As I continue to stress over university assignments, I sometimes find myself wondering what a Sonny low% speedrun would look like, or if it would even be fun.

As far as what counts as a 'thing', I've come up with the following list:

• Levels gained (Including the percentage too? If it comes to it...)
• Attribute points used
• Abilities acquired
• Items equipped/eaten via glitch

There's also the use of teammates, where you are forced to use Veradux and Galiant in their first battles (but Veradux can be removed later). Then there's the initial equipment that Sonny has, which I guess can be removed after the first battle. We would have to discuss whether the fact that we were forced to use them once would count them in the overall total of 'things' used.

I hope this sounds interesting! :)

Could be interesting. Sounds more reliant on MSG than all other categories combined though. Maybe if you try to minimize total stats in general, ability points and ally usage, we could circumvent that. That way you could replace MSH with a couple of items and not be strictly behind an MSH run.

On a related note, would IL categories be viable? Instead of worrying about beating the entire game as quickly as possible, you could choose just to focus on one zone. This might open up new possibilities in Sonny speedrunning as well as be a less 'grindy' category overall. From a feasibility standpoint, you could simply just turn off autosave and save at the beginning of a particular zone in order to attempt multiple runs on the same savefile.

Of course, the question then becomes what limits should be placed on Zones Two, Three and Four. Zone One is fine as everyone starts on equal ground, but that won't be the case for later zones. Even a rule such as 'sell all your items' won't work as RNG means that different players will have different amounts of money. I suppose you could discard all your items instead, but that doesn't change the fact that the amount of money you get from each battle varies slightly.

Honestly, now that I think about it, IL categories would only really work for Zone One, and that'd probably be the most boring zone to attempt to speedrun on its own as it's already pretty optimised. Interestingly enough, it might actually be a great idea for Sonny 2 as I believe the amount of money you gain from each fight is fixed in that game, and perhaps I should give these ruminations on that game's forums. Given how time-consuming Sonny 2 speedruns are, IL categories are almost necessary to get people involved.

As for the low% suggestion, I'm not too keen on limiting allies as I don't tend to regard them as counting towards 'completion'. Items might also be a concern if we count merely collecting items as qualifying towards 'completion' (as a lot of games do from what I can tell), given the random nature of drops, so your suggestion for limiting the equipping and eating of items instead makes sense. Levels and XP also make sense, but the problem is combining all these attributes together. Does one extra level correlate with one item equipped? What if you equip an item for one battle, unequip it for the next then re-equip it afterwards? Determining what counts as making the 'least' progress will be a serious difficulty in my eyes, but it could theoretically be done.

I'd personally be interested in seeing whether it would be possible to beat the game using only the starting items (without eating any items, of course), and if so, it might make for a cool speedrunning category. It wouldn't really qualify as a strict low% category, though. Also, given that we know that training in Zone Three is quicker than not training in Any%, a no-training category might also be interesting to explore. I would also have suggested a no-allies category, but given how useless Veradux is in Any%, I don't think that will be necessary. :P

Now, Any% Glitchless without allies on the other hand...

Hmm...I agree that using the values of the attributes instead of counting the number of items might be better. In that case, we could maybe count it like this:

• The highest value that each stat reaches in the run
• Abilities acquired
• Maybe allies

By using the value of each stat, we eliminate all of the other categories I suggested before. I feel that Veradux could be a big part of what makes a run possible. His healing and focus regen could be the make-or-break of a fight, so counting him is probably best.