Unfortunately it's difficult to point out certain things without knowing the end result. For all I know you could pick something specific up early in the game and I'd question that, but it could potentially be of use in year 5 or so. I'll take a proper look at it once you've finished the entire TAS. Until then, good luck with the rest.

Anything that doesn't actually finish the game in any way possible is a bad idea, as those are more suited as race categories, if anything.

The part you quoted was what was first posted, which applied to the scenario at that point as no run had even be done. I've explained afterwards in a different thread why that idea/approach may seems inconsistent as of now: https://www.speedrun.com/p5/thread/ehx1w

Keep in mind that all of that was posted when there was none/one run only for it. As you could read in my previous post, now that there's been additional runs, I've even agreed to compromise to a different approach and at least add the category for the time being, despite still having doubts that it will change all too much in regards to what has been mentioned and turn out as first expected in terms of the category's progression and competition.

If you've read them, please elaborate why you'd further bring up the point about inconsistency between the other boards when it was already explained before.

Two things first, then I'll address some points of Gold's post.

Firstly, thanks for your uninformed opinion as always, Fatkid. Take a minute or two and read up on the matter in one of the other threads.

Secondly, this is what I'm gonna do. For now, I'll add the category and continue to watch its progress (just like I've been doing so far since the first NG+ run). If it still ends as expected in the future, I'll eventually remove it again. This will take a while because I'll have to sit through all of the 3 runs first, so don't expect it to be up right away.

"I personally dont care if you take the category seriously but I'd rather not see stuff like "running NG+ is like running a Visual Novel lol XD!!!!" and "NG+ literally takes no effort to run lol!!!".

• That's stuff you'll have to live with. Not everyone shares your opinion on NG+ runs, as you can clearly see. Maybe some people don't voice their opinion on it as strongly as I do, but it's something you'll have to accept in that case, or let it trigger you for eternity.

"I'd also rather not see people ask me why theres no leaderboards or why I didnt say that I beat record when I beat Nev's time but they dont annoy me as much as the constant shitting on NG+. "

• the second part of this doesn't even make sense as you didn't beat any times with your run anyways. As for the third part, you can read my above message.

"The last point i'd like to make is Time. We all have our different lives and when we can do things. I personally have class 4 times a week and work the other 3 days. I dont have time to do 15+ hour runs. I wont be able to do another NG+ run now til 2 weeks from now when I have time off class. Saying that "so far i've only seen one run from each person" and saying theres no competition is also dumb. I'd like to remind you of the last time you did a full run Nev? Cereth does his runs and Furry has his capture card issues so I think you'd have to look at yourself first before judging when other people do runs. Also saying "if you are gonna take time to learn 14 hours of the game you should just learn the other 4 lol!" is retarded. You saw yourselves how I still lost 2 hours to the record in NG+. Imagine that with NG. Hell look at Cereths runs. He knows exactly what he's doing in his runs and still got a 22 hour first run. I don't about you but I dont have time to do 22 hour runs. I will be sticking to my 12 hour~ runs thanks. "

• Yes, people have their own schedules to attend to, who would have guessed. However, if you read my previous post carefully you'd have probably skipped the first half of this paragraph. NB's run was months ago. Yours were a few days ago. I clearly said that my actual question is if those runs will end up being the only ones. I didn't say anything about how frequent they'd have to be done or anything along those lines. As far as NB's run goes, it appears to be the case. As far as the other two go, we'll have to see, I guess.

I find it funny that you bring up when I've done my last run. For all I know I've been doing several runs and routed and re-routed the entire game countless times over ever since the release. Yes, Cereth does his runs. What are you trying to say with that? Also, how can you say he knows exactly what he's doing? Yes, I gave him my notes and helped him learn the game, but he barely watched anything of my PB run because he said he wanted to figure certain things out himself as it's more enjoyable for him to learn it that way. Fair enough, but it will leave him with certain things probably being far from optimal in comparison to what is currently known/done. I'd even go as far as saying if he watched the run a few times and straight up learned from that, his first run could have probably easily been sub 20h instead of 22h. Regardless, that's not what this topic is about but I figured I should bring it up since you were pointing at it. And no, I did not see myself how you lost 2 hours in NG+ as I haven't watched all of your run. In fact it baffled me even seeing that it was 2h slower.

To address some of your points.

If you say there's no carrot at the end of the stick and that being the reason why you've only done one run, you make it sounds like the only reason you did one run to begin with was because you wanted it to be on a leaderboard. Granted, this can be interpreted differently but it's the feeling I personally get.

I am aware that this past week, there's been two new additions in terms of runs. The real point and question is, if it follow the pattern that I've been describing over and over, whereas those runs will be their only ones in this "category", which, as I've also stated times over, is exactly what bugs me about adding it as a category. Obviously, you can't force people to continuously do runs. I get that. However that brings me back to my point of "Why have a category on a board so people can compete if they don't actually want to compete". It just underlines what I've been stating in the past, that a lot of people simply do a run to have a time on some board.

As far as the discouragement goes, I can partly see your point. However, I've also stated that if there's actual competition for it in the future, that it can very well be added as a category. That doesn't only apply to NG+ but to all categories, as long as they're somewhat reasonable of course. The other part that I see is yet again related to what I've described above. Personally I see it as an unhealthy mindset to run solely for leaderboard purposes and not for actually wanting to play the game fast, let it be NG or NG+. I also think that an even bigger contributor is the fact that people realize NG+ is a bad choice and that's why they don't run it.

In terms of the routing part. I'll just be honest here. People want their category to be taken seriously, yet it appears people refuse to even look at the actual category's run to learn from it. While I haven't watched every single second of each of the three NG+ runs, I can safely say that there are very many occasions where extremely unnecessary stuff is done in the NG+ run. A primary example would be fighting optional encounters, which, "obviously" needs to be done to a certain degree in the normal run. However, if the NG+ run ends up fighting extra encounters in almost every palace, it's crystal clear that something is wrong here. It was something I pointed out when you first did your run, too, after I saw that some of your treasure routes were slower than mine or just barely faster at all.

Also, not once have I said "No, this category will never be added". So saying that you weren't given a chance and were being shut down all the time, seems kinda unfitting to me. The parts that were being shut down were all related to arbitrary restriction. Other people like Wulfz have also explained it many times in addition that it's not what this category would need. Unless, of course, you were considering to be shut down when I stated that, as for now, the category won't be added until it has some actual competition.

You can read parts of this thread, particularly my first response: https://www.speedrun.com/p5/thread/ehx1w

It applies to this board as well. Having a bunch of empty categories cluttering the boards isn't very helpful. As far as The Answer goes. I simply removed it for now cause it was empty and didn't have any runs.

Essentially, yes.

Obviously the route needs a few adjustments, as you'll have to gather mithril, rather than just buying it with infinite gil. You do 2 dungeons differently cause of that, as you'll have to pick up Mithril there, then sell a few and keep a few for your weapon/armor.

It seems we can agree to disagree in that case.

"If almighty skills are such an issue then lets ban them, I have no quarrel with that." - You're missing the actual problem here. Arbitrary restrictions isn't what is needed.

Judging by your last paragraph, you seem to be preferring if instead of me, no one actually responded to the threads? Aside from the fact that you're wrong as you can clearly see that someone else aside from me responded to the thread(s). Just because the other mod doesn't generally respond to a lot of stuff on forums doesn't make it pointless to have another. That leaves aside Ghoul, who simply created be page as it's more convenient to do as series mod.

Everything necessary has already been mentioned in either this, or one of the other 5 threads about this topic.

Anyways... To this point, there's still only one person who actually finished a NG+ run of this game. To no one's surprise, that also appears to be his only run ever completed. While I could be wrong on this, given that I'm not following anything in that regard, it is exactly what I've been mentioning over and over. NG+ just won't be competitive whatsoever, because it's a lazy alternative to doing actual runs. People will do a single run and then never improve. If people want to go home, sleep, 1-shot every boss. Sure, let them be my guest and do whatever they please to do.

Also, your argument about the menuing etc. being a skill in itself in NG+ is a moot point in my opinion and I'd disagree. Using cursor memory and spamming the same ability every single time you fight a mandatory enemy involves no actual menuing. Dodging shadows is no different in a NG run than it would be in a NG+ run, starting after the 1st palace.

On top of that, the amount of people screaming "I wanna do a NG+ run of this game that I like so much" who then never even do anything in that regard is also large.

Again, people should do whatever they want. Several years ago, there were almost no leaderboards whatsoever and people managed. I don't see why it's so important now to have unnecessary categories on the boards and why it would prevent people from running whatever they want.

Don't get me wrong, but by the looks of it, you haven't actually looked at the current run(s). Chariot rank 7 is 100% useless as you don't actually fight random stuff past the second palace. Really the only exception is the anubis and Isis + Lamia in the pyramid, of which you actually want to get the EXP from Anubis and wouldn't be able to insta kill the other group anyways.

Everything necessary has already been said. Super arbitrary restriction like these have no place in speedruns.

No categories/runs have been removed retroactively at this point, which is basically the reason why it appears inconsistent as of now. Removing runs and/or categories retroactively can be difficult sometimes hence why I/we left those as is for now at least.

The plan is to approach the ideas described above from here on, whether or not categories should or shouldn't removed retroactively on other boards, I'm not sure about personally. Especially since some of them weren't even added by me (See P4 bad end for example). Ultimately it would be great to keep the consistency across the different Persona boards, but then again, as of now P3 is a hot mess anyways for example.

I've stated in the NG+ thread before as to why I(we) think new categories should not be carelessly added as soon as there is simply one run of it. One run doesn't mean anything in terms of the categories progression. See P4 for example. We're trying to avoid those kind of scenarios from happening over again.

In addition to that, yes it's a free DLC, just like a bunch of others. If you start allowing partial DLC usage, people are gonna want more arbitrary restriction in that regard. They want to be able to use X DLC, cause Y DLC is also free and allowed. Even just allowing all the free DLC would trivialize certain parts of the run by quite a bit. I'm not saying whether or not it was a good decision by ATLUS to make Challenge/Merciless difficulty a DLC instead of just having it in the game from the get go. However, fact remains that it IS a DLC.

As far as the "interest" goes. Hearing that some people are interested is good and all, but at the same time I've also heard from tons of other people they wanted to run game/category X. Ultimately, I've never seen them touch that game/category in any way.

Also, as a reminder. Speedruns or categories don't have to be on a leaderboard to be appreciated by the people who want to do them and if there's actual competition and considerable merit to them, they can always be added in the future.

There aren't really any resources other than learning off of the actual runs, unfortunately.

There's no point in deviating from DLC restrictions of the actual run of the game. Every DLC should still be banned. It's not so much about "better" or "worse" accessories. It's about the fact that those accessories are otherwise unavailable to obtain. Same goes for DLC Personas, obviously.

Other than that. I personally don't care for NG+ runs as I think they're pointless, but from what I saw when skimming through some of the palaces is that some of your treasure routes are barely faster or actually even slower than the True End run on hard mode. Which is another reason why I personally dislike NG+ runs. They're always quite unoptimized and usually stay that way because no one really cares for them. Of course, everyone's free to do what they want to, but if you're already spending 14 hours on 1-shotting enemies with Hassou Tobi, could probably consider just spending the extra 4 hours on learning the actual game's run at that point.

Mishima's EXP bonus is 5% for each, rank 3 and 7.

Other than that, this seems like info that has been mostly available on the JP wiki for several months.

At this point in time, there are no plans on adding additional categories such as NG+. This might change in the future. However, even if it does, new categories would have to be reviewed in their value, as in what benefits there would be from having this category, the community's interest, the concept of the run, etc.

We've done the mistake of loosely adding new categories before on previous games of the series. Basically all of those categories ended up as 1-run "categories" and never had anyone compete for it. The goal is to avoid something like that from happening again.

1. The 9-4 stage has a tendency to spawn a certain pattern of blocks in an unintended way if you go too fast, iirc. It will screw up the layout of the stage and make it quite more inconvenient to beat.

2. It's generally faster to not drink in full game runs.

3. I personally never played easy, but my first thought would be that it's far from optimized because no one cares enough about easy mode.

4. For the run itself it does not. However, make sure to not be signed in to PSN while running as that makes the load times for the results longer.

It's been a while since I played/ran the game myself, but this should hopefully answer most of your questions.

No. I explained to you why, when I rejected your run. Resubmitting it won't change that.