Hi again!
I'm posting partially as a bit of an update, incase anyone was wondering if I ever did an actual run.
My current best RTA time is
26:04 23:50 (japanese version), which afaik currently is the fastest RTA in existence. Much thanks to stealing some tricks from Randil's TAS.
It could still improve it by quite a bit, as there are a lot of execution mistakes in it. But the main problem I have is still the penguin boss :( ..which is the second reason I'm posting...
I found the memory position of the boss's HP (I'm a complete newbie at using emulators to anything other than playing, so it took a while), so I can look and see when I actually damage him. The strange thing with this boss, however, seems to be that sometimes my shots just.. misses.. even though I'm actually hitting him, in the head, as instructed by Randil's response. Someone has to have noticed this while doing a TAS for this game and why it is? It's killing me that I can't figure it out :P
Thanks again!
EDIT: Ok, so we figured out how it works :)
Here's my post explaining it, in case anyone is interested.