Hello, in case anybody wanting to run this game is wondering, there are a few differences between the different characters you will play. Basically, the pattern of the bubbles you will send to your ennemy will be different depending on your character, meaning there are "better" and "worse" characters. There is a very good guide here : https://www.gamefaqs.com/neo/563372-magical-drop-iii/faqs/16931 if you want further information. The most agressive character is probably Fortune which is why I do every single run on Fortune. The thing is that this character is a hidden character, and you will need to do a little trick to make it appear. Each character is related to a specific number (see the FAQ I linked earlier), and what you want to do is place your cursor on a character, wait for the countdown to get to the number corresponding to this character, and press three times the C button (ONLY 3 times, not once more, not once less), during this second. This should add some time to the countdown and make a few new characters appear, especially fortune in the top left corner. I generally do this on Sun, which number is 19, which gives me enough time to get my cursor on this character and then press C three times, which makes the characters appear as early as possible. It's important for this to be quick because of the secrets. On normal mode there are two secrets. Everything is explained on this FAQ : https://www.gamefaqs.com/neo/563372-magical-drop-iii/faqs/6017 about secrets, but for the speedrun, you will basically encounter Moon and Black Pierrot if you're fast enough. In order to get Moon after stage 6 which is a bonus stage (so it will make you lose time) you need to beat the first 6 stages in a very short timer. You can then avoid getting this secret by delaying Stage 6 for a bit. However, if you're fast enough, doing the secret can still be faster than delaying Stage 6, so once you're more at ease with the run i'd suggest you to train the secret. Moon is quite a hard matchup specifically because the board is quite complicated so you'll lose time quite easily on him. The second secret is quite another problem. Basically, Black Pierrot is just unbeatable. It's way too strong, and his cursor keeps teleporting (i've never beaten him), so you absolutely want to avoid fighting against him. And his fight will only happen if you win three matches in a row before he's supposed to appear and have a score over a certain amount. Which basically means "if you suicide on the match right before him, then you won't encounter him", which is probably what you want to do. So if you've not lost any match before fighting empress (Stage 10), then start the match against her by suiciding, and continue the game (here you gotta be fast for selecting fortune, which is why i said you need to be fast on this part earlier). By suiciding, the matches will also get a bit easier, and Fortune will then be easier (it's a quite hard fight anyway). I think I gave all the information you need to run Normal%, it's quite tough at first because some fights are really punishing like Moon and Fortune, but it's still a very fun run which requires a lot of skill. Have fun, good luck :)