Yet another game that I have fond childhood memories of! While the previous record within this category was 7 years old, I was quite amazed at how unoptimized it was. I could understand not really being able to optimize the beginner and pro difficulties of the battle modes, but the race modes were very unoptimized and the master difficulty had a LOT of struggles as well. I think I'm also helped out by the fact that I already knew of 1000 Waterfalls Skip and Forest Jump Skip going into the run. Combined with my overall better execution, I cut 1 hour off the previous RTA.
That said, due to the ordering that I did for this run by starting with the battle modes for beginner and pro, the run does not truly begin until 2:53:20 in the video. To iterate, starting with the battle modes is NOT the best order. It's faster to start with with the race modes, then moving to the battle modes. However, I did this run in the order that I did because a previous attempt of mine on this run that used the other order had the game freeze near the end of Rise and Shrine. Losing 1 hour and 40 minutes is incredibly lame considering the fact that it's faster to not make a save file.
The Master Difficulty is always an epic part of this run due to the fact that the execution is more demanding and Freeze Combat in particular can result in huge time loss - 30 seconds per draw, and if you restart you'll lose more depending on when you decided to restart. I had to restart Timber Wood and Coconut Island, costing me about a minute 50 combined. I lost another 2 minutes there due to 4 draws. But that Haunted Yard double draw was clutch!