The only rule / limitation of this category is to complete the game with 0 Kills, which awards you the Pacifist rank so for this reason I use Normal difficulty.

The only rule / limitation of this category is to complete the game with 0 Kills, which awards you the Pacifist rank so for this reason I use Normal difficulty.

I still don't understand why you use Normal difficulty. Wouldn't be possible to get the Pacifist rank with the hardest difficulty as well?

As someone who once attempted a no-reboot true pacifist Extreme difficulty playthrough, I can confirm Extreme takes over twice as long to complete because 1) you actually need to explore every stage and kill most of the enemies in it for Nano pickups; 2) you still cannot kill directly, so in many cases you need to set enemies up to kill themselves by splash damage off of your body—but since you can take at most one heavy hit without dying, you have to constantly backtrack to heal yourself. Running this category on Normal is a wise decision in my opinion; Hard would just be slower and not necessarily more exciting because the no-damage Ultimortal run already exists.

Matslo123, I would recommend editing the comment about the difficulty choice to something like this: "The only rule / limitation of this category is to complete the game with 0 Kills, which awards you the Pacifist rank, so for this reason I use Normal difficulty. On the game's hardest difficulty (Ultimortal), a Pacifist run is impossible because you are required to kill a boss on that difficulty. On the Hard and Extreme difficulties, a Pacifist run would be far more time-consuming, due to required Nano farming and other factors, without a significant gain in difficulty under TAS conditions. This would result in a far less entertaining movie in comparison to one on Normal difficulty."

Using the hardest setting is the baseline in TASing so just explain why you haven't in the submission comments if you don't want people wondering about it (your explanation is impossible to follow without knowing more about the game). Of course people shouldn't assume it's the worse choice before they hear you out. I like the various damage boosts not all of which I think were used in the other two TASes, and generally the changes resulting from the pacifist approach. Worth having done this category. I guess the only thing missing now is some kind of 100% thing.

I have done a 100% (kinda) TAS and will submit it shortly if there is enough interest.

So I ask the audience, people please compare this to [3937] Windows Iji by Matslo123 in 27:41.87 and tell how many substantial differences you see that make this movie unique and unexpected after the any% run.

The game tracks several levels of player aggression which depend on their kill counts and some other plot-relevant choices. Aggression affects both gameplay (enemy AI, fights, itemization, and paths through levels change somewhat) and story progression (different sound effects, dialogue options, and endings).

Could this be vaulted

Comparing back and forth between the published any% TAS and this one, I'm raising several concerns: 1) For some inexplicable reason, you stop at around 0:47 in this TAS, but not in the any% TAS. It should be noted that Sector 1 is also pacifist in the any% TAS, meaning that this one is actually a bit sub-optimal. 2) You actually destroy some of the turrets, which goes against the spirit of a pacifist TAS (unless they're somehow impassable, or I missed something), IMHO, even if the game does not count it as one. Therefore, this is not a pacifist TAS for me.

Pacifist version Used for movies that explicitly avoid killing enemies (or only kill as few as possible) when it is unnecessary for game completion, even at the expense of completion time. In games where avoiding unnecessary kills does not postpone completion, it can be used as a stylistic choice and should still be tagged.

Then won't it be faster to kill more and still get that ending?