Hello, it has been a long time since I posted or had something to pitch about the game but over the last couple of days recently I started thinking about how flawed Boss Rush in itself is as a speedrun category. I'd like to explain and hope the moderators/other runners of the game will take into consideration;

1. Timing

One of the prime issues with timing in this category is that the timing for bosses is dependent on boss screams, which doesn't quite work right for RTA timing due to how Boss Medals and Keys are obtained in the game. Some of them you are generally leaving sooner than the game would had normally given you a key/boss medal and some screams are not exactly "fast"...sometimes you have to wait on them. Those who are very familiar to the game would generally have an idea when timing ends on bosses, although for Black Jewel the timing itself still ends upon lost of control of Wario.

So, the timing for the boss would start upon entering the boss loading zone when the screen turns black and timing would end upon the lost of control of Wario (when the cutscene of the boss defeat begins).

2. Route

Another issue that always came out of Boss Rush is that it dependents on a completed file that also has Battle Arenas and Crystal Entities already cleared and out of the way. It also makes use of the ByeBye Balloons, which allows you to skip half the level in most cases but you are still having to transverse through the level itself in order to clear a boss to begin the next segment. The category idea is meant to defeat the bosses as fast as possible and having to go through any of the levels quickly to do this objective is...kinda silly.

3. Is the category forced?

In my opinion, from when I originally added it, I had presented the category to some of the older Wario World runner folk and at the time they had agreed the category still felt too forced to be an ideal category to run on the board but also understood at the time that it did some form of variety. Looking at it again, I feel more strongly that these should be boss ILs instead. The category was also created created at a time when most modern strats (including SJs) were never a thing.

4. Boss ILs

An old topic of this came up once for general ILs which were frowned upon but I believe Boss ILs should be reconsidered in the present time with the consideration of breaking down Boss Rush and would allow more runners to get into the game with some bite size action. As the game currently is, I can understand why some users may of want some form of ILs to exist, also considering that the other Wario games in the series have created Boss/level ILs far more recently these days, I think its worth a look into and something the community should think about. This would also allow for more crazy potential with Bosses in general (Dual Dragon being a big example) and allow risks that normally most runners would not endorse in their own runs. It would be amazing to see some of the most optimal boss fights possible.

5. The pitch

Adapting to change is something people sometimes struggle with, but I want to believe this would honestly be a big and welcoming change considering all the many other categories and runs people do these days. The expansion of variety would be nice, so my pitch is what is all written above.

We have been thinking about ILs not too long ago and my opinion is that I'd love to have ILs. Not just bosses but every level, both for any% and 100%. The only issue is getting there without using cheats or an emulator would be very tedious. Personally I think that maybe for ILs only we should allow the use of emulators, which gets rid of the biggest issue that stands in ILs way.

I'll try to push for getting a conclusion on the IL talk and hopefully we'll get them on the page.

Yeah, you are correct, that was always the drag to bringing ILs into the leaderboard long ago and another reason Boss Rush had taken priority as the idea to "ILs" (sloppy if anything though).

I appreciate a response, dip had originally brought it up to me shortly after I posted this thread so I was actually kinda excited that some talk and decision making was already in the talks to happening. I happened to ask meowmix a few hours ago about the possibility, have yet to hear a response though with all this.

As you said though, unfortunately, without using an emulator the only solutions are using the debug code (although it would be possible to create some new codes to have more direct warps) but as you said, having to use cheats. Which just leaves doing what is done in Boss Rush...which is also tedious in itself.

Thanks for making some time to respond to this thread.