Hey everyone,

For a while, Yakuza 0's load remover has been plagued by an unfortunate bug. DrTChops' load remover was a great step forward in making the run more competitive across hardware, but sadly, it not-infrequently fails to remove certain loads. The result is runners losing time through completely meta-game reasons, and of course, the worse your loads were, the harder you got hit.

Luckily, fellow community member PlayingLikeAss came up with a new load remover that, building on DrT's work, uses a better pointer path that seems to avoid this problem completely. I spent my last stream testing that load remover, and you can see the results in this highlight of the entire stream:

As explained in the vod, I use two instances of LiveSplit here - the one on top titled Any% Debug uses PLA's load remover, while the bottom one uses the old load remover.

The results mostly speak for themselves. The timers, for the most part, behave the same. There are some decimal differences which I believe are inconsequential, but maybe this should be looked into more (it would be interesting to see if this happens even if two instances use the same load remover - the differences could be down simply to differences in polling intervals).

But the important part is, of course, the loads themselves. You can see the first load fail to be removed by the old timer at around 53:38, and several more following up. Note that it's not simply that the new load remover stops in more places: every place where it stops is a place where the old load remover usually stops, except for when it fails due to a bug. These are loads that should be removed, and worse, it fails on different loads each run.

The meatiest part of the vod starts around 2:39:49. where I started a (sigh) no-reset run of the game. Here are the time stamps for the instances where the old timer fails to remove significant load times:

1. 2:49:30 Entering Toko Credit
2. 3:07:44 Exiting Hakua Building
3. 3:19:44 Oda Fight End
4. 3:21:35 Leaving Majima's Office
5. 3:26:45 Taxi Ride
6. 3:43:30 Leaving Dragon & Tiger
7. 4:12:47 After Shibusawa Watch Cutscene
8. 4:51:03 Taxi Ride

There may be others I missed due to them being very small, but I believe this accounts for all the time losses worth at least 1 second. As you can see, these are all instances where the old load remover would usually remove the loads, but fails randomly. Again, these failures will occur at different places depending on your run, and will cost different amounts of time; for me, the average seems to be around 18 seconds.

Personally, I think PLA's new load remover works exactly as expected and should be adopted as our new timer. But that's up to the community, naturally. This is just information I've collected that I hope will help in reaching a conclusion.

Thanks for reading, and many thanks to DrTChops and PLA for their invaluable work.

EDIT: Just to clarify, given how similar the timers are, there is no need to change anything in the leaderboards if the new timer is accepted. All the old times would remain valid. All that would be needed is to switch the timer used for runs going forward.

One of the reasons cited for limiting the game's framerate to 60fps was that 120fps allows speeding up FTH significantly using an unlocked mouse scroll wheel, which is only possible on specific mice. However, the post did not say out explicitly that scroll wheel is banned, and it still gives a big advantage on 60fps. Can it be clarified whether or not we can use scroll wheel for FTH at 60fps?

I don't run this game (yet), but on my current casual playthrough of the US PS1 version on Duckstation, I came across a potential minor time save for the Ultima Weapon fight.

This sounds like a prank, but - if you use the soft reset right after the fight where you finally defeat Ultima Weapon (i.e. R1 + R2 + L1 + L2 + select + start), it actually skips the 10~ second animation of him crashing to the ground. [I found this because Tifa died during the fight and I wanted her to get EXP.]

I've only tested this on emulator, although it would be weird if console behaves differently. While this is a pretty minor time save, especially for the two categories it's relevant to - All Bosses and 100%, as far as I know - the real significance is it raises the possibility of soft-resets having similar effects in other parts of the run.

Finally, sorry if this is already known, but I did look at the WRs for All Bosses and 100% (console and PC) and didn't see it being performed. Maybe it's too minor for people to risk accidentally soft-resetting over. But I figured better to share than not.

EDIT: Sorry if there's ads on the vod, not my choice, it got copyright claimed over the battle music.

Hey, when you go to the Streams function of a game / series, it seems to not filter at all according to game - you just get a big list of all current active streams (linked to accounts on the site, I assume). Sorry if you are already aware / this isn't the place.

Hey everyone,

I'm planning on running ED soon (TM), and my understanding from streams and posts on this forum has been that emulator runs are banned, which is why I've been playing the game on original hardware. However, when I look at the rules on the leaderboard, all categories have a section at the end saying:

"[Submitted runs can be done on a Gamecube,Wii, or Dolphin Emulator. (Must use Dolphin version within a few months of the current build. 5.0 stable is banned)]"

Is this just an outdated paragraph that was left in accidentally, or are emulator runs allowed now?