In reply to DrD2k9:
In this case, I think you can make the TASing challenge here considerably more interesting by trying to optimize the run's strategy for speed (which is what almost every experienced TASer here immediately thought of doing; you can see FractalFusion's attempt to optimize it just above, and at least one TASer on IRC didn't understand the concept of
not optimizing the parts of your run that aren't part of the category for speed).
You said that you see TASing as a puzzle, and that's something I very much agree with; seeing how people solve the puzzle of what they're aiming to do in their run is one of my main interest in watching TASes (and incidentally, the reason why I value good submission text as much as a good run). "How do I set up a chessboard to allow as many combinations of capturing piece and captured piece to occur as fast as possible" is a puzzle, and it's one that doesn't really naturally occur to chess players. As such, it's an interesting puzzle which probably hasn't been fully explored yet.
Obviously, the reason why this puzzle is interesting is "about" Battle Chess in a way; in regular chess players have no real reason to care about which piece is capturing (unless the capture places the piece in a position to be captured back again, but that's more about caring about moving to an attacked square than it is about the fact that the move is a capture), whereas in Battle Chess there's an amusing animation that accompanies a capture and depends on the identities of the capturing and captured pieces. The developers most likely intended Battle Chess to model regular chess, and even though the rules are exactly the same, this extra cosmetic feature has changed the motivation of the players (in this case, it's inspired you to attempt to demonstrate something that's completely uninteresting in regular chess, and some other players to try to optimize the demonstration). It's this sort of thing that I'm talking about when I'm talking about going beyond the developer intent; it's adding an angle to the game that the developers likely didn't realise was there.
So I guess the reason I'm so taken aback by the run – almost offended, in a way – is that the category choice (of not caring about anything but the cutscene collection, and in particular not caring about the optimization of the route) kind-of negates the idea behind the run. As currently written, the run is about showing off the cutscenes themselves and deriving entertainment value from that; this is something that's fairly clearly placed into the game intentionally by the developers, and an expected way to play. It's also incredibly easy, with no real puzzle involved, to simply see every cutscene (it's an obvious goal for most casual players; it's one of the first things I noticed when I started playing the game casually, well before I came to TASvideos or even knew what speedrunning was, although even then I made it more of a puzzle by trying to do it against the AI with no setting up of boards involved). On the other hand, the puzzle involved in trying to optimize it is fairly interesting, which is why it's so disheartening that you disregarded it.
Note, however, that it's only
fairly interesting; this sort of run has a tendency to get rejected in practice. A good parallel is
this movie, which was the result of weeks of work trying to solve another puzzle that's embedded into a game and probably unexpected by the developers (in this case, what the
shortest stroke, in terms of time needed to draw it, is for each of the 100 puzzles included in Polarium; this is something I basically didn't consider while playing the game casually). The puzzle behind this was really interesting, involving multiple different computer search programs to be sure we had the right answer, and I enjoyed working on it even though eventually it turned out that other users had better solutions (and thus my work wasn't part of the final result). The end result, though, simply isn't fun to watch, and was only saved from rejection by the fact that it's technically a 100% speed record and thus allowed in the Vault.