Speedrunning? At least on Twitch it seems that people prefer their games set to Japanese, at least with games like Ocarina of Time...
That's because textboxes in japanese are way shorter.
At 8/9/15 08:03 AM, kmau wrote: That's because textboxes in japanese are way shorter.
This is a valid point for RPGs. Also if you ever watch any speedruns of JRPGs usually you will see the person take a brief moment during the naming of the characters to delete all but a single letter or number, usually resulting in a party full of "A" since during text boxes which don't appear with all the text instantly and instead fill it up over time not needing to fill in the other characters of the name every time saves quite some time by the end.
On the note of JRPGs, the ones where you can't skip cutscenes are fucking obnoxious for speedruns. It really acts up around Final Fantasy 10 being one of the worst JRPGs to speedrun since FF10 was when the animations began to be quite long with long introductions and many cutscenes throughout the game both pre-rendered and gameplay graphics yet they hadn't thought to add the skip option like they did with FF12 and FF13 which makes those later games a lot better for speedrunning as a result despite having longer animations. But with that said I don't see people speedrunning those often since they aren't as liked.
But on the same note having no cutscenes can also be really bad. Take Final Fantasy 1 where there is just a single cutscene early in the game then about 4 hours STRAIGHT of gameplay. Concentrating hard for 4 hours without a break can get nasty.
When it coems to proper speedrunning, TAS or real-time usually they also choose the Japanese versions due to other reasons but sometimes the international releases can be quicker. One of many things to think about is the combat animations take for example Safer Sephiroth (Think Safer is the name?) Where his big super-nova attack is like a minute shorter in the Japanese version as it is in the international version. Obviously speedrunners will never let him use that attack in the first place, but that is an example of how the different versions of the games have differences.
Finally probably the main reason for using the Japanese versions is bugs. The original releases of the games are always more glitchy and bugged than the later releases. Many of these can be abused for speedruns like Yuffie warping in FF7 (This is just a glitch example though as it is in the PC versions as well I think) which allows the game to be completed in a couple of hours. Or you can use the Home glitch in FF10 where you can replay the game from Home onwards after getting to the last boss if you want....obviously this isn't for speedrunning but it was funny to know about and sadly doesn't exist after the original release.
The only real downside to Japanese versions is the text being unreadable, obviously this isn't a problem for those viewing since all the text is skipped. But the speedrunner needs to have a very good knowledge of the game to know for example which materia is which in FF7 without being able to read the text themselves if they can't speak Japanese. But by the time you are speedrunning shit you usually have a very good knowledge of where you can buy everything and the like.
