I've added my notes to the guides section, but I wanted to write down a couple other things for possible reference.

1. Untested, but it might be possible to save a small amount of time against Mouri if you set up a couple Battle Permits beforehand. This would require you to start with at least 185 points if you keep the same item loadout in the notes.

Omachi should get the Popularity Staff until the Kouhime/Sill scene right before the scene introducing Shimazu. At that point, you'd switch Omachi and Daidouji to Battle Permits. With enough luck, Omachi and Daidouji will both attack Izumo on that turn, and you can safely defend any counterattack. From there, you'd switch Omachi to Tange Dog, dismiss/unequip Daidouji, and finish claiming Izumo.

Obviously this idea would require multiple things to go your way on top of everything else. Specifically, you'd need Tenshiism to not ruin their troop totals, and you'd need both permit users to pick the right target consecutively. Still, it's an idea that might be worth testing if you want to save a little time. (Having Daidouji around will probably mess with enemy troop scaling though, so that might be a drawback.)

2. I haven't put much effort into ironing it out yet, but it appears that the 165+ points notes mostly work for 5-star difficulty as well. You'd obviously need to make some tweaks, but it's surprising how much applies. It appears that the main snag is funding, so you'd want to take the Jizo bonuses + 10,000 starting gold. This allows you to abuse the troop limit/cost gates to get the necessary troop counts for your tanks. You'd probably also want to go up to 40 satisfaction instead of 30 to make that happen.

The other snag seems to be that you'll need to resign yourself to safety saving at certain points. I'm not sure you'll be able to get around reloading at specific points until the enemies don't counterattack you, because you just don't have enough Instant Time Pass to block everything.

So yeah, that's all I have for now. Hopefully this is useful to somebody. :)

I have a few questions about the New Game All Stories rule set:

1. Why are the tutorial maps required? They don't give cards, and what little gameplay is there is mostly trivial. They aren't even included in the Story Mode tab, so it makes even less sense. I realize they are mandatory from a fresh start, but since they don't give you anything relevant to a run, I don't see the point.

2. Is the unskippable introduction required? The rules wording makes it sound like time would start after that, and it would actually allow you to freely change your controls without losing time. However, the only run currently on the leaderboard apparently includes the introduction in the timing. Which is it?

I also wondered about why first completions of levels are required for a New Game All Stories run. I'm guessing it's because even with a stock setup at base level, any cards you'd get per level completion would be extra because your base save file already picked up some cards.

Would it really make THAT much of a difference in a run though? It seems like the only real barrier for eliminating pointless cutscene skips that just slow down the run's pace. I imagine it would make slightly more of a difference at higher difficulties, but still. Only other thing it would change is the default team, but you could just require a runner to re-enter Story Mode between arcs to fix that. (Not that I think it would even matter outside of melee somehow being super good for something.)

Since the Japanese version does seem to have a small advantage with Mecha Godzilla, is there any interest in splitting the leaderboard by region?

There's currently only one Japanese version run on the leaderboard, but with the recent activity I've seen, perhaps that will change.

Let me know what you think. I'm in favor of a split, personally.

I don't know if there's a topic for this kind of thing, but apparently my notifications/followed games are linked to someone else's account. I just received notifications and have a followed game from Molotok's account (note the "k", not a "v").

No idea how something like this is even possible, but could someone fix it please? Thanks.