So, once again we have an interesting situation on our hands, here.
The
currently published run is in Vault, and it uses time-saving glitches (just not weapon glitch as that wasn't discovered at the time, as far as I can tell), which means that glitchless would have to be a separate category, and glitchless
isn't a
Vaultable category.
So what needs to be determined here is whether or not this run is entertaining enough to make it to Moons, and... Given that the published run is sitting comfortably in Vault, and this is a 4 hour and 45 minute TAS (as soon as the file gets updated) to begin with, the deck's a bit stacked against it... But this is a weird case, because at the current moment this is the fastest known TAS of this game, at least that I can find. Nicovideo doesn't return a lot of results other than janus' previous runs, but I could have missed something (searching on Nico directly returns nothing because apparently I'm awful at searches, everything I found was searching through Google), and even if there was something on Nico, I'd imagine a 5ish hour RPG TAS would be significantly faster through the text differences alone, meaning it would be harder to compare actual improvements without watching the runs in full. On the same note of comparisons, it's hard to compare this run and the published run given that this one's purely glitchless, and it's hard to compare this run and the other submission because the other submission is missing techniques used in this run, and comparing this run to the improvement run... Kiiiiiinda requires the improvement run in the first place.
So how do we judge the entertainment value of this run in the meantime? As a non-fastest completion category, we can't let it stand on its own. As a 4 hour and 45 minute RPG TAS, I imagine it'd be kind of a difficult watch for a lot of people... And there's also the precedent that
foregoing time saves in a Breath of Fire TAS isn't publishable. Yes, I'm aware that's BoF3, which is 3 hours longer than this, and that it's strictly slower than the published BoF3 TAS overall, but in terms of pure comparison I think it's still worth bringing up.
Does entertainment even matter right now, though, given that this is currently the fastest completion of the game? Even if an improvement that
will be faster is in the works, assuming this run gets judged before the new submission comes in, does the fact that it's the current TAS record make it Vault eligible, or do the known improvements nullify that? I can't immediately think of a precedent for this, a glitchless run obsoleting a glitched Vault run as fastest completion despite the fact that it's known glitches are faster, and honestly I don't even know where to begin to look with that.
Obviously, this is a tough ask, but I think this run needs a good amount of audience feedback given the weird situation. I'm planning on watching this run and janus' (EDIT: RECENTLY CANCELLED) submission side by side within the next couple of days to compare them on an entertainment level. I'm sure the categories warrant separate publications, but that would require this run meeting the entertainment level it needs to be published in the first place.
...TASvideos, as always, remains one of the most complicated places on the internet. I love it. Genuinely. No sarcasm. Never change. <3