Hello all, it's an exciting time for Xenogears speedrunning and I feel it's time to re-examine a few topics that are unrelated to the new glitches and skips. pidge and I have our own personal opinions on some things that should be changed and we would like to bring these issues up. They are as follows:

Turbo

Currently, the status quo is that Turbo is only allowed in some categories, and is particularly banned in Any% and Any% NMG. We would like to allow Turbo in all categories, with a new column added in the run information to show whether Turbo was used. While other games, such as the Legend of Dragoon, have gameplay mechanics that give Turbo a large advantage over regular mashing, Xenogears has no such mechanics and the only advantage is automatically advancing text. In addition, we all know Xenogears is an extremely text-heavy game with comparatively little amounts of gameplay for extremely long sections. Grinding runs out by having to mash for such extensive lengths is not only tedious and annoying but causes wrist wear and could lead to repetitive stress injuries, and the low amount of autoplaying cutscenes makes for very few bathroom and food/water breaks. There are also officially licensed turbo controllers released by Sony, making it an officially provided option. We believe that allowing Turbo will make the game more accessible by automating parts with little or no gameplay, sacrificing very little in terms of skill but allowing the runner to take better care of their body.

Timing end

Currently, the status quo is to end timing at "THE END" after the credits. I would like to bring up the idea of changing this to end timing earlier. It seems to be a relic of Japanese standards and I would personally like to make it more in line with most other English version JRPG standards. After talking with pidge we have two ideas for doing so:

1. Ending time when the Urobolus battle screen fades to white. This would be close to a "last hit" standard while avoiding ambiguity in not knowing if a certain hit is going to be the last one.
2. After Urobolus, ending time on last text input before credits roll. This would be the last input of the game and it is completely unambiguous.

If timing end is changed, all runs will have their times edited to reflect the new timing method.

Allowing sessions for long categories

Currently, splitting runs into multiple sessions is banned in all but the miscellaneous "Session%" category. While this is the status quo in almost all games, Xenogears is a particularly long game, with some categories exceeding 24 hours, a grueling task on a human body to do in one sitting. We would like to suggest allowing doing such categories in multiple sittings to allow them to be more inclusive and allow better self care for runners who wish to speedrun these tasks. If this is to be allowed, which categories should this be allowed for? Should it be based on length or decided by category directly?

Please let us know what you have to think about these topics.

Turbo I've already set my mind on this on the other post, I'm ok with it :)

Timing End I kinda agree also. I think it would be more logical to put it at the last input in my opinion, as it feel strange to end the timer at Urobolos but still have textbox to input ? But it's just feeling and I'm ok with both as well

I am for all of it

I haven't seen much discussion around the new kernel menu. Apologies if it's already been covered.

How will it be handled here on SRC, especially since it's possible on both English and Japanese and that it can shave several hours off the any% WR? I can't provide any input on this since I haven't ever touched the game, so I'm curious what the mods and actual runners have to say about it.

I do remember watching a Japanese TAS-er (kyotosagauoa on Twitter, known for SaGa Frontier) doing an any% run with the glitch on nicolive. He got a 7:58:20 ending time at THE END, 7:11 IGT. Screenshot of the final time (from Palantir): https://twitter.com/Palantir_K/status/1286963784385347584?s=20

I took part in this routing with SaGa sennin, ffvd_games. This was ready even before the release of the glitch and uses the researches done with bif, notably with glitched equipments.

Unfortunately for the moment, Japanese Kernel Menu needs to use the Data Demo Disk sold with Chocobo no fushigina dungeon. In the view of this, I preferred to stick with US version, as using Cd from other games would then cover the any% save glitch category.