there should be NG+ Categories with the huge health bars from Blue orbs and that would be great for runs because I was gonna run Dante/Nero NG but i'm not sure if I can do it with Nearly a huge health bar please get back to me on this subject pls thank you ^_^
First of all, thanks for expressing interest in running this game. Even if you're not going to run this I'm happy you're looking at speedrunning this series.
I'll start by giving a little bit of the history behind speedrunning DMC3 and DMC4 (and touch briefly on action game speedruns in general), which will hopefully shed light on why the leaderboards are the way they are right now. When I started running NG Human on original DMC4 in mid 2014, there already existed a few NG+ Human runs of the game. They use super costumes and very heavily utilize Holy Water and Omen, making 99% of the fights menuing or laying down a suitcase and opening it. What's even dumber is that only one person ran on the 1HKO difficulty Heaven or Hell, which is definitely faster for NG+.
What interested me in the game was SDA's page on DMC4. There were 2 runs: a segmented 1:12:30 NG Devil Hunter by monban (which I highly recommend watching) and a single-segment 1:38:05 NG Devil Hunter by Alucard. While the segmented run is fantastic, I saw lots of room for improvement in the single-segment run. Now traditionally, New Game for action games has been run on Normal difficulty or above (Mega Man X series except X6, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Bayonetta, Legend of Korra, Devil May Cry, The Wonderful 101), though there were some exceptions (God Hand, Vanquish, DmC, and whatever is going on with the Ninja Gaiden series). I wasn't that familiar with the communities behind these games at the time and went ahead with my own NG Human stuff for DMC4 and got a time that I was decently satisfied. It was only after I started running DMC3:SE and getting involved with other action game communities that I realized the logic for playing on Normal for most games.
DMC3:SE is a little odd with its difficulties. Going by the original Japanese release of Dante's Awakening, Normal is the only difficulty available from a new save (to play on Easy, you have to die 3 times from a new game file); however, going by the North America release of Dante's Awakening, Normal is actually Hard difficulty with a gutted checkpoint system. The difficulties in Special Edition universally conformed to the Japanese DA release, with an option to choose either the JP DA checkpoint system or the NA DA checkpoint system (Gold and Yellow, respectively). Making this more confusing was a new option added in SE, Turbo, which makes the game 20% faster, and the myriad costumes you could select for Dante and Vergil, some of which drastically change how you play the game. Before I started running DMC3:SE, the categories were scattered, with Vergil NG+ Heaven or Hell (Super Costume) being acknowledged as the fastest. The system was a mess, so I (along with past runners of the game like Darko and Flicky) decided on some ground rules. First, timing would be done RTA. IGT is somewhat accurate for these games but you would have to either save the game after completion or sum up your mission times to get that value. Next, Normal was deemed the NG category due to it being the only one available from a fresh install or save of the game. From there, NG+ items like super costumes were restricted from the category, with the exception of non-super Vergil (who is less a costume and more a character). These decisions were made with the reasoning to get the NG closest to the state it exists in when you first pop in the disc or install it.
When DMC4:SE came out, I briefly assessed the start options and made the leaderboards following the logic behind DMC3:SE. NG was to be the dominant category, any character or costume that was available from the start without DLC was considered fair game, and the NG category was to be Devil Hunter (Normal), keeping in line with DMC1 and DMC3. I did some testing for what NG+ would look like for 4:SE, and it's prepping a save file to have Heaven or Hell unlocked, Super Costumes available, getting every upgrade, and stocking as many items as you can hold. Making all of this really stupid is that DMC4:SE has an autosave feature, meaning that unless you create a new profile or load a prepared one on console or go into you game files and delete your save, NG is impossible to run except for the first playthrough and NG+ has to be prepped every attempt. This was a stupid decision on Capcom's part, but it is what it is.
The reasoning for the 4:SE leaderboards being barebones as they are right now is lack of interest in other categories and a desire by the community to conform to DMC3:SE's standards. That being said, I am open to new categories. Human is available from the start for NG, making it the fastest NG category and deserving of a spot on the boards. If you'd like, I'll put a spot on the leaderboard for it after you do a run of it for any character. This is what I highly recommend you do if you're intimidated by NG Devil Hunter, though in all honestly NG Devil Hunter isn't that hard and ideally you'd be resetting over getting hit even a few times in NG because of the way Proud Souls are distributed after mission clears. Again, if you want to do this, I'll add a spot for it, but show me a run first. What I'm less open to is NG+ categories besides Heaven or Hell. NG+ Heaven or Hell is the fastest you can complete this game, but a lot of that is because of items, 1HKOs, and super costumes. For NG+ to not be a complete mess of arbitrary categories (all of which would be slower than NG+ Heaven or Hell), there would have to be restrictions placed on super costume and item use, which is arbitrary in and of itself as NG uses items and it'd be dumb to restrict one and not the other. If you can come up with a sufficient argument for NG+ categories besides NG being too hard, I'll add them, but as of now I'm convinced that this is the best system possible for speedrun categories.
Keep in touch. I'm interested in discussing this more with you.
