I wonder if there could be a resurgence of runs for this game, now that Tomato's finished his translation patch of it? Seems such a shame that the spiritual precursor to the M&L series doesn't have many runs.

I feel like any of the top M&L runners should have a fairly easy time getting decent times, and it doesn't seem to be too long. I've played through most of it now, and it's a reasonable difficult level.

You may not be able to submit runs on non-official versions, but nobody's stopping you from learning/practicing on them. The gameplay and strategies are unchanged and the game has plenty of visual tells and similarly named items to make it easy to transition over to Japanese without too much re-learning. And when you reduce the game to a speedrun route, it removes even more complications.

My recommendation is do most learning and refinement on your language (in this case English, though there may be other languages later) then submit runs on the Japanese original after you've refined it quite a bit. You'll be surprised at how intuitive it becomes.