It's been discovered that the door elevator glitch can be performed on buildings with minimal space between the door and the wall on both of the JP versions of the game. Some testing has been done, and it looks like this saves the most time in Cason (40-50 seconds) and in Varde (3-5 seconds) in any%.
Here is a quick vid displaying the strat change in Cason that allows you to skip the orladin pick: Here is a vid displaying the strat in Varde that Ry came up with (The Ry Stomp): There are some other possible applications, such as getting the Silence Rod early, but I'm not really familiar enough with categories outside of any% to think of anything.
Incredible discovery! I was never able to figure out any real differences between the versions. Very interesting that it affects both JP versions, as I'd thought one of those releases post-dated the USA version. Guess that might not be true based on the last modified dates for the files on disc.
These are the two versions I'm referring to;
The launch version (1.3) dated 1996-05-05
The Playstation: The Best version (1.4) dated 1996-05-24
The 1.4 version is what I've mainly been playing on, as it is on PSN. My 1.3 disc likes to crash on PS2 when it checks for a memory card before the run starts. I don't know if this is an issue with my disc, or if that was what was fixed in 1.4.
tthats actually been happening to me alot BW. ive been using my 1.3 JP disc on console and ive had to remove my memory card when booting a new game bc 90% of the time, it freezes at checking the mem card
I've been doing runs on 1.4 lately and have not experienced the crash. The changes made in that revision seem to eliminate the issue.
