I came back after a 2-year hiatus, sat down and played the game for one day, and smashed my old record. My PS2's disc drive is dead so the console is no longer speedrun-legal, I decided to pull my save data from my memory card and grind out some runs again on emulator, and I beat a PB that I couldn't top after over a month of dedicated grinding when I was running this game on the reg. Speedrunning, what can I say.

As far as emulator vs console, I don't see any difference, PCSX2 seems to run this game accurately. If anybody has evidence that this game runs differently on emulator than original hardware, please let me know and I'll make it a subcategory.