So, I am not the greatest at explaining this, but I will do my best. I noticed that when you push the start button for the first time, it takes you from the "Mask" screen, to the "Friday the 13" screen, then when you push it again, it goes to the screen with all the text, then the third start input goes to Character select.

Now, the important thing that I noticed, is that when you let the game sit, the mask gets stabbed, and then it goes to the "Friday the 13" screen on its own and then plays the sound.

Now for the question, is there a reason that we don't try to find a potential seed starting from that second screen, maybe saving a little bit of time? I mean, it probably wouldn't amount to a huge amount of time, but it might be a bit more consistent with a potential audio/video cue based on when the screen changes and sound plays or something.

I'm not sure how that work would exactly. In any case, the current fastest route is fairly common seed, so I don't think anything special needs to be done in order to get it. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, I just don't know how possible it would be to manage this.

As a side note, timing doesn't actually start until you press start at the press start screen. Everyone else seems to think it's the first start press on the mask screen.

Oh, ok. I always hit start the first time I hit start on the mask screen, I should re-check my PB time in that case. I doubt it will change anything though.

"Real Timing (RTA) begins on press start, and ends when the final attack hits Jason. IGT (SDA timing) begins upon pressing start, and the final cutscene beginning to play."

^I read this as time starts as soon as you press start (Mask screen), others probably read the same thing. It probably doesn't change anything that much since the presses are so immediate, but the wording should probably be changed just to avoid confusion

I had spent a good chunk of time analyzing the 256 possible seeds, most of which are indeed duplicates. The current route actually only has I think 2-3 entries in the programming, so nailing that seed would theoretically have to be frame perfect. But Lazarus_DS made a great point that basically the global timer on console is likely programmed to start the RNG at a random value even on a hard reset. I had a click track I built that I was able to get the correct route seed about 25% of the time, but when I tried to use that click track on console, I almost never got it. The one bane of speedrunning this game is that dumb random RNG value. So every time I just hard boot and quickly mash start, jump over to Mark and hope it's the right seed. Can spend 20 minutes before I actually get a playable seed. It's a bummer.