Thanks to vaxherd for discovering the character names that result in no enemy encounters until you save your game, and catklaw and Evilash25 for making the first Metal Slime manipulations in this route. I expanded on the idea from that point and added the Gremlins in Lianport and 47 Metal Babbles to eliminate all grinding in Rhone.

In this run I executed my new endgame manipulations with no mistakes, allowing us to save more time than we lost in the early game for the first sub 2:30 run.