Fishy Story in

notes: pastebin.com/0...
harvest moon speedrun discord: / discord
this category specifically is probably one of the most intensive gauntlets the game has seen thus far. it's just too bad the fishing mechanics are so clunky. still not totally happy with how the route works out, but it's hard to care about hyperoptimizing when there's so much variance from the fishing. still, all things considered, this run got some very good fishing luck and i'm quite happy with it.
also, if it's not clear why i'm sleeping to winter, it's because the chicken spam only works on kurt on his birthday (winter 10). it actually makes his spam a lot faster too (+5 instead of the standard +2), but it kind of complicates the routing, because it means you then only have ~20 days to complete the ending, and the winter rainy season (winter 17-21) makes it even tighter. that's why i also spam gina and katie, to use their goddess dress cutscenes to get around some of that rain, but of course that's an additional time investment as well. the alternative would be to spam kurt and joe separately, spamming joe a few days earlier, but i'm not sure if that's even faster, and you'd also have to yolo the sprite cutscene day (need a non-rainy tue/thu), whereas this route has the second goddess dress cutscene to guarantee sunny weather on that day. it's actually pretty cool that gina and katie are both perfectly positioned right next to kurt and joe, respectively, to be able to implement this strategy at all.