After starting my TAS for this game, I discovered a glitch that would improve Enhasa's run by about 10min or so. It is the glitch that is displayed in segments 27 and 28. Nitrodon, a fellow TASer, discovered another glitch that is displayed in segments 29 and 32. With these 2 glitches, I started my run for this game, my goal was 3:30. I soon found out that after Kainazzo I was already about 7 minutes ahead of Enhasa's run. My new estimate was about 3:20 and really stretching for 3:15. Soon after I completely destroyed Enhasa's time during the Cal/Brena and Golbez segment, I thought 3:10 was the time to beat. Eventually though, I got it down to exactly 3:05. I'm quite satisfied with this time and suspect that 3:03 and MAYBE 3:02 would be possible, but not without a LOT of effort.

While making this run my cartridge decided to dump all data except for the bottom save. This left me with 2 segments that I wasn't entirely happy with. You can see this at the begining of segments 13, where the top save is mysteriously empty. It also happened when I was still doing segment 15. This was very upsetting because that is by far the worst segment of the entire run. There was a few spots (mostly in the last couple segments) where I messed up with the walking, but I was very very borderline 2:54 & 2:55 before I got to Zeromus, so these tiny mistakes wouldn't have made a lick of difference. This is why the Rosa leveling although about 30 seconds slow, would not have improved my end game time had I perfected it like the 2nd leveling segment.

Concerning the Cal/Brena Golbez segment, I would like to reiterate this quote from Enhasa "People have a hard time believing this, but it really is impossible to get Kain into the air versus Golbez at low levels." Indeed it is near impossible but there's an 8 frame window (note that this is only .13 seconds) for when you gain control of the cursor to select jump and select Golbez. Timing for this was tested on an emulator while doing a test run for the TAS.

Most of the improvements that are not related to the glitches are a result of better boss strategies, reducing the number of random encounters, not saving as much, not visiting the item shop in Baron, not entering the menu except when it's already being opened to save (i.e. changing characters around and equipping items just before saving), this includes never equiping a weapon out of combat except for Rydia and Rosa because I was already equipping other items that i couldn't equip in battle, Kain is the other exception because I wanted him ready to go ASAP against Rubicant, getting the Change Rod and Tiara which nearly doubled Rydia's dmg, and not getting the Crystal sword.

There's another trick that's abusable to reduce the in-game time. This trick is pausing during attack animations. This, however, I feel shouldn't be used at all. This compromises the in-game timer and therefore makes it unreliable. For this reason I did not use this trick for the run in order to preserve the integrity of this timer.

I did not want to reveal the information about the glitches or the strategies here so that people could watch the run and find out then and hopefully be a little bit suprised.