Okay text was changed since I worked with Eekcast for rules which is a bit frustrating. Regardless, my point stands. There is no consistency issue with saying normal difficulty or higher unless playing the whole game on hard is faster at which point you start discussions on if arbitrary categories for normal are worth creating. In fact it’s less rules, clearer and easier to understand if combat should be fought on Normal or higher; you only ban something if it would cause a negative effect on the run, runner or hardware. This does none of that and accomplishes the goal of a run that does everything but set the run to Easy mode and demolishes bosses.

I completely disagree with disallowing hard. We already bump it to hard for the scripted loss to Sho, and the category is it has to be on normal or higher unless Easy is required for a drop. If putting the game on hard makes it faster, it is on a difficulty that is normal or higher so it’s fine. I don’t see the “consistency” argument at all. I’m pretty sure it’s even worded as such; I’ll double check. Heck, if that’s the case then my run is void; I accidentally got a reaper transition encounter with the difficulty set to hard that I won.

I care less about Tigress (fight is crap but I'll never lose it. For now, I'm wondering if it's even worth the 26 second risk for the level 3 given that the damage only goes through 1 in 4 times it feels like. It sucks because if the damage goes through, I've skipped three phases of the fight.)

However, that does sound really nice for Uzuki and Kariya given those fights potential to be a time bomb through either dying or them standing out of the arena and spamming projectiles at you, especially since fusions don't even do a third of their health.

My one other concern with the build is that it might make it much slower to build meter for random fights which has been generally the faster way to clear them but given that you can carry a level 1 over, perhaps the ideal is to lead with a level 1 into cleanup that builds a bit of meter? Still unsure.

Hmm... this sounds equally miserable but I wonder if lowering joycon sensitivity to 1 or 2 might make the press action more viable. I’ll test it. I normally have been playing with 4.

The traditional rules state that all fights must be done on normal unless it’s done for a drop specifically (the exception was made for a story requirement). I’m not sure I’d be opposed to easy mode being allowed for a drop only, considering the rule is already slightly arbitrary.

Would Tin Pin Thrift trigger Sun Emperor too? Do those stack? That might create a crazy effect.

Also if you could mess with press inputs on docked and just let me know if I’m crazy, that’d be awesome. The only press input I’m not struggling massively with is Shiki’s spin and I used to run the DS version.

The problem with going out of your way is how little you actually fight. The longest fights are rarely longer than 2 minutes. I can’t imagine it’s worth spending 3 minutes, even if Beat does a majority of the damage, especially when half of his fights can be a race to a level 2/3 fusion attack. So shorter fights are almost not long enough to reap the benefits and longer fights don’t benefit as much.

I absolutely disagree on dropping Naraka but maybe I need to play with it. Cross combos are huge both because they increase your damage and the lockdown they provide. I think it’s new passive is still crazy good in a different way.

Meteor Magnet was just a "throw every pin on and see which one actually does somewhat okay DPS when not slashing". That was a free pin that did decently. There's a "press enemy" pin you get for free that I'm super curious about because that motion works well and when paired with something like telekinesis or Beat, it's incredible lockdown and DPS. But yeah, the reason Meteor Magnet was pick was the same reason there's the kangaroo boomerang pin (too lazy to look at notes atm). I couldn't beat Izuki and Kariya, I threw that pin on and the fight worked. I didn't fight it, it seemed decent enough and that fight is awful.

Shock Warning isn't needed for shopkeeper affection. It was added because higher base stats and I didn't think Masamune would evolve again. For Pork City, you just use a deck of the starter pins if Shock Warning isn't used. I'm also wondering if the Mus Rattus boost pin would be good if a bit difficult to get; I'm assuming that's a 20% damage boost?

Maybe we need to play around with Burst rounds more; I'm assuming Herreteman wouldn't be looking at them if the motion didn't work for him. That's the one holdup keeping me from outright dismissing them.

To me, that's just how I feel. 1p2c is hard to enforce, so I'd personally prefer to just say it's a coop run and have them on the same board with a potential flag for solo or coop if people care.

I think unless there becomes a more consistent way to use burst rounds, I don't really want to use them and kinda hope they don't become meta. They truly feel awful to use in this version compared to the DS version (where they were awkward but usable) and I can't figure out why or how to make them work normally. I do think they're higher DPS than what I'm using if I could make them work. It's especially problematic when cross combos do so much damage and so far, lockdown seems almost as valuable as DPS; if I can hold a boss in place with a 2x cross combo multiplier, I can shred it. That's the idea behind shockwave and vulcan uppercut pins currently, even if shockwave falls off super hard by late game.

Something I didn't do but could look into, the food resets at midnight real time. We could have Neku eat twice as much without changing the clock if we set the time an hour or so to midnight, if there is larger but more valuable food. That said, I'm a bit hesitant just because changing system clock can be a pain. At the same time, it's not something bannable since you can't say "You can't do a run that starts before X time". For the same reason, system clock shenanigans should probably be allowed, I just don't expect them to be super good, especially factoring in resyncing the controllers which is suuuuuuper scary. You touch them wrong during the sync process and you get a nasty drift that takes a solid minute to sort out. And if you get it on the 2P joycon, you actually don't know until you get into a fight.

I think early miso ramen might be really useful, at least for Shiki and Joshua. It's only a +2 to attack but still, flat HP really isn't that useful imo. If people were going to die, they'd die regardless I feel. I haven't figured out how Sync works but I think it actually carries over up to 100% from fight to fight as opposed to how it used to work. Keeping up sync is likely not something that we're going to have too much control over unless we need to hold food for specific fights (Uzuki and Kariya, especially red pin would be nice).

Also I'd separate the categories into solo and coop. 1p2c is cool but it's unenforceable. People can do coop on their own if they wish.

I've done a 1p2c run. Time on final pin touch was 3:53:57

I based it off the old DS route mostly, the one thing I will say is that burst rounds are awful to actually use compared to DS. I don't know what happened but something with the press motion broke on this version. I've instead focused on more basic slash pins and want to reevaluate pins later.

I don't know what individual points of attack do but I'm adding more of them instead of flat health with food where I can. I'm not sure that it's correct or worth it.

Any fusion attack is 26 seconds for the whole thing.

Shiki is really broken. The spin is crazy lockdown and dps. In general, you can beat enemies with her faster than with a level 2 fusion including most bosses so avoiding using fusions as much as possible with her is huge

Joshua is meh but also doesn't have to do a lot. If the laser press worked more often, he'd be okay but I can't get it to consistently fire when I want it to. Yay press empty space command being broken.

Beat does some Shiki stuff but worse. He's a lot more reliant on fusions so rushing his level 3 is huge. Uzuki and Kariya is by far the worst fight in the game and red pin isn't much better; I've had them be stuck out of bounds. You have to bring something ranged in or you can get psuedo softlocked.

Most of the other stuff is identical. There's an argument to be made for going back to the Sun Emperor for the flat stats and 20% bonus damage but it'd be risky and you'd give away a minute getting the rare metals for it. Tough call imo.

There's no point creating categories that don't have runs. And specific endings change nothing about the run other than text. There's no stopping people from running what they want but there's not any real reason the latter would exist beyond complete arbitrary definitions. If you want to run them run them though.

We'll figure that out when we get there. It's not something really worth speculating on when all we have is a trailer. I'd say the most likely outcome is either a sort by console feature or a different tab but it's unlikely to need a new game page.

Do a run and submit it and I’ll add it. If nobody runs it, I’m not going to create categories that nobody ever runs.

No, there is no need for another moderator as I said in the other thread. There have been no runs in over a year and I'm on top of it when people do submit or have questions.

This game's structure doesn't make sense to allow an IL leaderboard. It's impossible to go back to previous chapters and since previous chapters influence the others, there is no way to structure it in a way that makes sense. How do you restrict what Yo-kai and levels are allowed? What if a route change were to happen if you said "oh, make it the same as any%"? Heck, in single segment runs, you have a ton of variety in what levels yo-kai are from getting bonus EXP wisps mid fight. If you want to do individual chapters for practice, that's a fantastic way to learn and highly recommended. However, there's no consistent competitive ruleset that can be made in a manner that is both fair and rewarding to all runners.

Are you asking to be a mod? Or are you saying you want to run it.

If it's the former, no. It's not necessary.

Emulator would not be slower. It wouldn't properly simulate either lag or loads, my guess is that it'd be significantly faster, especially depending on PC hardware. When I used it for RPGLB practice... 3 years ago, I remember running at a smooth 60FPS, which I'm not sure the game ever holds, especially in miasma streams. That said, it's by far the best way to practice the game. My consistency at the hardest patterns for Meteor Parasite 3 went from impossible to what I used within 3 hours of emu practice, since I no longer had to do 4 minutes every time I wanted to get to the fight and many more to get to the fight should I accidentally kill the boss. And of course, if you wanted to do a run on emulator for practice or it's the only way to do the run, there's nothing stopping you from doing it, it just shouldn't be on the leaderboard.

IMO, any GCN games that allow emulator are probably just wrong unless they know a lot more about the game or have an accurate IGT but those communities are much more equipped to know that than I am so I can't fully criticize it.

And thanks. <3

I'm not a mod, but Dolphin, while a fantastic emulator and amazing practice with an adapter, doesn't accurately simulate loads and shouldn't be used for an official run. On top of that, you'd bring in hardware differences which is already incredibly difficult to handle but on emulators which are meant only to run a game and not necessarily be super accurate, it's almost impossible to quantify the differences to a level where it should be comfortable on a leaderboard like this.

That said, it's amazing practice and worst comes to worst, once you're practiced, point a webcam at your TV, as long as you can see what's going on, it should be verifiable for a leaderboard.

Just submit it, note the version in the submission and I'll add it to the leaderboard.

With the new run and category, I've taken the liberty of switching the order to say "Difficulty, New Game (+)" to match how it's done in Persona and other SMT games. If there's a strong reason to dissent, let me know; it's open for discussion.