Persona 4 Golden (Hard, Golden Ending) Speedrun FAQ

Q: What does this category involve?
A: Beating the game on Hard, the game's second hardest difficulty, and obtaining the Golden Ending, which is a new Best Ending that this version adds that entails obtaining the True Ending on top of doing an extra dungeon that is unlocked by maxing the social link of a particular character named Marie. Meeting all of those conditions unlocks epilogue cutscenes that play right after the point the game would end on for the True Ending

Q: What makes Hard different from/a better speedrun than the other difficulties?
A: On Hard difficulty, attacks from enemies do 120% damage while attacks from your own party do 80%. This is the opposite on Very Easy, where enemies do 80% and your party does 120%. Hard is the better/more preferred speedrun than Very Easy because playing on Hard difficulty adds a challenge factor to the run that overall makes it more fun to run. Trust me when I say that the speedrun is not as fun on Very Easy because of how quickly the bosses go down on that difficulty, as I've done my own rough routing for it.

Q: Why not run on Very Hard, the game's hardest difficulty?
A: Very Hard is considered a meme category because on Very Hard, the amount of exp you gain from battles is reduced, making the experience grinding take so much longer than on the other difficulties. For reference, the Hard WR is just over 9 hours, while the Very Hard WR is just over 13 hours.

Q: How does combat work in this game?
A: Combat in this, and the other Persona games, is kinda like Pokemon if you're familiar with that game series. You send out Personas to battle for you, and they, as well as the enemies, have weaknesses and resistances to keep in mind. The different types in this game are: Fire, Ice, Wind, Electric, Physical, Light, Dark, Almighty. If you hit a weakness or get a critical hit, you'll get an extra turn (signified by "One More" appearing on the screen), which is very useful for the speedrun as you can get some extra damage in or get a heal/guard in with that.

Q: Why do you sometimes take just 1 or 2 party members into a dungeon?
A: How experience works in this game is it's put into a pool, and it divides that number up by the amount of people that you have in your party, the maximum amount of party members being 4. In order to make the most out of the experience I gain from grinding, I often take very few party members into a dungeon when grinding so the party members that I have out get more experience.

Q: Speaking of grinding, whenever you grind, you go for these gold hand encounters. Why are they so important?
A: Gold hands give the most amount of experience out of any enemy in the game, especially when you defeat them in groups of 2 or more.

Q: You keep changing the time on the system clock periodically as well as close and reopen the game when grinding; What does that do?
A: Closing and reopening the game, while on a fixed floor in a dungeon, makes it so that there will always be a gold hand encounter on that floor. Changing the clock to a certain time also influences the RNG (to some degree) to make it so that the gold hand encounter will have a specific grouping of enemies, which, for the purposes of the speedrun, we want to be 3 gold hands (4 gold hands in later dungeons). The clock manipulation is still being figured out as it's very recent development in the game's speedrun, but at the moment we have semi-concrete manipulations for every dungeon in the game except 1.

Q: What's different between this and the original Persona 4 on PS2?
A: This version added a feature that lets you fast forward through all of the cutscenes by pressing Start twice, which saves a massive amount of time (several hours as a matter of fact). The previously mentioned Gold Hands were added as a new enemy, and killing them for experience shaves a drastic amount of time off the time spent grinding. The route for this version also involves getting several combo packs of items from the shopping channel in order to avoid having to do a fishing minigame that you would do in the route for the original game.

Q: Does the fast forward sound effect ever drive you crazy?
A: It's music to my ears at this point lol

Q: Is Striptease really as bad as other runners play it out to be?
A: It really is. The reasons are because it's the only dungeon in the game to not have relatively consistent Gold Hand manipulation, the boss fights in the dungeon are notorious for being a huge troll to even the best runners, the tell for where the stairs are is hard to see, and it has ended a fair amount of speedruns. There's a saying uttered by a runner of the game that says "Good Stripteases don't exist", and that saying rings true.