I wish I could help out with that. It took a while for my runs to get accepted as well.

Since the DLC dungeons are built into the game now, I've managed to get a feel on a decent route on NG. When I do submit eventually (hopefully the first run will be this Saturday when I have time), how will the port be handled record wise?

Very interesting...it comes with all the DLC dungeons, so we can easily cheese lvls. Routing NG might be interesting since everyone has them now.

Can't believe no one has posted about this yet. Quick sessions are gonna be a godsend for runs if it means what it says.

edit: Also I botched the title, don't mind me.

Sorry, video proof is required.

Well, backup saves might be easy for PC, but not for consoles. I would definitely do it if I had the PC version though.

The reason why I asked the farming mod pods in the middle of the run is that the "extra boost" box is super OP, and having it more than 5 times would see significant time save.

While we're on the subject, are we allowed to go back to the main menu after a GP to the mod pods to get more pods or will that count as an "extensive break"?

I agree with Diablo. Mods are there forever, but box boosts you have to refill, and having to rely on luck to get the ones you need to even attempt a run takes the wind out of it.

Ok, so while I was practicing NG, I had a bit of an idea of a new category that can make for an interesting run. I'm proposing a NG+ Skills Only category. I know that I'll need to put in a run first, but here are my impressions so far.

I feel that this is a decent middle ground between normal NG+ and NG. NG+ with everything imported makes for a pretty boring run since we one shot all the bosses aside from chapters 5 and 6, and even so, one session kills almost all of them. With skills only, especially on Hard, it becomes more skill intensive since everyone is squishy and EP becomes more valuable from using big skills. Plus, people won't have to worry about grinding stats and carnage (except for the skills you want).

I've currently only gone through chapter 1 (it's very late as I'm typing this), and I feel that we can come up with interesting strats for this category. One example being do we keep just the starter weapons and rely on skills? Do we just go straight to the boss or grind for exp? I think this can be a good category to experiment with.

Please let me know if this sounds good, or I'm just crazy.

Also worth noting that I'm currently doing my route on easy, and while I may not remember my exact strats on bosses, I think I get a tad more aggressive than usual. I was going to have vids showing what I did, but just forgot.

I think that finding the grind/skip ratio might take quite a bit of testing to figure out how much grinding is needed in later chapters. I need to take a look at Oden's run and take notes on that.

I've taken a look back at my NG timing since I'll be doing NG+ in an upcoming marathon. So far, for me, after chapter 5, I've clocked in at 7:16 IGT. Chapter 5 took me about 1:40 to complete (with fake Yashiro taking about 20 mins), so I expect chapter 6 to be much longer than that. If I were to make a guess, I would say 3 hours depending on the mini bosses, so 12 hours doesn't seem too far off of what the final time could be with decent optimization. I was planning on an Itsuki/Mamori/Whoever else build, so I might go back to routing it once I've done my NG+ run.

Chiming in, even though this thread hasn't had a post in about a month.

Sure, I may have done one actual run of NG+ and nothing else after, but there is a reason for that. There is simply no carrot at the end of the stick. I would be fine to fine-tune routing and keep doing these runs every once in a while and help out those who are looking to actually run the category. However, it feels like it's difficult to get a foot in the door to showcase these runs. I'm not a very big channel on twitch/youtube. I don't have many followers/subscribers. SRC is one of the very few places where I can show the potential of the games that I run. Granted, I've had a couple of people ask me about some stuff about my run, and they've even done runs themselves. But the problem is that we have difficulties of showing that bit of growth and progress.

On the part of "people screaming 'I wanna do a NG+ run of this game that I like so much' who then never even do anything in that regard": I can imagine someone looking to actually run NG+, go to the SRC page, see that there's no category for it, go to the forums, and see that the category might never be accepted as "official". That can be very discouraging, and I believe that it's a big contributor as to why you don't see more people wanting to do this category. Again, it feels like there's no carrot at the end of the stick, in this case, recognition on the leaderboards for a game that they enjoy. You also said that people did fine without leaderboards back in the day. Well we DO have leaderboards now, and I'm not talking about the one for NG+ that someone made here in the forums not long ago. Just throwing that in there.

As far as routing is concerned, yes it may be a lot more simplified that a regular NG run. However, my only run may not be the end all be all route of NG+. Who knows? Maybe someone who has the time might come across something that I may not have accounted for that might save a good chunk of time. But we might never see that, and I may sound like I'm giving up on it, but it's far from that. It's just that I feel that things would've been different if we had been given a chance instead of being shut down all the time. I mean we've seen a few people ask about NG+, and when they were told "no", they try and offer suggestions to try and keep the idea alive and make NG+ seem more interesting. Yet, they were shut down just as quickly because it's silly to try and make the category artificially difficult.

It's frustrating to me that I get asked about my run and see people actually do these runs, and yet we have nothing to show for it. To me, I'm concerned about the separation of the P5 speedrunning community, and I would hate to not run this game again in the future because of it.

FYI, I took a look back on how much faster loading times are between physical and digital. It seems that digital is faster by, on average, about a second each loading screen. I don't know how much of a difference that makes in a 3 hour run, but at least we have a definitive stat.

NG+ is essentially a solo run. It's much faster that way.

I'm currently routing NG as well, and I have to say that the first mini boss in Ch 4 is really, really dumb (at least with my route so far). Mandatory characters in party AND regenerating mobs? Ewww, no thanks.

Also, I still think that NG+ should be a category here, regardless of personal preference. I am willing to work on the route and improve on the game in general, but if people are marking it as "pointless" and "boring", then it takes a lot of wind out of motivating myself to improve. I would love to hear other people's opinion on it as well.

But that's the big reason why I can't do NG runs. I can barely put in 14 hours in one sitting for NG+, and tacking on another 4+ hours is basically impossible for me. Otherwise, I would take the time to learn the NG route, as I agree that NG+ isn't the most exciting of the two modes.

As for the treasure routes, they're most likely not the best routes, so I can't really say they're "optimized". I'm still figuring them out as I do these runs.

Thanks for the feedback.

This is a NG+ run that I recently completed. While I feel that the run itself is sloppy all around with many minor mistakes (my first RPG speedrun so menuing is not the best), I still feel this is a good representation of what NG+ would look like.

While setting up for these runs, I came across a few thoughts in regards to NG+ runs in general and potential rules.

• First and foremost, DLC. I think that DLC personas should be allowed. When min/maxing out stats, I believe the DLCs are about the same level as the high level personas; the only exception I see might be Kaguya only because she is low level so you can sculpt her how you want, and she nulls holy/curse. I'm still building her up so I can test her, but I think it won't make too much of a difference.
• On the subject of DLC, I'm on the fence on whether looking at the box to get the healing items should be allowed. Getting healing items from the doctor should be sufficient enough, and you can simply make coffees if you're SP heavy.
• DLC accessories should be fine since there are much better ones anyway.
• I believe skills gained from network fusion should be allowed. If people take the time to get them, more power to them.
• Network connectivity in general should be turned off however. Shouldn't need it anyway.

That's all I got for now. If you have any questions, I'll try to answer them best I can. Thanks.

Ok, that's understandable.