I've really been wanting to pick up this game as a speedrun, but with there being only one category for the entire game as a whole I've backed off. Are there any other categories that are going to be added at all? I see people looking into asking about NG+ and all of these other ideas, and I understand that it's possibly quite the bother for mods and such to look into, but I'm curious as to whether or not it's a possibility at all. My personal idea was just a Merciless any% or even just a possible any% in general.

There's no one stopping you from making a route and running it yourself but there isn't really a reason to add a leaderboard for a run that isn't competitively ran (aka a single run being done) I know myself and at least 2 other people have ran NG+ but again isn't not really a competitively ran category so there's no need to have a board for it. Just don't let the idea of there not being a leaderboard stop you from doing a run you want to see done. Who knows, maybe if you were to try running it, other people might get interested and it could get a board some day.

Thank you, Lap, that's actually really inspiring.

Regarding those, there needs to be actual runs done before categories are made. There are several for NG+ granted, one done by me, however I'm not entirely interested in my run being tracked in its current state and I'm not sure if I'd ever go back to it simply because there's far more interesting things to do with the game in my opinion, and proper setup for NG+ requires far more effort than its actually worth. Same thing for Any%; I have a run of it and I believe one other person does too, but same situation. Both of these I pretty much did just as test runs to see what they were like.

Looking at the forums, there are currently 5 threads now on NG+ (and a few have asked specifically in the discord) and to my knowledge none of those people did NG+ or even attempted to do a run before asking, so you can see the predicament there. People very rarely follow through with what they say they're going to do, and if I had to guess it's because people underestimate just how much practice/routing it takes to prevent even a NG+ taking more than 15+ hours.

My honest opinion regarding NG+ is its a total waste adding for two major reasons:

1. There are far more interesting ideas for categories, like NG difficulty swapping, NG Merciless, an 'All Bosses' type category in which you must defeat the Twins and Lavenza being three, for example. NG+ is very boring in the grand scheme of things, and the games run appeal just isn't highlighted in it at all, in my opinion. It has no dodging really, bosses are mostly auto win, and there is even far more downtime (sleep spam basically) in it in comparison to NG.

2. The time gap between NG+ and NG in this game is far smaller than it is in Vanilla Persona 5, as many boss fights/fights in general simply take longer in Vanilla due to the way that game is balanced. An example being here in NG Madarame takes less than 5 mins, whereas in Vanilla a semi-decent fight takes approx 10 minutes.

Because of this, you're only going to be looking at a run approx 2 hours and 30 minutes faster than NG. My run is 12:06 and not fully optimized Persona wise and I didn't use the Veil to gain free access to dodge shadows, so I'd wager it can get into the 11:40-50 range pretty easily. This is still only around a 2:30-50 gap though, and I feel for how dull of a run NG+ ultimately turns out (so much downtime, no challenge in fights, no necessary planning needed for shadow dodges/movement, etc) that people would just be better off running NG. With proper practice and dedication to the game you can quite easily etch into the 14-15 hour ranges in NG in this game.

(And of course this is also speaking specifically about speedrun.com and categories, if you want to run something then you should do it.)

Liv summed most of this up pretty well.

As far as your question goes. There's no point adding any% as basically almost nobody is interested in it, far less so than NG+ even. Also, even if, there would not be any restrictions for difficulty or anything else outside of DLC for any% because that's exactly what that term means.

NG+ would probably be the most likely category to be added if there was some actual work done on optimizing it by people, like Liv mentioned before. However, that's not currently the case. Almost everything else would be too niche in terms of interest to be worth adding to the boards resulting in dead categories which we've been trying to avoid after the Persona 4 case. Unlike P4G, this game's any% isn't 3 hours and a good entry level run. It's still around 9 hours or more which isn't really too inviting to most new runners either since it's still abysmally long in comparison to the vast majority of speedgames.

Posted about it in a thread of my own, and I am aware of how wildly different it would be in both tone and challenge compared to the rest of the game, but I really think as an entry level way of getting people interested in running this game a category for Tycoon (the in game bonus card game) should be added.

It's very fun and addictive, requires almost no progress in the main game to unlock, and aside from being RNG heavy is a very quick paced and reactive card game. Runs would be very easy to reset and redo.

If runs and footage are required as mentioned in a previous comment to help garner interest I have no problem doing so and will. I'll stream it on Twitch until somebody pays me to stop even. Not kidding. I've got time and I want more people to play this game no matter what. It deserves all the attention in the world.

It wouldn't be a good entry level category at all, though. The standard run is approx 14+ hours and features largely the standard JRPG affair in terms of its gameplay for the run. Whereas that is a card game that doesn't play anything like the rest of the game, and wouldn't serve the function of easing players into the game that an "entry level category" would typically achieve because it's teaching you nothing about the actual run.

That aside, I just don't think it'd be a good thing to add. It's essentially a mini game and can't really be speedrun, nor do I really think it'd be that popular or well ran if I'm being completely blunt.

There was also another thread for this that you made, was it entirely necessary to post it here again?

I'm not sure why you're posting this again in another thread that's unrelated to it after you've already received a response to it initially.

If you wanna speedrun Tycoon so badly, then go for it but it's not being added to the board as there's absolutely no point in doing so. Also, as Liv mentioned, it's so far from an entry level category to the game as it has absolutely nothing to do with the actual gameplay of it.