I was just playing around with some stuff in game and was wondering if we could add more categories. My thinking here is that doing this could get more runs submitted and bring a bit more variety to the standard run.

My suggested run(s) would be one or more of the following:

1. No Element Sword: - Obviously it's required to pick it up to get to Blood Island, but it can never be equipped on any character. This will only really affect the Black Dragon fight as Elrad typically Nukes everything up to that point.

2. Solo Character: - Could be any character. After acquiring that character, all other party members must be killed off until you need to visit the King to promote. This one would essentially create 4 new runs and may need some additional rules for later character choices.

3. Combine Solo Character+No Element Sword: Again, this only really affects the Black Dragon fight, which any character can be leveled up to do.

4. Add the JP version: - Honestly not sure about this one as I don't think there's much if any difference between the two other than the language. Even then, I'm not sure that makes the text any faster.

Any and all feedback is welcome.

In my opinion on no element sword it is a bit trivial to create an entire category for it since the run is essentially the same for 98% of the game up until the very end fight and is not different enough to warrant recognition as a separate category. Might make a cool highlight to make for YouTube or something though.

In regards to the solo character category, it certainly doesn’t seem inviting to do for anyone but experienced runners of the game looking for a new challenge or being bored of the any% run. The rules for this seem a bit complex, needing to revive and kill off characters constantly after every promotion visit seems very tedious. Things get even more complex when you want to do a “solo” run for late characters after having used the others prior.

Personally not a fan of these as main categories, but if you really wanted to do the solo runs and have them be a “misc” category so they can be recognized here on the site that is ok, but I highly suspect this won’t do anything to bring in new interest or runners. I feel they are more of a “forced challenge run for fun” that’s more suitable for YouTube and not really an official speedrun like categories such as Any% or 100% would be in cases like this.

Japanese might save a small amount of time if it makes fewer text boxes, but given how little story there is in this game I can’t say how much faster it would be. Feel free to do a run on JP though and if it proves to make a big difference we can certainly add the JP version as an official sub category to the leaderboard.

I appreciate your thoughts, and I can see what you mean in regards to being more of a "challenge run" type deal.

I'm actually pretty excited about some of the Solo Character runs, so a misc category is plenty enough for me.