Dear Kingdom Hearts Community,

Tomorrow the embargo will officially end, and we will be allowing people to submit runs to the leaderboards, during this two-week embargo we have been looking at various options and believe we have come up with rules that will please everyone.

Firstly, we will be implementing a complete ban on all Pre-Order keyblades. It should be worth noting we will be looking into future keyblade releases on a case by case basis, but we believe that it would be unfair for future runners to be locked out of a DLC category because they pre-ordered the wrong version.

As for what constitutes using a pre-order keyblade; due to the difficulty of removing the DLC from a PS4 and the game automatically equipping it we have agreed by a vote of 5 to 2 that using the keyblade in combat will invalidate your runs. We are also asking runners to remove these keyblades in the first OC menu.

Secondly as of this current moment we have agreed upon the following non-miscellaneous categories to be added to the leaderboards: any%, any% level 1, and all lucky emblems. Beginner, Standard, and Proud will be a sub category for each of these categories allowing for more variety and run options. We will also be adding the two following miscellaneous categories, all worlds and Winny the pooh RTA% which will simply be any% with 100-acre woods and do 100-acre woods as fast as possible respectively.

Any% will be our typical beat the game as fast as possible anything goes (With the exception of pre-order keyblades).

Level 1 will require you to equip level 1 in the first menu and keep it on for the entire run, other than that we will be allowing keyblade upgrades and magic/defence boosts etc etc and it will follow the same general rules as any%.

All lucky emblems will require you to collect all lucky emblems and then defeat final Xehanort.

Finally, the most important thing we have to share is how we will be timing the game, our primary aim with this decision is to encourage as many people into the KH speedrunning community as possible without forcing them to spend an extreme amount of money on the best hardware or console.

As such we are announcing that for KH3 any% we will primarily be using the in-game time located within the battle report at the end of the game with some minor rules attached.

Due to this decision we will be requiring all runners to keep an RTA timer going to be used a fall back. Following this due to IGT not being counted if “continue” is pressed in the death screen we will be defaulting to your RTA time in any run that uses continue rather than retry. On top of this we have decided that we will be defaulting to your RTA time if we feel you are pausing on the death screen for over 30 seconds.

For the RTA timer we will have the timing start on confirming the brightness settings and the timing end when the beam of light hits Xehanort and the end of battle sound is played.

Finally I am now announcing that we are opening up positions for KH3 leader board mods. Please message me on discord if you are interested with decisions being decided sometime in March.

We hope that you are all happy with these decisions and that we can all start running this game problems free. If anyone has any questions or wish to discuss things further, please use the other leader board thread.

Thank you for reading this and for all your help in making these rules.

• Drazerk