Northern IrelandA Tower of Sour/All Sours category is a safe bet. Not sure how interesting of a run it'd be, but it's an easy inclusion and could take on a life of it's own with routing.
Langston's challenges could be a great idea for a category, never even crossed my mind. From what I can gather there's 110 challenges in total (113 if we include the skippable tutorial challenges), and with requests including Roario, Eaglair, Sarsgorilla and so on towards the end, it's essentially All Pinatas with a lot more work. That doesn't sound too compelling, but the challenges are split up into regions, and I could see runs of Region 1 (20 requests for mostly early-game Pinatas) being a much shorter alternative.
A Dragonache run seems like it'd just be mining RNG for the most part, and Choclodocus would just be Any% to get the Wishing Well for the Amber and then buying the bones. Apparently you can only buy the red bones from level 45, so relying on mining RNG for the other bones would be faster. I guess the "Pinata People" garden name easter egg could be used to get Wishing Well immediately, but you'd still need to unlock the mine and then hope for bones, so it's pretty much the same as Dragonache. Still, if a pure luck category is the aim then you could even combine both into a single run.
Don't have any real ideas for new categories myself. There's stuff like getting all desert pinatas, all pinarctic pinatas, all evolved pinatas, but hard to say if they'd be good additions.
I believe there's a way to stream to Twitch or YouTube through an Xbox One, so if you don't have a capture card that'd be the way to go. Streaming to YouTube would make archiving the run automatic, but you could also download or export it from Twitch, or just highlight the Twitch vod.
This is fantastic, are you able to put it in the guides section? Might be a mod thing, if so I'll put it there if you'd like.
Not sure if I'm understanding the issue, but speed and turn order in Blue Dragon isn't 100% consistent outside of extreme cases. In the Hydrattler fight, if you're absurdly unlucky, it can get more turns than usual and possibly mess things up. On the other hand, you can get lucky to the point that it might not get a turn at all, or at least only 1 turn if I recall correctly. Jiro's agility being boosted by Assassin means he has a high chance of fleeing from enemies and getting turns sooner in battle, but in my experience there are times when bad luck just screws you over.
For the first ever run of such a long category, I have no issues at all with making a small exception for it. I'll probably add a mod comment to the run notes for clarity, so you can go ahead and submit it. For ease of verifying, to confirm that you still got all the awards besides that one, did you check the journal at the end of the run? If not then that'll make verifying it quite the task...
A run was done at ESA Winter 2019 by Truljin (who I believe is now called NordESA). That's the only one I'm aware of.
I believe the PAL version of the game runs a 50fps instead of 60, but from what I'm aware it doesn't effect the running speed of the game (though I could be wrong about that). As for ILs, this game isn't particularly active, so nobody's went out of their way to make one yet.
The official guide by Prima Games lists things like total HP and pretty much anything else there is to know about a given enemy, and is what I've used for help with routing. Although, if I'm not mistaken, I think you can check the in-game monster compendium entries for the HP total and other information on an enemy, but I could be remembering wrong.
Doing the credits part is unfortunately required since it's the only way to get the wishing well, and without that you can't get a Choclodocus, and as a result, it's Resident Award. It's not against the rules to use the "Piñata People" garden name to automatically unlock the credits in this category, but there isn't really any benefit to doing so since you'll need to resident all the blocked pinatas eventually. Unless maybe there was some benefit to setting up for the Choclodocus earlier.
That's what I was referring to. As I said, it probably wouldn't be allowed by default, but it's definitely up for debate.
Chulip was not released digitally in Japan unfortunately. It's also likely that using a JP PS2 disc on a backwards compatible JP PS3 would have worse loads than a PS2, given the PS3s track record with back compat.
Thought I'd put together a video on all the known methods of performing Early Suzuki so that people who plan on using it in runs know how best to utilize it.
The easiest way to get Zombie Mode is to keep mashing pause when Policeman shoots you to 0 HP and then scroll in your inventory to make poor boy stand up, but for the most promising debug shop scenario I'd suggest this:
The only way to recover from Zombie Mode (without going back to the title screen of course) is to read a comic VERY soon after entering it, so sadly it's not possible to buy something and recover afterwards. Even if there wasn't a time limit that causes reading a comic to crash the game, pressing X to select things after a certain amount of time will make everything fade out and go back to the title screen, so the game would do that before the comic has a chance to be used.
Zombie Mode is a state of being able to move around and interact with things while in the process of getting a game over. It currently has no utility in a run, but it's possible to access a sort of debug shop through it where you can buy almost every item in the game. Would be crazy if a way to utilize it existed.
Oh yeah that's been known about for quite a while now. Sadly it's useless in All Kisses due to it making Policeman impossible to kiss, and Thief Tip-Toe too if you haven't kissed him prior to doing it. The question mark that lets you enter the criminal grave seems to be some sort of unused trigger that either the devs used during testing, or maybe they planned to let you revisit the prison but scrapped it. Something interesting about it is that if you use OoB to re-enter the prison and attempt to leave, the game will always try to play the cutscene with Goro and Julie, as you should only be able to leave the prison once and never again after freeing Goro. The result is the game softlocking, which if I recall correctly, is due to the fact that the game can no longer use Goro's model to progress the scene after you've already freed him.
I made a video a while back comparing all of the major cutscenes in Chulip on both versions. JP text ended up saving 3m48s over ENG for Any% Glitchless, so including all of the more minor text interactions and things like the final quiz, the total time-save is likely between 4m and 4m30s. However, loading times play a factor too. The fastest loads on official hardware are on PS3, which is ENG only (at least for the digital version, and I'd imagine old backwards compatible PS3s have worse loads), and the slowest loads are PS2. ENG PS3 takes a minute or so of that text time-loss off versus JP PS2 thanks to those faster loads. Official hardware aside, PS2 HDD has the fastest loads with emulator being slightly slower.
Personally I wouldn't recommend investing in a JP copy of the game, not just because of the cost, but primarily because of the final quiz being very difficult to memorize and deal with if you have no experience with Japanese. So, assuming you don't, I wouldn't recommend it unless you really want to go for record.
