Hey there! Was just poking around in Discord chat and dug up an old convo about version differences and I thought that it'd be a great idea to post/confirm the version differences that are known. It seems JP is a bit faster than NTSC but PAL is incredibly slower.

Here's what Deku King had to say about it: Deku King - 04/19/2017 no, but jp is ~20 faster then us and PAL is ~4 minutes slower

EDIT: I believe this is purely in reference to N64 console versions, which is the info I'm interested in as I'm planning on running on NTSC N64

I guess for VC it's about the same - the PAL version is always a lot slower since it's 50 hz instead of 60.

JP vs U vs PAL differences are more or less the same throughout every console choice, jp is slightly faster due to text, text speed and cart movement in some areas while PAL looses a lot due to running at a lower framerate.

The biggest differences between versions is lag and how demanding oak is with centered pics. There is more lag on the wii version, probably due to terrible optimization, but if I had to guess there's only about 5-10 seconds timeloss vs N64 if you're good at lag reduction. The Wii U version has no lag and saves roughly 40 seconds compared to N64. Centered pics does't seem like much but it does make N64 much easier, and there's also a strat we use in River 1 that won't work on wii or wii u due to this difference.

To tag onto what quo has said, NTSC actually saves a little bit of time back by being faster in the Oak Point check, but yeah, NTSC overall is slower than JP by around 20 or so seconds. On VC River 1, where we get early pesters, you can still take that poliwag picture but you have to submit it to the photo album. This really only loses around 3 seconds because you have to resubmit poliwag next round.

Ah wow I didn't expect the different games to have different mechanics, thanks all for the info! I'm not sure where to get JP carts so it's good to know that a good time can be achieved on an NTSC cart.

You can buy a NTSC-J cart on ebay for like 8-10 bucks. Even shipping is free on most of them, the only thing is that takes some time to arrive (since they're mostly shipped from Japan)