The sub 5!

This was my goal. Got lucky with 3 gold ring drops and not much extra grinding. I did do a "safety" of sorts and got an additional 4th wizard with max spells which took a bit of gold grinding, so you could definitely do this faster as you only "need" 3 wizards. It just means gambling after about 5 hours of gameplay and potentially losing 30 minutes if the gamble doesn't work out.

So I didn't do that.

This was a lot of fun to route and was basically the last non-PAL NES game that hadn't really been fully run.

There's still a lot of time you could theoretically shave off this game with the right gold ring drops, but really only 2 or 3 additional gold rings would have sped this up at any considerable amount. Given that this run involves gambling with the wizard grind at the start, the widow fight, the aildrek fight, getting a gold ring by this point, getting to Tarjan for the first time, beating Tarjan without losing a bunch of your wizards, and then getting to Mangar with enough MP and not getting restoration chained.... I'm happy with my time. :D