Hey folks! I've run into several folks running this in September. Make sure when you hit the 10-hour streamed mark for this speedrun you let me know! The offer is still good and I don't want to forget anyone.

I'm not discrediting anybody. I am stating a technical fact. I will repeat it. SGB2 is not clocked faster than speedrunning-accepted emulators.

My concern is that you are talking about fragmenting the category based on platform, which isn't something that's done with almost any other game, based on nothing more than me getting a good time. Hardware being an unfair advantage is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary proof.

Cast your vote. If you and everyone else wants an emulator-only category, then the players actually playing will go get a good speed there too (go look at some of ChessJerk's runs) and it will be a bad look for everybody.

The distance between runners has everything to do with the number of runs they've been willing to put in.

Do not make the mistake of fragmenting this already-obscure run.

Hardware is not faster than emulation with the exception of the SGB1. Full stop.

In a recent thread, it was mentioned that the community of players is larger than ever. I respectfully disagree. Right now it appears that the people actively running this game are me and ChessJerk. Toorima was running the game until his WR, which is understandable. I'm not likely to play a bunch for a while.

This is a bad state for the game to be in, because having many former players who haven't actively run this game more than once or twice in the last six months creates some really toxic possibilities when it comes to discussion of changes to the speedrunning meta. LOTS of great people list FFL2 on their list of active games, but the runs just aren't happening. Nobody is a villain or bad person here, and everyone has their reasons for not playing, but the time constraints that prevent us from playing are not preventing us from critiquing runs or suggesting changes to the rules.

I'd like to put my money where my mouth is in hopes of increasing the number of stakeholders in this run.

Between now and the end of September, if you stream ten hours of Final Fantasy Legend II speedrunning in the most popular category, and leave up the VODs, I'll gift your stream ten subs. For now I'm going to limit that to one gifting per streamer, but I could be convinced to support the game further.

All but a few of us here have a VERY real chance to get a new PB with ten hours of total speedrunning play time. Those who have never run it before but are interested will find that sub-1:50 is a very achievable and fun goal.

I'll set some reasonable limit to prevent some weird viral thing from wiping out my retirement. We'll set it at ten streamers for now.

This is a great game, and it's a great speedrun. You should be playing it, and convincing your friends to play it.

The timing difference is the reason why I run on the SGB2 instead of the 1.

My experience recently spending a few days running on emulator is that my paces were pretty consistent with hardware. My responses are slightly more tuned on hardware, but I think if I was running on emulator full-time there'd be functionally no difference.

As far as the exact same things happening, I would like to quibble just a little bit. A large part of the timesave in this run is from my new insistence on spicy starts. For instance, I got a 14:18 Ashura split vs. a 14:49 in the next-fastest recorded run. Most of this game is indeed variance, but insisting on a good start and then timing dialog and fight inputs correctly are where time is earned. In my case I'm not good at multitasking so I starting doing Emote-only Twitch runs and eventually offline runs. Turns out grinding WRs in this game is not super entertaining to watch.

I have all of my offline runs from the last 11 days (since right after I had a 73-second WR fail to record) and will trickle them onto Twitch as I have time this week.

"Until then, the matter remains up for debate."

I will be happy to debate this issue with anyone who puts in at least 10 hours a week of running this game for a month. Of course at that point they're likely to be on my side since they'll probably have a faster time than I achieved yesterday. World records fall out of this game every time someone with the time to invest takes it seriously.