater in Dragon Shores, if I quit that game and started a new game without the memory card in, I would start the game immediately with the permanent fireball ability in Glimmer. The other abilities - headbash, climb, and swim - did not carry over, strangely enough. This glitch seems very similar to the Furnace Fun Moves glitch discovered recently in Banjo-Kazooie, where you game over in one of the clock minigames in Furnace Fun in a separate file, and when you start a new file, you can carry over all of the abilities learned in that separate file to a new game. That glitch was allowed for that game, and I'm wondering if starting with the permament fireball would/should be allowed in this game. I think it has the capacity to save a ton of time in pretty much every category (I've only run 40 Orb at this point so I'm not entirely sure about the others), but it also seems to be similar to a New Game+ type of run. I'm also not sure if this files under the category of a cheat, like entering in button codes on the start menu to gain all the abilities, change color, etc., so I was wondering what you guys thought about its use in a speedrun.