I'm looking into games that could be raced in a tournament I do with ~20 friends. We'd all at most have played the game casually. The game would be announced a month in advance of the tournament. I'm asking these questions rather than watching or playing because I'd like to limit my exposure to the speedrun so I don't have an advantage if it is chosen. (It's been 20+ years since I've played this)

My questions: Which versions of would be fair to race against each other? Does "PC" include the MS-DOS version (is it any good?)

The leaderboard makes it obvious that Tyris has the fastest potential. Are the slower characters easier in some way that in a race scenario they would be a viable choice, especially for the very casual participants? Basically, is Tyris a riskier choice?

How much time does it take to learn the speedrun and improve it? For example, what are the differences between a sub-10 run, a sub-9 run and a sub-8 run?

Since we'd be racing, the runs would presumably be no reset. This may be answered by the previous question, but how volatile is the run?

Thanks in advance for your guidance.

Hey there!

1. We use the Genesis/Steam version on this board, it's probably the most fun one, aside from the original arcade version. I don't know much about the DOS version. In terms of fairness, I feel like any version will do, but everything I write here is based on my experience with the Genesis/Steam version.
2. Tyris is is the fastest, because she has the best magic. She's also a good fighter aside from that, so she is the best choice for pros and beginners alike. Ax Battlers attacks have a slightly longer range though, I believe (on the other hand, his sprint attack sucks).
3. This is very difficult to say. As a reference point, there was a Sega tournament a few months ago, where players were given like a week to learn a few games. Golden Axe took the fastest player about 14 minutes in round 1 (they probably improved in later rounds). It's not an easy game to speedrun. There's a lot of positioning and enemy behavior to learn and you gotta be able to do your special attacks very consistently if you want to get near sub 9 or even faster. Once you get to a certain skill level (Sub 10 or 11, I would say), volatility isn't too much of a problem anymore. Also, there's an option in the game's menu to increase your health to 5 bars instead of 3 - that might be very helpful for your race!

Well said, NoControl. I agree with all you mentioned above.

Only thing I really have to add is that you can probably run this on an emulator too if you like! We have people in our community who have submit runs on emulator. Also you mentioned that you give your friends a month to learn this game. I'd say a month of solid practice from picking this game up as a casual player can get you to Sub 10. Getting sub 9 in just a month of practice seems like a stretch to me. Take this with a grain of salt though, since I started sped running this game with having a pretty solid understanding of the game and its mechanics.

Let us know if you have any more questions :)

To add onto the previous comments, The MS Dos version is not an identical port of the genesis/megadrive game so I would say it is not fair to play it in a race (it would probably be a disadvantage to play on dos). There are plenty of options for playing the genesis/megadrive version, the Wii version is particularly good. A general point on megadrive, if anyone is planning to play on original hardware the European models run the game at a slower refresh rate making the game slower overall (this is also true for most megadrive games). Finally, as someone who has played the steam version a lot, I ultimately abandoned it as it runs very poorly and can lag on older PCs. I would highly recommend an emulator over the steam game.