Most people are using a program called LiveSplit, which you can download at livesplit.org The splits are activated manually in most cases, although there are some autosplitters for PC games or if you are running on emulator.

Backwards compatible PS3 has significantly faster loading times than PS2, so it would not be allowed in the PS2 categories. It would have to go into a misc. category

if there is going to be a different category, it should be "No Save & Quit" rather than "No RNG Manip" Because you can technically do RNG manipulation in the long grinding run, it's just not as extreme.

it depends on if you want to do a run with or without RNG manipulation. There have been many crazy things going on with this game in the last year in terms of RNG manipulation, which is why the times on the leaderboard have gone from 5+ hours to less than 1 hour.

Running the game without RNG manipulation is fairly simple, it is just a bunch of grinding, and occasionally picking up some items. With RNG manipulation is incredibly complex and fairly difficult to figure out just from watching a video.

My video has the right link, but could you change the entry for Caracarn to CaracarnVi, so it shows up on this account?

actually if you get 9 or 12 second duel, you can start with Meteor Strike

ok, when you make the comparison to the ladders being separate, I can see that makes more sense then.

even if you don't die in softcore, you would generally not be playing as safe, since you know that it is not hardcore. So there is still a difference in play style that affects the times.

Now on the other hand, if someone gets a better time on Hardcore than a Softcore run, then that could be considered regular any% as well as HC any%

I actually notice that on the rules for any% it says "Must be done on softcore." Honestly, I think that if someone has a PB or WR that is done on hardcore it should be considered any%, though Hardcore runs are almost always slower, so I'm not sure how much of an issue that really is anyway.

Hero can miss in JP console version also. I didn't know about the stats affecting it though. I never had it miss in NA console version, but maybe when I played NA version I never used it on a character with high spirit.