Splatoon and Skippable Cutscenes

Hi, my name is TonesBalones, and you may recognize me as the speedrunner from AGDQ 2016 who finished Splatoon in 52:58. Word on the street is, the folks at Nintendo are not only aware that the game has a speedrun now, but that most of them loved my run! I am very grateful for Nintendo for not only giving us this game, but expressing interest in our relatively small speedrunning community, whether it's individual representatives or the company as a whole. For this reason, I'd like to address something that people have been talking about for a long time, and hopefully you would take into consideration.

I'm aware that Splatoon has reached the end of it's development cycle, meaning no more new maps, and no more new weapons. However, as far as I know, there hasn't been a stop to balance patches and updates (or at least there shouldn't be.) Something people have wanted for a long time is the ability to skip the Squid Sister News. Well, not only am I for this, but I will use this as a guideline to bring up another issue that regards speedrunning.

One of the biggest issues of any speed game is text discrepancy. That is, with languages that have less characters, the text scrolls faster. This is why it is so common for runners to use Japanese versions of games, because it is always the faster language. In Splatoon, this holds true as well, where Japanese boasts a 35 second advantage over North American English text. For this reason, it would benefit the speedrunners, and to a wider audience the players just going through the single player, if we had a way to skip dialogue with the (-) button. Just like we do when facing DJ Octavio for the second time. Adding skippable cutscenes in Octo Valley would solve two problems: it would normalize the times across all regions so that nobody has an inherent text advantage, and it would cut the time of the run down by over 2 minutes.

I figure that challenging the Splatoon community to the speedrun would breathe a new life into the game for many people, as it did for me. Regardless of how you feel about this message, I along with the speedrunning community will stand by this game. I just wanted to bring up the issue to the people in charge, seeing how skippable cutscenes has been talked about before in Splatoon, and would be a relatively easy update to please a lot of people.

Thank you for your consideration, this game is amazing and the feedback I've gotten from it is spectacular. I can only hope that the developers see the same potential in this speedgame as we have.