As usual, as soon as I publicly report starting a new project, my interests shift. Some delay is to be expected.
While messing with this game at a friend's house today, we discovered two new mysterious and promising glitches.
1. save menu+jumping towards a person (so that discussion begins) and getting pushed inside collision simultaneously causes Xena to enter a strange state during which she can move normally, but all collision checks/triggers are ignored (including drowning, level transitions, etc.) I've only done it at the bear, right at the second screen of the game. Entering save menu once ends the state. This trick would save time, if it could be done at the second water room of the route (from which you get to centaur village).
EDIT:
a vid.
2. at the ghosts right at the last dungeon of the game, we got the first key and unlocked the cage at upper right corner. All of a sudden we note that the sword we had carried with us had completely disappeared from inventory. Reproducing this didn't work. This is the first "item menu" glitch I've ever seen in this game...
EDIT: I'm guessing this glitch has something to do with the above, since I got similar results (items disappearing/not getting picked up), albeit not always, at the beginning of the game, when I made the above vid.
As a side note, I'm having some difficulties figuring out what's the secret to "The Kitchen's" exit door. It has something to do with elapsed time and/or the amount of pastry ammunition you get hit with, I guess. This would be useful to figure out to get the fastest possible time for TAS... I tried memory watch, but couldn't find an explanation (not too experienced with it). I wonder if some help could be recruited from among you?