Why are so many games speedrun in Chinese?
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There are two reasons a game would be speedran in a certain language: Text speed, and region differences.
Others have mentioned text speed: if a game is compatible with a language that displays entire words at the same rate a different language displays single letters, the first will get through a sentence measurably faster. Sometimes the measurement is less than a second overall, but other times it adds up to minutes. And in speedrunning, 1/60 of a second (1 frame at 60fps) matters to the people that care, and since it’s their hobby I won’t say they are wrong.
Region differences are a smaller thing nowadays that we have so many online compatible games and frequent content patches, but for retro consoles (certainly as recent as the PS2) these things didn’t exist. If a developer releases a game locally (and likely with only local language options) and then releases it globally (with more language options), the global release will have any patches they added after the initial release. Sometimes these patches make a speedrun easier or faster, sometimes the opposite. So a speedrunner will try to get the version with the most beneficial glitches in it in order to run the game the fastest (this is still true today, but with things like “back patching” and version control). And if that means using a certain language, they’ll just memorize the “menuing” or the button presses they need to hit in order to go through the menus the fastest.
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