Racing on twitch with Beyond Chaos

I think the idea was that the shops wouldn't be required, since there's a doable end goal.

Yeah, I guess that's fair, it would end up probably the same length as Kefka @ Narshe.

Anyway yeah, I didn't really expect anyone to make it through the endgame in four hours, but I don't want to take the final segment out of the cave. Ostensibly the speedcave is supposed to be balanced around vanilla settings and if that's the case I don't think an experienced player would have much trouble with the final segment at all.

Yeah, but does anybody actually race with near vanilla settings? If most people aren't doing that anyways, perhaps you should balance around the speedcave settings we are using (or make a separate mode altogether). Otherwise it ends up like how Nintendo seems to consider Time mode somewhat of a "default" mode for Smash Bros. even though everybody plays Stock.

Regarding me getting to the 10th shop, I did get the game over on that inescapable encounter once. On my second attempt I forced an extra encounter before that map so I would be able to walk through it without falling into that trap again.

I hard reset to change encounters up completely every time (which is essentially equivalent). No dice, my luck was just bad.

EDIT: It's not really forcing a playstyle, more just forcing you to play the game at all. If you can play through with team 1 (which is set up to be the best team you can make), get some good equips and the Warp spell, then rush everybody else up to level 5 and run through the rest with a perfect defense character or something it would get stupid quickly IMO. All you'd need is a little luck to avoid some inescapables and you wouldn't really even be playing the game.

Cecil, you voiced pretty much all the qualms that I had with my own idea, but didn't have time to mention when I posted that. My only thought on a way to keep a counter was to adjust the colour settings in the config menu (say, set Blue to 0 at the start of the race and increment it each time you run), but that would be awkward as all get out, I'll admit. It would have the advantage over paper of resetting it when you die though.

Only warping by Items would be cool, except that buying them in shops might be too much. Warp spell being a limiter is right out IMO. That would probably do almost nothing.