Cutscene dilemma

During the launch celebration race on the RandomizerMania channel, the most common bit of feedback I received was a request to remove the cutscenes.  This feature is not one that I'm a big fan of, but it is common practice for randomizers that are intended for races.  In general, The Lunarian Shuffle has a policy of leaving the original game as close to unchanged as possible.

To put things in perspective, FFIV has about 85 minutes of cutscenes, out of an average total play time of 5-7 hours with glitches, or 6-8 hours without.  For a racing setting, if 1 hour of the plot events were cut, this would be a 15-20% reduction in the amount of time players would have to be able to set aside in order to race it.  As a speed runner myself, I can definitely say that this would be a big difference in terms of being able to schedule time to run the game or not, which is consistent with The Lunarian Shuffle's vision as the randomizer that is the best suited for strategy and competition.

Another consideration is that, given the way I randomize the final dungeon optional boss item awards, any changes to the game's event script will require me to move several pointers in the randomizer that change those items.  Maintaining two versions of the base ROM, one with and one without cuts to the plot, could therefore be a huge pain in the long run.

I will experiment with removing the many dramatic pauses in the game, to see if changing that but leaving the scenes otherwise untouched will make the game still feel the same while supporting speed runs better, or if instead it winds up being the worst of both worlds instead of the best.