Skipping Cosmo Canyon means no Death Sentence (amongst other things), which will reduce Tifa's damage later on by a factor of 4. It can be gotten from Boundfats too, but only after Disc 1 is completed.
You just press start to go to the menu then leave the menu and it resets the random battle encounter counter.
That would be triangle, I assume, not start. If that trick worked, I think it would've been used for speedruns a long time ago.
Edit: Nope, no go. I just did some testing on that in the first reactor mission, both with going into the menu just before an encounter (I've done it often enough to know exactly where they happen), and going into the menu every several steps. It made no difference either way on where the encounters happened. If you mean that this pause trick is just for world map encounters, it's already known that it doesn't work there... the random encounters there aren't reset by going into the menu unless you save your game and reload it.
Right. That's why it isn't used. It would be nearly impossible to do even once, let alone the many, many times it would need to be used in a non-TAS speedrun.
Once every 4 minutes in a 9 hour speedrun is about 135 times.
Many TAS strategies (including this one) just aren't suitable for non-TAS runs because the extremely precise timing that's easy enough to pull off in a TAS becomes virtually impossible when you're using nothing but your hands and a gamepad.
Good day, everyone! Remember me? I'm the guy who was supposed to finish his speed run today, but I was not able to do that for several reasons. But if I remember correctly, I would get 125 bucks if I completed it before july or something, so I'll do my best to finish it before that.
I'll make a more detailed statement on Youtube soon.
I always underestimate how long something will take compared to how much time I can actually devote to it. I look forward to a console run of this though, and hopefully it's done soon.
I hope it is too. I've actually contemplated doing this run myself, but as long as it took me to finish my Final Fantasy II run, I can't imagine how long it would take me to finish a game 3 times longer.