Im nearly 100% sure that it is the cutscenes at the end. You pause the game to use healing items in the fight with Shibusawa and it shows an IGT of under 7 hours. Then you let the 50 or so minutes of cutscenes play. Which is totally fine it just means your IGT is a lot longer than you deserve.

Exciting times for this speedrun though. Hopefully the weapon shopping can help out.

It is exciting.

I am also on a standard PS4 with a normal HDD, and I'm playing it using Remote Play which is basically just Remote Desktop for PS4. Works really well, no serious input lag.

I think for weapons, if there is no way to speed up the wait time for Kiryu in Sotenbori that might be a good opportunity to pick up a bunch of pistols/shotguns while waiting and since Majima has to go there anyway for story progression we could pick up the guns while in the shop since I don't think you need to send people out to get the basic pistols but I might be mistaken. I know when I did a casually playthrough for the game I filled my inventory with pistols for the last mission on both characters and from what I remember Shibusawa was a push over with guns.

For IGT if it only resets if you die and reload rather than die and retry then we can just say no loading savefiles. But that has issues in itself since there might be some wait time skips we can do by saving and reloading but again thats all conjecture. I think for now, RTA ending when we finish the last QTE thats fine, but we may want to expand that to cover until it says END since the IGT seems to count until then anyway, But I have no idea. More testing will be required I guess.

Also one other thing to note is that it seems like the cutscenes at the end of the game count to IGT. Considering during the final fight you had an IGT of 6 hours 50 minutes. We still need to work on when RTA stops to make sure that it reflects accurately when compared against IGT. Considering your RTA is less than your IGT. Looks kinda weird on the leaderboards. I've approved your run as it stands since I can't get the IGT of your final quicktime event input. However your run is probably about 50 minutes faster IGT than is recorded.

Pretty much this. Im going to look further into if buying guns can save time in the enemy rush sections such as the last part of the game with Majima and Kiryu. Still haven't done any testing though.

I havent used the wait skip for Kiryu in chapter 5 and I didnt skip either of the Karaoke events but those save quite a bit of time each.

I stuck with Slugger for most of the game cause I feel its the safest method for someone who isn't a Yakuza Veteran and Brawler lets you stun lock most enemies making it quite easy to take out the grunts and some of the bosses.

Yeah I was thinking the same. All substories is something that someone might actually run rather than 100% which nobody in their right mind would run. If someone runs it though I'll probably add it.

Sure we can get some difficulty based categories. I really only did the run for fun so the time is pretty trash. If you have any suggestions for timings, categories that's fine by me.

As for splitting after the last QTE that's probably best yeah.