Hey - so I just noticed that there is a new category of Any% - Cutscene Remover which seems fantastic since it brings the total time to run down significantly. I was thinking about learning this run, but was curious about a couple of questions I had:

-Does this run have a huge RNG element to it? For reference, I am currently running XIII-2 and one of my biggest turnoffs about it is that there are multiple huge time losses (2-3 mins sometimes) due to the strategy that are completely out of your control.

-Are there any drops/strategies to look out for that are rare, but help you save time?

-Are there manipulations that you need to do throughout the run or is it more of a hit new game and play?

Thanks!

-Yes, literally everything in the game has an element of randomness to it: random encounter chance, which enemy encounters you get, chance of landing a critical hit, random drops, etc.

-Lightning-based weapons that can drop from bosses are useful against a few bosses and other enemies, an enemy in Cavern of the Stolen Fayth can drop an armor that has No Encounters on it which prevents random encounters for the rest of the run saving you time, etc.

-You don't HAVE to manipulate, but manipulating will easily allow you to get the abovementioned No Encounters armor and lightning weapons, once you learn how to manipulate the RNG, saving you a good chunk of time. If you don't care about going for WR, then I wouldn't feel pressured to learn manipulation.

Thanks for that response! Yeah RNG is a part of FF runs for sure, but I'm more concerned with barriers of progressing. Seems like there is no X and Y events must happen before you can progress and those events have a 20% chance of occurring.

Is that the only manipulation you need to do? Is there a guide/link for the manipulations?

There are a couple of chance based barriers, but they are very soft barriers. On Mi'ihen Highroad you need Kimahri to learn lancet from a bomb and on Djose Highroad he needs to learn Stone Breath from a Basilisk. If you don't get these from natural random encounters you end up having to force encounters but it is very uncommon for this to happen.

You don't need to do manipulation and in fact it is probably best to learn the run first before attempting that since it requires some understanding of what you are doing to utilise effectively. Not sure what the link is off hand but I'm sure someone can supply if you're dead set on it.

If you're planning on Any% - Cutscene Remover then it is very hard and a lot of effort to manip in that category due to the lack of downtime so I would advise against it for that anyway.

Hope this helps.