Small update to the thread.

There is further information about the old days of running the extra vision : https://klonoa-at-blog.tumblr.com/post/184622930490/balues-tower-time-attack-challenge-from-dengeki

We lack a proper timeline for these, on top of an obvious lack of video to go by. All that is known for sure is that these were made before April 1998.

The 2007 VHS time was apparently submitted and was the winner of another extra vision contest, held on the DPSコロシアム (katakana for Colosseum) magazine. As far as I know, there is no info about this anywhere online.

We also added these two times to the leaderboard. Read the run comments for more information.

Hello everyone.

A new trick has been discovered in DtP² by NeilLegend : . It involves waiting on cutscenes in specific ways, to alter the global cycle of certain entities loaded in the stages, in a way that benefits the runner later on. In this instance, in the 100% standard category, it is making a wind flower activate sooner by not immediately skipping the opening cutscene of 1-1, so that its surrounding dreamstones and phantomilian can be retrieved seconds earlier than usually achievable. We do only know of this one application thus far. It can exclusively be done in rooms with cutscenes in them, which severely restricts the possibilities. It is however known to affect enemies (like the first Moo of 1-1), and that is on the contrary pretty significant. I feel it will not work with L’sV², but it remains to be proven.

When I first saw this trick in action, I was definitely hooked, but part of me couldn’t help but be slightly on edge about something. And that something was being able to affect the run without being subject to IGT, since it is disabled during cutscenes.

Is that an actual problem ? Does that constitute a IGT abuse technique ? I gave it a thought, and this is what I personally came up with.

I’ll say it immediately, I think it is harmless and that there is nothing to worry about. For the simple reason that, everyone is already subject to manipulating cycles or entities during cutscenes, consciously or not. People aren't necessarily always keen on their skipping game. It’s not an uncommon occurrence for a runner to not immediately skip a cutscene, being unresponsive to it for a variable amount of time. This is not a big deal, as the run is paused (unless you also mind about RTA), but that would be enough to potentially alter the cycle of some element in the stage. From there, who knows what could happen… granted, this is a bit of a play with extreme odds. But the point is, trying to ban or regulate this cutscene skipping in lieu of this is simply ridiculous.

So to me, this technique appears to be completely fine to use. It turns mundane cutscenes into something useful. It’s not like you can afford to wait on them for too long, as you may very well mess the cycles in your disadvantage.

…but what about it and the timing system ? Isn’t it a problem that it isn’t counted in the final time ? It constitute active and precise gameplay during a run. Does it compromise the entire system ?

Well, IGT wise, it was already a strange decision for the developers to design a timer that only counts gameplay, and not like cutscene time, world map, pausing… so personally, I like to think the integrity of the speedrun includes these moments. They just don’t. So, I don’t feel opposed to cycle manipulation strats. Again, cutscenes pause the IGT, and are unavoidable. They are impossible to moderate, unlike pausing.

Now RTA wise… this is generally not an issue because RTA counts the time spent manipulating cycles. But then there's the one at the start of 1-1. Manipulating cycles there is not only possible, it’s shockingly useful. But. It affects the run before it officially begins, before either IGT or RTA kick off. And that seems wrong. Do we need to redefine RTA, all of a sudden ? To include the moment spent during this one cutscene ?

RTA was never meant to be an important metric. Its point is to estimate the amount of real human time it took to achieve the speedrun, and by speedrun I mean the real-time duration of the time the in-game timer started working and stopped working. RTA is nothing more than supplementary information about the performance. IGT timing tend to be much shorter and disconnected from reality for a multitude of reasons, so RTA is handy to have. It's also fun for people who still want to care about RTA.

If you ask me, not counting the split second of 1-1 intro cutscene skipping in the RTA time doesn’t sound like an issue. It would even be within the three seconds of approximation RTA timing we allot. I do not object to this special case.

If there is one thing to gather from this trick and discussion, is that cutscenes are now relevant to the speedrun. And as such, it is only fair to require them to be part of the run footage. Everyone already does without thinking twice about it. There’s just the 1-1 case we need to be weary about. And ILs. A run video that skips directly into gameplay without showing the previous cutscene tidbit (if there is) shouldn’t officially count in my opinion. This has never happened yet, people always record these moments. But for the time it will happen, we will be prepared.

[This post was heavily tweaked from the third reply of this Lunatea's Veil forum thread : https://www.speedrun.com/klonoa2/thread/27f68]

I know this board hasn't been very active recently. 4 runs in a year. (Even audit log wise. There are only about a couple logs per couple months, and there have been times with 4 month draughts such as in the end of 2021).

Still, I would like to discuss about a small leaderboard udpate.

Recently, the Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series board has been established. It' s the first game in the series that use Time-Attack (TA) as the main timing method (as opposed to Real Time-Attack, RTA), using the in-game timer (IGT) as time of the run.

A big focus we had about the design of that leaderboard, was on the act of pausing in relation of the in-game timer. Indeed, the in-game-timer stops when you pause the game. Therefore, the run as well. This could potentially be abused in a lot of ways, such as mitigating nerves, helping with tricks, deal with difficult situations... all by pausing the run and waiting on the pause screen for however long you feel like, without any repercussions. In RTA, pausing is counted in the time, so you have a reason to use it as little as possible. With TA it's different, as even if it doesn't seem intentional, you have a valid reason to use it. Even if nobod does.

Technically speaking, speedrunning is about reaching an objective as fast as you can. And, sure enough, pausing can help with that. But it significantly changes the nature of the run. In traditional speedrunning, you're always running and moving, you cannot afford to stand still a single second. And you have to play live to everything, no matter how good or bad things may be. Here, a run wouldn't be as much about running, since you can take as much time as you want. It would be about methodically planning one's way through sections, patiently, to decrease chances of making mistakes and react to situations better than you normally would in real-time.

It's definitely an interesting way to play, and there are games in which it's very relevant (Minecraft). But it's definitely the less popular playstyle. And although in KPRS, the game has other tricks involving IGT abuse that makes it more special and worthy of allowing these techniques, in most Klonoa games, pausing serves little purpose. It's not flashy, it's not used in crazy strategies. It's just there to be abused for very small gains, at the cost of the run feeling and taking longer to complete.

So, it might be better that we don't waste our time with them, as they are currently not relevant and they sort of harm the spirit of speedruns. I'm saying all of this because recently, I realized the Ils sections of the Lunatea's Veil and Klonoa Wii boards were lacking in that extent. They use the in-game timer, and you can pause the game to freeze it. We probably don't want that.

I first went and made a thread discussing it for L'sV. Admittedly I didn't get any responses, but it was most likely going to affect nobody given not many people even ran Ils for that game. I expect the same to happen with this game, but I will still go through with this discussion.

Of course, under special occasions, pausing may be allowed, like if it's accidental (trying to skip the Polonte mid cutscene), or if it's clear that it doesn't impact the flow of the run. I have checked every single L’sV Ils, and none of them pause, so no time should be affected if we push through.

Obviously, if things were to change, like a new groundbreaking use gets found to pausing, we may return to this topic again and decide the fate of timer abuse again. But before then...

Still on this topic, if people want main game stage ILs, we may add them. Though I feel a bit sad that most of the time we add them to certain games, they quickly end up becoming inactive and empty. Maybe it should be a general leaderboard making principle that for special categories, people should play around them a lot before we may seriously consider them.

Tell me what you think.

[9 days later, didn't hear anything, so I changed it that way, just like with L'sV]

This will be the main thread for holding discussions about adding rules, categories... This is a presentation post that might be updated as time goes on with extra information. Actual discussions will occur below.

Added L'sV any% normal standard category, as the record changed 3 times, and displayed a clear progression of the level of play.

I believe this one aspect of ILs wasn't made clear when discussing them, so allow me to come back to it and make sure everyone is on the same page.

Boss time-attack segments are found in boss ILs. This is the place where you can go and beat them the fastest way possible. It's also fun to compare these boss times and that of full-game runs.

Naturally, there should be a counterpart of that with stages. Stage running segments, so stage ILs, is the place where you can focus on beating a given stage the fastest way.

This was never clarified before, but I believed that, due to their nature, stage ILs shouldn't include bosses. It would be like doing two ILs in a row, which is counterproductive to the intended goal of this IL type, devoting time exclusively on stage portions.

I am saying this because DtP has stages where directly following them is a boss, and the stage isn't considered cleared until beating them. Since the rules don't make it clear, people could rightfully assume you need to clear the entire stage, such that you have the "vision clear" text appear. In fact, a runner, KalarMar, has. Thankfully, this does not compromise anything about the submission or run. We just need to retime it and it's good to go.

Now, L'sV has some boss-fight segments in the middle of stages. In this case, we have no choice but to count them in the stage IL time, especially because there are no time-attack modes for them. They're also generally very short bosses.

All this is to say that if you ever submit DtP X-2 IL runs, the boss won't be counted in the final time. But they would in L'sV. And the IL rules have been updated with this.

I verified this time without fully watching it.

There it is. The 4th variable based category pause abuse is now obsolete. The 4th difficulty is now called IGT abuse.

The rules have been simplified as a result. The IL ones are still fairly large, but full-game runs ones have consumed an elixir of youth. Of course, I do not need to point you to the look of these boards which look so much simpler.

It's finally set for good.

Added Rongo Lango normal standard IL, by far the most popular one.

Hello.

In this post, I will discuss the state of IGT abuse (refers to tricks or time-saves related to pause abuse, and switching difficulties within the run).

More specifically, I would like to propose a leaderboard board design change that would still allow these categories to exist, runs to be conserved, and massively simply the board in itself while keeping it more relevant. I have changed mind for the Xth time, please disregard my past intentions.

However, before getting to that, I need to make a point.

Right now, we have a lot of categories. Some of them are rerlated to the different speedrunning categories, the gameplay mode, and the three basic difficulty. Those have never changed and are perfectly relevant to have. The speedruns change drastically within each and every single one of them.

But the remaining portions of the categories are dedicated to pause abuse, and difficulty irrelevant runs. The current leaderboard and rules are made so you are able to do runs where you only pause abuse but stick to the same difficulty. Likewise, you can do runs where you switch difficulty withing the run once or multiple times, but have your run not be considered as a pause abuse run (you need to change difficulties in the world map). There is a bit of flexibility as of what you want to do here.

But let's face it. These categories bear little difference between one another. They don't allow for a lot of original tricks, they don't change the gameplay experience in clear ways.

• Pause function spam : it is useful for pausing the run to plan ahead, setting up tricks more easily, dealing with bad situations. And yes, if one were to use it a lot, it would change the gameplay, and look for the run. But really, it's not gonna save a lot of time by itself. There's aren't a lot of tricks that are so hard you need to pause for them. Most of the time, you'd use it to save your skin.

• Pause warping : there are five DtP and two L'sV known uses, that save time by skipping something, such that they are slightly popular among players. But in either side, they don't save more than 10-15 seconds in the entire speedrun ! And they're not accessible in all gameplay mode and difficulty categories. There may be much bigger possible time-saves, if pause warping is found to be able to save-time when activating switches that lead to unskippable cutscenes, the backtrack skips of 6-2, or with the engine backtrack/escape sequence skips. The latter one is apparently possible, but has only been reproduced once and on an already skippable engine, and the timing might be insanely tight, way more than engine skips go for. Third, pause warping could be used to save some walking distance over checkpoints. Sniping them from far away, then warping back to them. No proper research has been made on the subject, but Bobbykaze thinks this is not possible with a significant amount of clocks. In most cases, it would actually result in a time-loss. And when it would save time... you'd imagine it's not gonna be miles. Finally, pause warping could be used to reset rooms, health, backtrack after getting collectibles (for a future all stages speedrun category), and probably more. But it's unlikely that any of this will lead to big time-saves. All in all, this technique either doesn't have a lot of time, or is way too hard for 99.9% of runners to employ.

• Difficulty switching : you want to play the entire game on easy. More health, shorter bosses, longer bullets... There are a couple theoretical uses, such as switching to hard to throw something at a clock, and proceed to die before it is struck, saving a bit of IGT. Kind of like we use in Balue's Tower. But they seem few and extremely far between. Or, you could switch to normal under certain portions of a stage to benefit from one second invlunerability to make more damage-bounces under a shorter time span. Remains to be found and still appears small. An actual practical use has been developed by Kumohachi. He plays The Ark Revisited on normal so it's faster to lose health for the engine skips (3 hit points instead of 15). Outside that, he only played on easy. It definitely saves time, but it's really just for one stage. The hardest stage by far, yes. But the gameplay is the same, just that you have less health to get rid off.

A common theme with these is that they are extremely specific. Nothing like support jumping your way everywhere. One hit KO on hard. More health, longer bullets, faster bosses on easy. And that, beyond just full-game runs.

This to say, all these various category distinctions that are meant to be flexible in allowing these runs, feel completely hollow. What's the difference between a fixed and variable difficulty speedrun ? Nothing on DtP, one stage in L'sV ? What is it with pause abuse and no pause abuse ? 5 tricks that represent 10 IGT seconds out of a 1920 seconds run ? Followed with basically nothing ? Perhaps something decent if you're a god, much better than Kumohachi who is already a master at his game ?

But as negligible as these are, you'd agree with me that it'd be a waste to disallow them forever. They still are part of the game, and relatively simple. Plus, some runs already exist with them. Including Kumohachi's recent full-game run, which although I haven't seen, I'd like to bet is the most skilled run in the entire leaderboard. Although there's ultimately no hard in doing so, as the videos themselves won't be lost and be suddenly worth nothing, I'd rather keep them around here than delete them.

Case in point. As much as I'm disappointed by them, for instance, I cannot bring myself to remove the difficulty irrelevant category. It brings little change to the run compared to other games out there, but by principle it's still a completely normal and expected way to play the game. As with the game being timed IGT, abusing the timer also constitutes a valid way to run the game.

Which brings me to say that I think it would make more sense if we had all of these IGT abuse tricks, all of the almost insignificant, controversial techniques, responsible for much of our headache with this game, be fused together within a single category. That way, we have a way to the run the game which... still doesn't represent much... but at least something. Something that can stand on its legs. A speedrun where your goal is getting the lowest IGT time you can, abusing the timer. The wild west of KPRS speedruns.

Back then, it was called Low IGT and was a difficulty based category. That term is slightly problematic, so I suggest simply replacing it with IGT abuse (difficulty irrelevant is concerned. There is no reason why you wouldn't do it during stages. And that, constitutes pause warping). We wouldn't need to carry the pause abuse category around, simplifying the name of videos. Rules, submissions would be simplified. A couple runs would be moved around, which would be done in a couple minutes.

Do anyone see anything wrong with that ? I know we're messing with the board once more. But for once I truly believe this would be the definitive, perfect board design, even for the future.

This goes with the post above.

Quitting a stage to the world map is obviously safe. You're not abusing the IGT in any way. You're actually losing time if you do that, because you lose stage progress. It's quitting to the title screen or beyond that could be a problem.

If you accidentally re-enter a completed stage (as happened with buggle here : ) it should also be completely fine. You'll lose some time, but the run is still going.

Should be fine,

Another day, another topic to discuss.

In full-game runs, what can we say about the run if the runner quits the game ?

How do you quit the game, first of all ?

You can soft quit the game from basically anywhere. If you're in a stage, you can return to either the world map, or the title screen of the game in question. If you are in the world map, you can return to the title screen.

Footage of going to the title screen from the stage :

And then, you can hard quit. On Switch and probably other consoles, you can simply close the game on the menu page. On PC I imagine, you could also alt + f4 the game or something.

When soft quitting, the game will prompt you to save your progress, briefly after you pass through the world map (if auto-save is on, the save will be automatic). It's to be assumed that hard quitting before that screen will make you lose stage and IGT progress. We'll see why later that could become a problem.

Let's start this discussion with an interesting idea : can you skip the L'sV credits, and if yes, would that be good ?

Effectively, you can. Begin by saving your game after you're prompted to do so after the KoS cutscenes. Proceed to quit the game the hard way (as you cannot pause during the credits), re-launch the game, and load your save-file again. You should find yourself at the Terminus of Tears stage, therefore past the credits, and the stage is shown as blue, meaning it's completed. Final time should show at the bottom of the concerned save-file.

So if you wanted to do the final boss before the extras in 100%, you could effectively hard quit the game to skip waiting for the credits to roll.

What are the downsides to this ? It would seem to be a cheating paradise, due to enormous quantities of black screens that can be used to splice with. But this argument is not receivable, as it's not like there aren't already a ton of black screens in the normal game you can exploit. We have to make do with that.

The continuity of the run (in other words, the proof that the run is single-segmented, and that the run was done in an single go as opposed to taking a big break somewhere) would be difficult to establish once the game screen becomes black. There is no way to know for sure that the footage i continuous and a time gap wasn't just added between the first part of the run before the hard quit, and the second part after it. Making estimating the RTA time impossible, as a consequence. But again, same dilemma as before. You can't prove for certain that a run is continuous anyways because of silent black screens. Which makes me wonder if we should stop worrying about run continuity, and arbitrarily assume that the run footage presented will be continuous. Well, maybe except for top level play. The burden of proof would become higher, and while you may still be allowed to skip the credits that way, you wouldn't be allowed to slack off during the IGT inactive moments.

So I think it would be fine if people do that ? Now that's not to say that you'd be able to sit on the screen for a while during the run. Even if the IGT will never update, if you really do nothing, you're not really speedrunning. That is reason enough for rejection.

Anyways. This is the only use I could find to quitting the game.

Second scenario. It was brought up in the server that someone could accidentally quit the game. Or similarly, the game could just decide to crash. If this was RTA, the run would basically be dead, but IGT is different. You could launch the game again, load your file, and return back to your progress without losing any time. Can we allow this ?

Well, it would depend on how the run was before the play was interrupted. If you're in the middle of a stage, quit gameplay through one way or another, and don't save your game when you're prompted to, loading your save-file will lead you to the beginning of the stage you just played, except you will have gone back in time, before you ever touched that stage. As such, the IGT would be reset. (you can also easily do this by hard quitting) And that is a problem. Because it is very much akin to segmented runs. You play a stage, you don't like your performance, so you quit the game to reset the IGT time by restarting the stage, and hope for a better stage time. Even as an accident, you could very well reset the IGT without realizing it, and have a much better performance than in your first stage iteration. There is no way we can accept such a practice. Your run stops being single-segment since you are re-doing a section of the speedrun. You are merely going back in time to try the stage again, almost as if you used save-states. That, instead of living and making do with your mistakes, like how speedrunning is supposed to go by.

But in the case that such a thing were to happen outside of stages, for instance in the world map, and if reloading your last save-file of the run were to lead to the next stage or boss you haven't touched yet, the IGT and the run wouldn't be impacted. So an accidental or even intentional game exist wouldn't immediately be problematic (But I don't know why you would do that anyways).

So simply put, you would be allowed to hard quit the game to skip the L'sV credits. Quitting the game from the world map would be acceptable, so long as you then resume the run by opening a save-file that lead you to a stage you haven't touched yet. But hard quitting the game from a stage would be banned, and soft quitting would as well, unless you save your progress on the world map before doing so, and load that save-file when coming back. That way, the run would be left undisturbed (it would represent a IGT timeloss instead of simply invalidating the run)

This might all look confusing, but in the end, it is unlikely anyone will be affected by any of this. Not only it seems useless to quit the run, but as of now, no one has yet to have done it, or pause for extended durations for that matter. All current 70+ verified runs have behaved well in thar regard. Muh like speedruns. This post would be a sort of broad guideline on how to handle such runs if they were to come up.

Actually, one of the reasons why this is a topic in the first place, is that returning to the title screen for instance might mess with autosplitters. Sadly, given what I've discussed here, it looks like quitting the game in specific circumstances might be allowed. But such situations seem so uncommon and useless that it doesn't seem worth it to adjust the autosplitters for them. Nor write actual rules about this. It will be fine...

Having said all this, I do not claim in any way I am knowledgeable on this topic, so if you think something is wrong, or happen to know a bit about how to handle that sort of stuff, please go ahead. If this was RTA, the problem would quickly be solved, but IGT doesn't make things easy.

In light of Kumohachi's mesmerizing support mode boss fight times on the remaster, I realized this board never allowed anything of the like. Which is pretty dumb, as it doesn’t make sense to be able to use Popka in full-game runs, but not run the extra stages with him. Thus, I have added IL categories where you can use Popka.

The time becomes green when you use him, which basically means the time disqualified, and doesn't save if you finish the run. Who cares.

But now, at the same time, I would like to discuss the act of pausing.

In RTA settings, pausing is part of the final time, so naturally, you would want to avoid doing it completely since it generally prevents you from doing anything in the game.

But in settings where the time would simply be extracted from an in-game source, like an incorporated timer – here used during boss time-attack, and the extra stages - there may be issues, depending on how these timers are programmed.

And in our case, there is a big one : the timer stops when you pause. The entire run suddenly halts at the press of a button, and you can do it anytime you want.

This can mean a lot of things :

• Dealing with pressure without any run penalty
• Being able to anticipate the future, instead of dealing with it live. Setting up precise tricks more easily
• Splicing being slightly easier, although we aren’t very much concerned by this.

Although abusing pausing in order to obtain lower times is an interesting endeavor, I think this typically careful, meticulous and slow playstyle would go against speedrunning, which is more about completing an objective very quickly, in one sweep go, always going at top speed without taking breaks or slowing down. Don’t get me wrong, these are two valid playstyles, and some games have potential for both, like Minecraft. But for us, it doesn’t look like pausing would bring anything special to the table. Pausing doesn’t seem like it would help with saving much time, as it only provide some amount of support with pulling off tricks, and pausing to recover kinda cheats the purpose speedrunning as you’re supposed to never stop… running.

It seems too irrelevant for us to care about, and as such, I suggest we simply disable pausing during boss time-attack and extra stages Ils. So we may simply continue our efforts on doing what we know best to do.

Of course, under special occasions, pausing may be allowed, like if it's accidental (trying to skip the Polonte mid cutscene, inoffensive cutscenes, as long as they are not very long). Either way, I have checked every single L’sV Ils, and none of them pause, so no time should be affected if we push through.

Obviously, if things were to change, like a new groundbreaking use gets found to pausing, we may return to this topic again. But before then...

Still on this topic, if people want main game stage ILs, we may add them. Though I feel a bit sad that most of the time we add them to certain games, they quickly end up becoming inactive and empty. Maybe people should play around this a lot before we can consider it.

Tell me what you think.

[Didn't hear anything, nor in server, so I changed it as so, thinking it wouldn't hurt things.]

I'd like to bring a slight change in the way we handle the act of pausing in ILs.

Recently, Pirik performed this run. It was a submission at some point, but he has deleted it since. In this run, you can see that he has paused right before the midpoint cutscene. Rule wise, this run would thus go to the pause abuse category.

But let's be honest. This is stupid as hell. And I'm mostly the one who pushed for this in the first place. This press happens way after the first phase is taken care of. Pausing here bears no gameplay significance, and can in no way be used to abuse the game in any way whatsoever. Moving it to that category is completely nonsensical in my eyes. And it was a really short pause too, so nerves wise, even though he had a legit serious pace up to that point, I don't think that helped him much in the end if it lasts one second.

So I would propose that we tweak and clarify the bit of IL rules that regulate this, to indicate that runners are not systematically "banned" off no pause abuse runs if they happen to pause, especially when it's of the accidental nature (like pressing pause too early to skip a cutscene, which is a very common mistake), and is inoffensive to the integrity of the run. That won't make the rules any softer, pausing is still very much prohibited, it's just so we can save these rare runs that truly do no harm and have no business being moved to Pause Abuse.

And just saying, because that possibility comes to my mind, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense to argue that we should ban it regardless because it helps reduce cheating slightly more somehow. Pausing in full-game runs isn't banned, and that seems like a way easier location for runs to be cheated. Furthermore, pause warping exist, so we would have to ban that as well.

I don't think this will see much debate, but I'm still making this post out of safety.

This is a thread about keeping track of the various times and achievements that are really good, sometimes seemingly better than what we display, but that aren't submitted. It will be updated continuously as new times are found.

Such runs can be found on Youtube, Twitter, Twitch, Niconico... but never move outside of it. I find it important to know these runs exist, so I'm making this thread. Perhaps, this can motivate some of you to try and beat them.

(The player るる has expressed that they did not desire these old times to be submitted.)

[Beaten since by @IMERLy with a 1:47.37]. Balue's Tower 1:51.76, easy standard, 10th of july. Played on PS5. Haven't watched it.

[Beaten since by @Bobbykaze with a 1:37.75] Balue's Tower 1:37:76, easy support. 10th of july. Played on PS5. Haven't watched this run.

Balue's Tower 1:32.67, easy support. 29th of july. (@IMERLy) Uses clock snipe death warping. This beats Bobbykaze's run. Early game seems good, but late game can be improved. I'm sure there must be faster strats too.

Balue’s Tower 1:57.60, normal standard. 9th of july. Beats buggle’s run with a 2:14.94.

Balue’s Tower 1:57.45, normal standard. 10th of july. The run lacks the very beginning portion of the stage, so it sadly wouldn't be verifiable regardless of anything else.

Balue’s Tower 1:49.87, normal standard. 11th of july. (@IMERLy) I have not watched this run. Played on PS4. https://twitter.com/9wa_mK2y/status/1546481817330794497

Balue’s Tower 1:49.58, normal standard. 13th of july. I haven’t watched this either. But the run only shows the first 30 seconds so it wouldn't be verifiable. Played on Switch. https://twitter.com/kichoumenta/status/1547192284571062273

Balue's Tower 1:44.48, normal standard. 28th of july. Played on PS4. (@IMERLy) Uses clock snipe death warping. Toughest one to beat yet, I see no execution mistakes.

Balue's Tower 2:28.74, normal standard 100%. 14th of july.

[Beaten since by @Vehmura with a 1:02.00] Chamber o'Fun 1:02.23, normal standard. 9th of july. A strong clean run as well, but I think the third room can have faster optimisation. https://twitter.com/9wa_mK2y/status/1545694382866591744 But, this was beaten with a...

[Beaten since by @Vehmura with a 1:01.46] Chamber o'Fun 1:01.48, normal standard. 24th of july. An absolutely excellent time, probably the best run in this post. Compared to the previous run, it has significantly better third room optimisation. But it also uses a trick where you would jump as early as you can after stepping into a new room to save something like 1/4 of a second. It's hard to see what could be done better about this one. Needless to say, none of the runs we have are close to this level of play, though they still are very decently good runs.

Chamber o'Fun 59,83, normal support. 9th of july. (@IMERLy) Haven’t watched it. They previously had a 1:00.00 on the dot, but it was a screenshot. https://twitter.com/9wa_mK2y/status/1545676186852147200

Chamber o’Fun 1:03.75, hard standard. 7th of july. (@IMERLy) Not watched. https://twitter.com/9wa_mK2y/status/1544921685568425984

[Beaten since by @IMERLy with a 1:44.50] Chamber o'Horror 1:49.73, normal standard. 1st of august. (@IMERLy) I think the third room can be improved. And they don't go for a certain clock snipe death warp in room five, room that also can be slightly improved I think. Overall though, no mistakes.

[Beaten since by @IMERLy with a 1:44.50] Chamber o'Horror 1:46.76, normal standard. 18th of october. (@IMERLy) Haven’t watched it, but they went for the clock snipe. https://twitter.com/9wa_mK2y/status/1582176167742033921

Chamber o'Horror 1:43.16, normal standard. 1st of april 2023. Looks perfect and optimised as ever.

Chamber o'Horror 1:55.86, hard standard. 7th of july. (@IMERLy) Haven’t watched. https://twitter.com/9wa_mK2y/status/1544931520338870272

Leptio the Flower Crown, normal standard. 21th of july. (@IMERLy) Haven’t watched it. Faster than AxelSanGo's run of the same day. https://twitter.com/9wa_mK2y/status/1550095220704169984

Hello again.

An update post about the potentially groundbreaking exploit mentioned some posts above.

An investigation was led by Bobbykaze about what we now refer to as infinite support jump, ISJ. https://twitter.com/twistedelf6966/status/1557607918287040512

He managed to understand why it worked, and reproduced it in this video, along with a breakdown of the required actions : It takes quite a while to setup, it requires reloading the entire sub-game at one point, and the procedure easily lasts one full minute of real-time. You get the glitch to activate only at the beginning of the stage.

What this glitch allows us to do is simple, disable the support jump cooldown. I don't have to explain how useful that would be, in fact I already did a while ago. It conserves through rooms, which is great. Although, we don't know if it conserves through a death, stage reset, and pause warping. This is currently unknown information at the time of writing this.

Unfortunately... it might turn out to be completely and tragically useless in the end. Here's why in one simple sentence : it only works on 1-1. Some later stages were tested, and in the sequel too, but there, ISJ didn't show any signs of life. Not all stages were tested however. Far from it. For all we know, 6-1 could allow it. That is why we should make sure all of the possibilities are extinguished.

To make things more complicated, it has been determined that it's only possible on 1.0. Meaning you would have to find a way to revert to that. This is effectively the first difference found with that version and 1.1. But don't immediately come to the conclusion that we will now have to account for version differences in the leaderboard. As it stands, this trick is no good for us to have.

As we said, it's useless. You can only use it on 1-1. On 1-1... the most linear level possible. You're faster sliding on the ground and damage-bouncing off enemies than in the air, and everything you would want to skip can already be skipped with normal support mode (Lephise Statue). So ISJ wouldn't help here. The only thing it potentially would - even marginally - be helpful for, is for when you want to save the phantomilian in the windmill. Outside that, it'd basically be worth nothing. Furthermore, if we strictly follow Bobbykaze's steps, you would lose time, because starting 1-1 the first time, you cannot pause the game for three seconds. Three IGT seconds. You would have to save more than three seconds to make up for it. The only hope you could still have, is by making it work by using a different setup than Bobby's in which you activate the glitch, and support mode before entering 1-1, before the run starts.

Sadly, the way it presents itself, I think we should ban it. I don't want runners or ILs to reset their console or something to revert their version of the game, and to suffer by spending a minute loading and exiting the game everytime, only so they can hope to use this trick to potentially save at most a second if they play perfectly, which is probably impossible anyways. It's a huge drag that brings nothing good to make up for it.

Unless there is new information about this technique, I think this is the wisest decision. As it is, it shouldn't be worth any of our precious time.

Hi

There is one extra stage in the first game, but two in the second, Lunatea's Veil. The rule you have read is exclusive to that game, so you can look past it if you want to do a DtP 100% speedrun. Just beat all the stages of DtP while collecting at least 150 dreamstones in them, plus the final boss and you will be set.

Also don't forget to display a FPS timer if you plan on playing on PC. Wouldn't want your run to instantly become officially unacceptable if you ever do one

One small post, about PC FPS regulations.

Me and other reviewers have noticed that the vast majority of PC runs have the FPS counter be extremely small, such that even in 720p, they are just barely readable, even on full screen.

It doesn't compromise the validity of any runs, just makes it harder to read, so fear not. But, I want to make awareness of this problem, so that people may try and find a way to make it look slightly bigger, small quality of life for everyone.

I changed the rules to encourage people to try and largen it. It will never be a rejectable offense to keep it small, but at least starting from now, it should be common sense that it's not the wisest option.

The counter is also not made easier to read due to an ever changing background. In the worst cases, if you have a green counter, then it is barely readable on the green colored stages such as vision 3. A solution to that would be to put it on some black background, but again, that may not be possible with every program or recording setup, so it is only just a recommendation, not a requirement.

Like with the other games I've tracked, here is the WR history of the popular categories.

If you have doubts about certain of the information presented, or have found issues, please report ! This is a one man work after all.

DtP Doc (all-in-one) : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HF4w7JHwjT_KRMtmnK8bOKlTOAszC4b4Xlh5bmpozTY/edit?usp=sharing

L'sV Doc (all-in-one) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GrTT40ayAyhxeoWowb2LYhZq8fGKgeLuwSw7J92msns/edit?usp=sharing