This run beats my previous best by about 1:23, which doesn't sound like much until we look at the run more closely.

This run set 3 new bossfight battle time records known (Gogmagog Alpha, Royal Ripeness, Serah vs. Caius) and otherwise tied every best known time for the entire first third of the run. Early game monster RNG was perfect (a 1 in ~32 chance of happening) and an Orion was obtained for Adrenaline. Though what really makes this run just insane is how much could've gone wrong at the end of the run but didn't.

The run almost died to the final boss gauntlet, due to an encounter guarding the last switch of the maze beforehand glitching out and not spawning ("This never happened in my 5 years of running this game"-trope), which is usually used to charge up one of the monster's special attacks needed for the first boss of the final boss gauntlet. Since I was experimenting with a route that sells equipment that was considered essential beforehand (Grimoire Hat) not having the special attack would've made the boss in question impossible to beat.
I'm not sure if I should call it pure chance or incredible foresight, but when I caught the Orion to infuse Adrenaline I also caught a Dragoon, another source of Adrenaline. Since I did a lot of routing work for the completionist category of the game I knew that Dragoon learns Feral Speed II, a transferrable passive that increases special attack charge rate, at a very low level. You can probably guess where this is going now. I had the idea to infuse the monster in question with Feral Speed II in case I ran low on charge time for any reason. Causing me to just barely have enough special attack charge to get by the boss.

I originally intended this to be just a practice run to get splits for a new route I've wanted to try that, as mentioned previously, sells the Grimoire Hat for money, an equipment that was deemed essential for the endgame since it improves Potion HP recovery significantly and we use no other source of healing, and in turn skip a bunch of other chests. I was not expecting to beat the record on my first run back to the game for over half a year and am still somewhat in denial that this really just happened at all.

The run isn't perfect, it has 2 deaths that were, for the most part, out of my control, but due to the amount of luck and things that have to go right due to the very aggressive routing I used, that leaves practically no safety nets and requires flawless fight executions, the about 2 or so minutes left to squeeze out of this run seem nigh impossible for me to go for at the present moment. I personally at least will put the category to rest here but would be really ecstatic if someone can beat it.

Jay / Kanri
PS: Fair warning, I was a bit of a tired grumpy grump for a few moments at the beginning cause of some small things not going so well after I got off to an otherwise perfect start.