The ruleset was created only with the Japanese version in mind at that point. I'm fairly sure that the japanese audio DLC would ultimately be allowed to use as the only DLC. About all the other DLC, including costumes. The Problem is that on PS4 you can't uninstall specific DLC and it will automatically download all owned DLC when downloading the game from PSN. Certain DLC costumes come with accessories that do in fact heavily influence the run, such as nullifying elements, increasing EXP/Money gain, etc. Therefore, at least for now, DLC is banned entirely. The DLC is stored in a box in your room, as long as it's not inspected you won't actually acquire the DLC items, aside from Persona DLC which is always in your compendium, if you own the 20th anniversary edition for example. Needless to say that these Persona can't be bought from the compendium, or used in general in a Speedrun.

Also, just to point this out. Quickly menuing to create your character is part of the game/speedrun. Plus, the top 3 runs all name their characters properly, actually. It just so happened that all of them were 3 characters long, iirc. You're basically asking to cut out some menuing and a 3 minute intro out of the run for no actual reason. In fact, you're asking to reduce "skill requirement" by removing character creation from the timing.

As for the appearance of the character you gotta have to look at for 2 hours. It takes literally less than 1 second to adjust the look of the character. The only thing that would take time is the name, which, as explained above, isn't actually a problem since everyone names their character normally. Even if you don't and go with "a", you're still not at a point where it'd matter to save those 3 or 4 seconds. (To answer your other question, race is preference, although Selkie/Lilty is the most common one, whereas Yuke straight up sucks).

TL;DR Again, there's no reason to change the timing.

edit: typos.

I don't see a reason to adjust the timing method. Starting timing on New Game is how it is, and probably should be, for almost any game anyways, except the ones that use JRTA timing (Power on). Also, I personally feel that changing the timing to what you suggested wouldn't even change anything except for making the run appear 4 minutes faster than it actually is.

You know, resubmitting the run like once a day and having people tag me on Twitter about it won't make me watch and verify/reject your run any faster.

It will stay out of misc if it's the only run, of course.

NG+ True end can be added if there's runs. It would be set up like it is on the Persona 4 boards in that case.

Sent mine, hopefully still in time.

Late to the party but I didn't have much time to practice.

Resonance of Fate: Even with the shittiest rng and stuff it will be easily under 2:55 every time. (Marathon run would exclude the 11 minutes of credits that are included on the leaderboards) Reason why my time is so far off of WR is my slow console and using safer strats for the marathon at times.

Lightning Returns: I didn't practice this much since my time was already pretty good on the PS3 version (which is roughly 15-20 minutes slower compared to PC version). The de-rust run I did off stream was 2:37 on PS3, which would be about around 2:20 on PC).

Tales of Xillia 2: Been currently practicing this off stream, made steady progress towards sub 3:40 times overall. It's not much more difficult or different from ToX1, only a bit more luck reliant at times so times can spike a bit more. However, I won't be able to update with any videos/leaderboard times on this until monday.