I haven't been able to find a good substitute for the village fight, seeing as how on the NA version the second wave isn't triggered by killing the two Ganados in front of the fireplace.

Does anyone know of any alternative fast methods for clearing the village?

The ganado wave should spawn, if you are not too close to the first 2 enemies when you kill them. This strategy is probably the most consistent one, but not the fastest anymore.

Most runner use this strat now:

You kill the first ganado and run into the house right after. Turn left and throw the first grenade outside the small hole. Turn around and wait for the cutscene, skip it and walk upstairs. I walk upstairs slowly cause it gives the enemies time to group in front of the window. After I grab the shotgun I start running again. Grab the grenade and run to the window, throw the grenade outside. Try aiming a bit to the right and also very far down, so you also hit the enemies on the right side of the house.

This strategy is not super consistent, but it saves around 5 seconds over the old one.

I'm NOT the one who invented this strategy, I think it was a french player but not sure tho.

Thanks. By the way I FINALLY got the Wii version of RE4 so I'm playing around with an all-collectibles route :)

Isn't it different for ntsc gcn re4? I remember trying to do our normal strats when first learning re4 and I could never get the cutscene to show.

I've actually been routing this version, as it's so different from all of the other versions. There is actually a strat I learned about recently that is exclusive to this version that works for some reason. It's hard to explain over text like this, so if you ever catch a VOD from now on of me doing a run of this category, you'll see me using it.