Hi all, you may have noticed that Normal and Hard are no longer listed categories for Any%, NG+, and ASS%. This is because they have been mostly empty for a very long time. As with Yakuza 0 (see: https://www.speedrun.com/yakuza_0/thread/gzhjl ), those times have now been moved to Easy, which has been renamed to "Any Difficulty".

I've seen a couple of submissions within those categories from other games that seem to be "WR fishing"; submitting a time for the sake of "claiming WR". For that reason, I see no reason to keep the individual categories. While the game is certainly "harder" on Normal and Hard, the route does not change substantially enough to warrant an entirely separate board, especially in K2 where the bosses take the same amount of damage.

There was also the complication of "what if you change the difficulty to Easy during a Normal or Hard run"? To which this new "Any Difficulty" category comes in. This also coincides with how Judgment and Lost Judgment difficulties are handled, and with some recent discoveries in LJ where Simple comes into play, it makes sense.

Legend runs are untouched because you cannot shift the difficulty down while you're playing on Legend mode. Game Overs also instantly occur upon losing all your health. If you want a more challenging run, Legend is the way to go, not Hard. Disregarding continues, you'd have to nitpick on the differences between Hard and Legend.

Majima Saga is untouched because there is far more overlap, and taking out only the Normal runs seemed a bit pointless.