Hello first of all. I am new to speedrunning and I thought lets speedrun a game that I used to play a lot. I did a run yesterday and I had a view issues at the end. Here is the link to the video, so you can see for yourself if I am not describing it well enough here. The issue is around the 1h 58m 50s part. I lose a fight against crow, then a button press for the rematch didn't get recognized which then puts me back to the main menu (I saved the character there when the prompt appeared, so this fight should have been recorded in the ingame time) I try the fight again and win but I forgot there, that I had to save to see the ingame time because you get send back to the main menu after the crow fight. So this fight probably didnt get saved in the ingame time and I had to redo the fight again (lost -> won and saved after that)

So my question here now is: Due to the fact that the time from the first win (the ingame time) is not recorded in the final ingame time of this run is it still a valid run, because there is no ruling about going back to the main menu after a fight or something.

Thank you very much for your time and effort.

Sincere regards, Exodeus

Edit: the video link now has the time stamp on it

Thank you very much for your reply banta546. I like this game as well, that is the reason why it is the first speedrun for me. I will submit this run and watch the other runs again to see if I can shave off some time somewhere or if I need to buy a xbox to reduce loading times or something :D

Anyways thanks again for replying and have a nice day :)

I have a question regarding emulation if it is worth addressing. I own a copy of the NTSC version of the game, but lack the hardware to capture via my PS2. I have a PC good enough to run a backup via PCSX2 at a stable 100% and 60 frames, and will be using it to practice regardless. Times seem to be matching up with the ranked videos for the most part, (given my menuing error knocking the rust off in testing) but I still have my doubts of "legitimacy" given the mixed reviews I've seen of PCSX2 in the little research i did on the matter as far as evaluation of legitimate runs. I'm very new to the speedrunning community, and will love for this to be my first experiece. Just curious, and figured i'd ask for posterity's sake.

Thanks for showing me that there is a community (however small now) for this amazing game!

I speedrun a couple GBA games, but played this a ton as a kid. May or may not ask a few questions, but would it be illegal to start at a higher difficulty, and then switch to easy? IIRC doing the tutorial on hard gives more stat points.

I still think there should be at least a Hard/No Switch category regardless, given the frustrating difficulty of the game, but that's just me. It definitely adds an aspect of input awareness that I just love for the game not to be bugged other than the AI being ruthlessly random. Which is a delightfully stressful "feature" when playing on Hard.

But if that's the case for the Any% Easy, that actually opens up some nice options...

Yea with Easy, you obv go thru the game faster but you get less stat points overall. I think for the tutorial, it goes 75 - 100 -125 for Easy, Medium, and Hard individually. There are a ton of little things I know about this game lol. Might post a wall of stuff on on it some day

Awesome man, I would love to see it and put my few cents in where needed! I plan on doing many more runs of this game. I've also got ideas for a 100% run, not that there would be many runners for it, but I will be playing with the idea and will probably run it sometime.

I'd love a 0 stats added category. can you make it through the game without burning skill points?

That'd take a LONG time to do with no stats even on Easy later on in the game.