In early 2017, it was discovered that through watching an animated cutscene on a file while loading into a new file, it would skip that cutscene on that fresh file. This was ultimately banned at the time, but was brought back up recently.

One reason for the change happening this time around when it was shut down a year ago, is the recent change to the timing rules. You can read more about that here: https://www.speedrun.com/sly1/thread/pt7dn

The community came together in our runner's Discord server (link in https://www.speedrun.com/sly1/resources ) and the mod team decided that a runner's poll was the way to go in this situation. The poll ended at a total of 65% - 35% for allowing the animated cutscenes to be skipped using this method.

On one hand, this can be considered file manipulation, as we use a different file to watch the cutscene, and save the change to a fresh file. It's definitely a gray area. While on the other hand, this is a huge quality of life change that will make running the game much more bearable. We no longer have to watch minutes on minutes of unskippable cutscenes every reset, in a reset heavy early-game. The community ultimately decided to sacrifise some speedrunner's integrity for a quality of life change that will make running the game more enjoyable for most.

Once the decision was made, the mods had to decide how to integrate this change to the leaderboards. After some confusion, we ultimately decided to simply allow the change, and make no adjustments to the boards. There was a brief moment where the leaderboards were being adjusted, but that change was quickly reverted, sorry about that.

Here's a guide on how to set up a file for the cutscene skips: https://www.speedrun.com/sly1/guide/i3si6

The skips only works on PS2 (and BC PS3) to our knowledge, but PSN can skip the same cutscenes by restarting the game.

Questions or any sort of feedback is very welcome!