You can play it solo against bots, but from what I've seen of that game mode speedrunning it would be 2-5 minutes of hoping you get lucky with enemy behavior and weapon spawns. Also, nobody runs it, so there's no point in having an empty leaderboard.
It will, you'll just have to submit it as Time with Loads, unless you want to rewatch your finished runs and manually add up the time spent on loading screens.
It's not possible to use the load remover on console, unfortunately.
I have managed to finish the DDR level on keyboard a few times. I usually just resorted to mashing all of the arrow keys together near the end because the game doesn't penalize you for hitting extra notes, only for missing notes.
I have no problem adding a category like that if there's interest in running it, would probably call it something like "genocide".
I also considered adding a "pacifist" category, but it seemed redundant with all achievements already being pacifist.
This newer route saves a pretty impressive amount of time. It's kind of funny, I had briefly tried testing separating party members in towns, but didn't think it would be viable since they always keep trying to follow the active character. Same thing with backstab, I only tried it out in early parts of the game and it just seemed really ineffective so I never bothered trying it out in the late game.
As for why I stopped running the game, I didn't even know more strats had been found and didn't want to just grind away with the strats that we had at the time.
It would be great to see the game get to where it's comfortably sub 2 though.
I agree with adding a category for Wii, and there should be one for DS as well since there is a DS run on the leaderboard and they are both very much not the same game as other versions.
You may want to try asking in the Discord, you'll probably get a faster response. https://discord.gg/62MRS4f
Most of my Machival fight wasn't bad, but I've never had his first phase fly away 4 times in a single fight before. Otherwise the run went really well with only a few small mistakes. At this point I think getting a sub 2:30 is mostly RNG dependent, which is really annoying because I can't imagine grinding a run this long for good RNG.
I would really like to get a sub 2:30 time at some point, just a matter of actually having the patience for it.
Submitted a new run 2:32:28, was on pace to be sub 2:30 but again Machival wasted minutes right at the end. Other than that, there is a more consistent Galienne strat that I talk about at that part of the run and it is really easy to do so it's a pretty free time save.
At this point, I'm not even sure where to look for new strats, or what to look for. It would be nice to find a way to have "solo" running speed inside of cities/towns, but that would only get a minute or two.
There is a trick when you hold Shift and ~ the game will teleport you to any location that you click on, but I think that would be considered a cheat. It's also very disorienting, but does let you clip through anything as long as you can see walkable ground to teleport to.
I deleted that submission because I was recording a run that ended up being a 2:31:50, but OBS apparently stopped recording halfway through, so I want to get another run like that before I submit again. Ideally I want to get something under 2:30, but I would have to get a lot of really good luck for that considering my sum of best is 2:27:28. I'm hoping to at least get a low 2:3x:xx on video later today.
It seems there is some kind of glitch that causes the final boss to take almost no damage from anything. My last run I lost 6:30 on the Machival fight alone because it took 400+ inferno scrolls to kill him. Restarting the game seems to prevent it, which is why I usually do that before that fight, but I thought I had restarted recently enough to avoid it this time. I guess it's just worth noting that the game runs poorly if it is not restarted often.
It looks like you had some really bad luck in a lot of places during the run, and I'm still not a big fan on using Meteor although I like the idea of using it to kill off party members efficiently. I think I'll finally have some time to do a few runs this weekend and I'll probably be aiming for sub 2:40. I would love to see this run get down to around 2 hours, but I don't think that's likely to happen without some kind of new major skip or glitch.
I don't know of anything else I'm looking at right now that I have any good leads on. One thing I would really like to find is a better way of dealing with Galienne than relying on Jekhar to kick her to death, but I don't even know what to try.
Also, I noticed in your run that right after you kill Titus, Rosalind tries to heal herself while standing in the wall of fire, and when she heals and takes damage at the same time, the damage on her ramped up to something like 80,000 in a couple seconds. I'm wondering if there might be a way to exploit that against bosses.
When I'm buying scrolls, I use two fingers from my left hand on the left mouse button to click really fast.
Yeah, that inferno trick is pretty handy in a lot of places if you think you're about to get hit :D especially against fast enemies it can buy you some time/distance. Plus I like having that last invisibility for the final run through Lenele. I tried invisibility scrolls for the same effect, but they don't really work very well.
No problem, I sort of figured that I should give it some time considering the holidays and all. I'm just glad there is actually a route for this game since it's a game I loved back on the PS2. Also had some other thoughts about changing the route, mainly buying more inferno scrolls at Iona so that there's no need to farm the merchant encounter in the late game, but haven't done any work on it lately.
Is anyone else actively running the game at this point? I've managed to get a 2:57:19 with only minor changes to the existing route, and a 2:51 sum of best. I plan on looking into a better way of killing the first Ikaemos boss soon, the only thing I have on that so far is that any leftover Icicle scrolls you have deal some damage to him (11-18 each, so not great, but more reliable than melee)