I'm noticing some slight inconsistency for when runners choose to stop time for this game. So, I'd like to try and reach a consensus on when exactly people think that point should be. The last gameplay action one needs to take to start the ending sequence is to use the Monocle to properly read Book Fact, but there's still the book text, as well as another text box to manually clear after that.

My own run (which was submitted on my behalf a while back) appears to have been timed up until the button press to actually read the book, but doesn't seem to factor in clearing the text afterwards. Other runners appear to stop timing after clearing all the text. Still others appear to wait until the moment the screen changes to where the text autoscrolls with a visual of Darm Tower / Ys in the background.

I realize this probably doesn't make all that big of a difference with the speedrunning community being relatively small and somewhat fractured for this game (due to version differences and all), but we should at least try and come up with a consistent end point.

Good ide. For me i choose the time them the last text box has past. As it was the last button i had to press. But in my aladdin run its after the final boss. As there are sevel minutes of unskipperble text. :)

I've always done new game-> last input, which is the final textbox closing. (unless you count the last impactful input as more important) The final textbox closing has the advantage of actually being noticeable when retiming a run to the frame, which is an often overlooked aspect of what makes a timing good. There's no real impactful gameplay after the final textbox. And as for the button press to read the book, there's still impactful gameplay afterwards IMO. Even though it amounts to just holding a button, if someone forgot to hold cancel at any other point in the run, they would've lost time, so it makes little sense to me to end timing before these last few textboxes, where someone could lose time, be it quite unlikely.

In the end this all comes down to a matter of consensus.

I'm inclined to go with as soon as the last text box starts to shrink, just because the fade-out / fade-in for the ending sequence can be a little difficult to precisely pinpoint.

If possible, I'd like to hear from at least a couple more runners before making a decision.

Just a quick question do you star the time after the beginning test when you get control of adol or when easy is choosen. :)

Difficulty select. I used to do it after control was given, but everyone else does it at difficulty select, so I'll switch to that as well. My submission here was already re-timed with that in mind.

This is difficult. I think it might be best to clear the book text, then stop timing. The book text is part of the "read book" action, and works the same as reading any other book.

Now that I think about it, I'm curious what the game actually does there. If anyone knows, does it check to see if you've read all six books, or does it check to see if you've read only the sixth book, etc?

Still would like more feedback on this issue.

To answer your question Despatche, I believe in this instance, the game only checks to see if Book Fact has been properly read, though of course there's no known way to avoid reading any of the Books, so this can't be properly verified. However, there's a hacked save file for the Complete version of the game (available from Nightwolve's site, where you'd find the unofficial English patch) that gives all items at the beginning of the game. I don't remember for certain, but I think using that file, you could pretty easily get to the top of Darm Tower since you already had the Blue Amulet. Thus, no need to read Books Mesa and Gemma, though reading the Books with Jeba prior to the tower is still necessary. It does also seem to check that Dark Fact is defeated before triggering the ending, from what I remember.

I've only just recently run into this, but I think it's an important issue to resolve. I've been trying to start the timer on the first frame after difficulty select, and end after the last frame of the text box vanishing after reading Volume Fact. The advantage of this method is that it's relatively easy to time when counting frames, and most of the other runs on the leaderboard seem to be timed in a very similar way.

This really should've been done sooner, but I think it's best that we go with timing starts when selecting difficulty, and ends when the last text box begins to shrink.

The rules have been edited to reflect this, and some of the runs were re-timed to properly reflect this, but nobody changed ranks because of it.