Gotcha, thanks.

So from what I can tell from the TAS videos, letting go of long notes a bit earlier charges more HP for U-1 and also does more damage to the bosses, correct?

Is this the strategy to go about doing enough damage? Or is it better/more consistent to just try to follow the notes on the trace line from start to finish?

So what exactly makes "Fast stage 5/10" happen? Is it totally RNG or is it dependent on how you play somehow?

We discussed making it a new category but we couldn't decide on a name that accurately defined the run. The closest we got was "Any% All Allies", but we were concerned that maybe adding restrictive rules to it wouldn't make sense because the name doesn't imply restrictions further than just getting all of the allies themselves and then credits warping/skipping everything else. If we can just call it something like Any% All Allies and still add the restrictions of no credits warping/no map unlocks, i think it would be nice

We also discussed the benefits of making this route into a new category, which would be that it would be a new and interesting way to play the game(?), and maybe even be a shorter run than NCW currently is. NCW should also get faster with the glitch menu dungeon item strat.

If it were Any% All Allies, map unlocking would be banned as well as whatever "derivatives of credits warp" are, i agree that needs to be more clearly defined.

With the aforementioned things banned, we would still have to collect the atla in the first half of DBC for Xiao/Gaffer, the first half of Shipwreck and Sun and Moon for Ruby/Ungaga, and all atla in Moon Sea, so we still couldnt use 100 floor skip until Dark Heaven, since that the skip removes all atla. With the map unlocking banned we'd also still need to get those atla/allies to progress so unless i'm missing something, everything that could turn the run into a meme should be covered.

The only thing that im indifferent about is this -- with the glitched dungeon item strat allowed in NCW and most of the same glitch bans in place for this potentially new category, would the two categories be too similar? The main differences would be that you just totally ignore collecting and placing georama stuff and viewing events for the majority of the new category, compared to having to do the Town% rules in place like collecting/placing necessary atla and viewing necessary events. Personally I think it's different enough, but I'd like to know what you guys think

Awesome, thanks for the replies fellas. I totally understand not wanting to invest in a setup, especially if you'd have to have NTSC items shipped to different countries, it can get very expensive.

I was just thinking maybe Emu was the fastest for some reason so I just figured i'd ask, but given what you guys have told me I do think i'm gonna stick with my console set up for now, thanks again for all of the help :)

Is there a specific reason everyone exclusively runs on emulator?

I would like to run on console but I would assume I would be at a bit of a disadvantage due to emulator vs console loading times, and there's no separate category for it