Part 2:

Technical difficulties: had the capture card disconnect a few times throughout the run (seems like the port for it on my 3ds is going bad), but otherwise no major issues this time, and the disconnects were all very brief.

An almost-immediate follow-up to my 27-hour run, this time I tried out Chikorita partner to be a little experimental. It seemed to lose a few minutes during the Any% portion, but honestly I'm not even sure if that was because of Chikorita or if it was because I had better luck last time. It's also hard to measure the time that might've been saved by having Wildfire Looplet + Petal Blizzard early, and holding off on getting the Golden Banana. Wanted to do one more run with Charmander partner to feel more conclusive about this, but sadly burnt out on PMD shortly after this run.

The big timesave this run had was stronger knowledge of the entire connection orb; for the first time I was tracking the location of every single mission that could unlock more missions as I went, leading to much greater efficiency in clearing them all. I was still a bit unlucky in that I often had random escort missions get in the way of some of the fixed mission spawns I was trying to unlock, and I also did make a couple mistakes with forgetting to track some valuable Pokemon, but I still saved so much time by unlocking all missions and unlocking fast travel so much sooner.

I hope to get interested in this again one day, and try optimizing it even further. We now know for sure that at least a sub-26 hour run is possible. I also want to experiment with a Kingdra third main; Brine on bosses is pretty sick.

Mod Notes:

Retimed from 26:05:44 to 26:05:40

Breaks: P2 04:08:34 - 04:17:47; 09:48:39 - 09:59:18

Run features several capture card disconnects that leave the gameplay black for a few seconds (such as P1: 8:34:28; 13:17:47 P2: 01:11:52; 09:47:42). They were rare and short so the impact is very minor