Speedrunning Cheaters and Why They Pick Japanese Games

Speedrunning is when someone plays and records themselves during a video game with the intentions of completing it as fast as they possibly can. Speedruns are usually the entire game, however, sometimes they choose to run certain parts. The usual rules are just to beat the game as fast as you can, but they sometimes add extra rules such as collecting all items in one room. It is mainly a challenge for oneself.

These players record themselves and they are used to verify the game time, to make sure no cheating has taken place and to spot ways to improve further competitions.

Speedrunners usually have to pick different routes compared to normal players, these routes are usually pre-planned as to not make any mistakes.

These runs can be viewed on a large number of platforms, including live streams where players can show their skills in real-time.

But you should not be too surprised, there have been some instances of speedrunning cheaters in the past. This specialized gameplay requires you to memorize a lot of routes, which takes patience and tons of skill. For those who want the easy fame, cheating was their way of going about it.

A speedrunning expert would claim that one of the most used methods of splicing is when a player takes multiple pieces of footage and edits them together, to create the illusion of one complete playthrough with zero errors and the best time possible.

Some players have a different reason for cheating, they either want the highest time to satisfy themselves, or they want to become #1 on that chart. Either way, you shouldn't cheat because people in this community WILL find out about it.

Usually, when they do find out, the player becomes banned in said game or online community, and their score becomes null and is voided, forcing them to either restart a new game or are not allowed to continue in the competition at all.

Now here's why I personally chose my games in the Japanese version, pair this with all the information you read above and you'll understand why it's the most widely picked upon gamers and speedrunners.

I've been speedrunning my video games for just over two years, and like most other runners I choose to stream my runs on Twitch. One of the most common questions I get from fans in the chat is, "Why do you speed run the Japanese version of games?"

So, I've decided to explain it to you on why Japanese versions of video games are most popularly chosen by speedrunners. I'd also like to add that not every game will be the same so everybody has their opinion on this.

There are two main reasons why this works, the first is text speed. More often than, not you'll find that the Japanese version has faster text than any other game, what this means is the Japanese can say the same sentence with fewer characters. So, if you're playing a game that has long text in English, you can almost bet that the Japanese version will load that same sentence much faster. There are some exceptions and this leads me to my second opinion.

Game versions; game developers, especially Nintendo, have had this habit of releasing their games in Japan first, this is the first rule of the game, then they patch up a few things before releasing worldwide. This makes it key to playing and finding all the glitches to help your time.

However, both Japanese and American versions of games run at the same speed, these are the only two things that I use to make my choice, feel free to dive right in with an emulator to find out for yourself!