Hello I'm new here and I'm currently trying some Konquest speedruns. (I'm playing PS2 PAL)

I found a very interesting thing: after defeating Darrius in the main quest, the next objective is shown to be Hotaru, and talking to him makes him run away and disappear, saying he'd meet Shujinko in Outworld, however this dialogue is technically non-mandatory: if you go to Outworld after defeating Darrius you already find Hotaru in Lei Chen, and talking to him makes the game progress as normal from there. The most interesting thing about this is a bunch of events that were supposed to be triggered by said dialogue and instead don't happen, for example there still are all the Tarkata outside the city walls, and in Orderrealm the people in the prison don't disappear. Also after beating the game you can meet Hotaru to train in his fighting style, but there still is the other Hotaru walking back and forth, waiting to be talked to! Pretty funny.

Now, from a speedrunning standpoint this doesn't seem to help much, you literally just skip that one dialogue, so my question is: would this be allowed in a NMSNG run? I don't think it's a "major" skip, and I don't believe it technically counts as a glitch, I'd classify it more as "sequence-breaking" but Idk, I'd be ok for it to not be allowed either, it's not a big loss.

I believe it could be considered major, since it does cut a decent amount of time off, since it does skip about 10 seconds of movement from the Darrius spot to Hotaru. From a newer runner (not saying you are) this may not seem like a lot, but in reality it is.

However, I do also feel that it isn't as major as some of the skips DWednesday discovered a few months back, it all depends on what is classified as a "major skip"

Oh I AM new, so I apologize if I ask something dumb or obvious.

About the 10 seconds I can see how that may make a difference, but I feel like the problem is more on what counts as "major skip", like you said, regardless of the time it takes. Like you obviously would allow it if it was just an optimization, even if it cut off an entire minute.

My understanding as a newbie is that "Any%" means you just need to reach the end of the game, and the "no skips" category is there to allow people to run the actual, intended route to that end and work on optimizing that route rather than "cheating" and going through a shortcut. It tests their actual ability at the game rather than their ability to exploit glitches and the like.

This skip is a bit in the middle, like on the one hand you clearly ARE intended to have that dialogue and it even remains as the objective for a while after returning to Orderrealm, but on the other hand it's not like a big mission or a fight, where you have specific skills tested, you may say that skipping it is just an optimization on the small "leave Orderrealm" section of the game, and it's not like I'm exploiting some special glitch, it's just an oversight by the programmers and it can be found unintentionally. Like, in the North American version they accidentally put the end of Sub-Zero's training before his fight, you only get that fight if you talk to him again but you don't have to. That's an oversight and it was corrected in the European version where the fight is mandatory, but you wouldn't require people to stop and fight Sub-Zero for their run to count.

Maybe the difference is that those minor glitches and oddities caused by the skip are enough to call the game "broken" and therefore invalid, unlike the Sub-Zero skip which most people don't even realize was a programming mistake? Idk

(I know I'm running in circles with my arguments, I just want to lay down all the points in favor or against. I don't know how these things are decided, since this is not a super active sub-community I'm not sure if we just need to come to an agreement among ourselves and call it a day)

@KombatGod Hi dude. Welcome to the board etc. I suggest you come join our dedicated MK speedrunning discord, as I've just put this point up for discussion to the community, and we'd be more than happy for you to come join us to discuss :) Link should be on the main board page :)

• DW