THANK YOU SO MUCH! That was one of the hardest puzzles I've solved.

Ok, I solved part 2 almost immediately, already had all puzzle pieces. Unfortunately it's region restricted for me, but it was a fun puzzle nevertheless. Thank you!

Solved!
Can't enter though, but that was an amazing puzzle with lots of variety to do.

Ok, 1 orange should have been obvious in hindsight. Those distracting apples.
I could sort of get your bird hints now that I know the correct character. It was my very first thought Blue Jays after all, before I went to sillier directions. And most misleadingly, it looks like it's telling me the code is xxxXX. Or even Morse? I also was wondering if I had to do something with the direction of the heads, although that never led to a concrete idea.

Finally solved! but region locked TT.
First, I tried birds image by EXIF Data in Zelgh's guide. that had image descrtiption. that confused me. So took longer time.
Second, I live in non-english country.
I confused 'W' Upper or lower case. It looks smaller than lower case l, bigger than lower case o. I found that font 'Consolas' using wordpad, so knew Upper case.
Third, Orange=Many Apple. I thought that 'Is that MA?' (because confused by image descritption in First.)
After many try, I tried basic known thing, p1WT?. so tried a-z, A-Z. 0-9. and reach here. but I don't know why 'j'.

I love puzzle events! Had lots of mind-boggling fun with this one. I'm definitely looking forward to any other puzzle you have planned out for the future. Thank you so much for hosting this (and the wishlisted giveaway as well) :>

On how I solved the final perplexity:
Wasn't able to get through any of the ITH puzzles, but I noticed a color theme going on: Since 5 of them appeared throughout the puzzles, I figured that each of the colors corresponded to a character in the giveaway code (Newt One, being the most straightforward one, gave it away). Found those characters and put them in the order of the rainbow and got here! ^^

Now I can finally clear out all the bookmarks I made to get here... haha!

Thank you for the puzzle, finally get there.
It's region restricted for me too.

Finally arrived, the blue j really threw me off. I thought that image was saying the first 3 are lower and last 2 upper. Did a reverse image search after the bird watching hint.. unfortunately region locked but this was really fun, looking forward to another if you do! I obviously went down the wrong path a lot but here's some of the things I tried..
Blue: M, the final two bird shapes, G/g from the Fox in Sox song.. blue glue, counting the birds.. 5/F/3/T/.. and I thought maybe the Indigo/Violet was maybe something I overlooked :D
Red: No problems
Orange: was confident this was 1 or O/o, but tried a few other things such as MA from Many Apples.. B from colour brown mixing them..
Green: Also confident on T but tried M for matcha.. looked at the emoji code "U+1F375" for awhile as well :p

Wow, it really take a long way here.
Thank you for the fun puzzle.

It would be really f'ing nice if you listed the regions that can or can not enter

Good thing I took another look now! I forgot about the time difference. BTW, the 3 baby birds and 2 adults threw me off quite a bit because I was thinking it was a clue that the format would be xxxXX. Thanks for the puzzles!

DID IT. I got the second part in 3 tries. I'll write a second message too explain further.

I didn't reach here by the puzzle, only after the solution was posted. Just saying thanks again for your effort and the fun and the games! <3 Bluehearted.

Alright. Didn't want to explain right away because I was quite exhausted and was just happy I finally figured it out, there was basically one or two things I didn't get, and it was what was causing me issues:

PART 1:
So for part 1, the first thing I was doing was simply focusing on completing all the puzzles. I saw the first 3 or 4 hints, but didn't think too much of them, once I was almost complete, and seeing hint 2 and 3 and combining that with the word "jeans" in the ITH page, it was clear your were using the gene cipher. I had seen this cipher in the guide as well as past puzzles. At this point I noticed it was kind of tedious getting around to the GAs of the solved puzzles so I made a text document, going through each GA with possible hints, including the the ones without genes, as i felt they were probably relevant too (the Newt One clue was the first clues I had noticed). This was super convenient as you later on you used numbers to point out which puzzles to look at which is what I had already done in my text document.

At this point I had also found the 5th gene already, although I was confused as to how "CGU" was of any use, but once I understood you were working with the gene cipher, it was simple. The idea of using the coordinates from the Hero in the word search was something I figured out pretty quick, which is why I got it before even figuring out that we were working with genes.

I had the characters "E V T W R", at this point tried it in the ITH as well as a GA code, and got nothing. You then put out hint 4 with the numbers. You mentioned 4 genes and the bird image. I was a little confused you didn;'t mention the hero gene, but i assumed you were keeping that hidden. Since you mentioned the bird, and since there was seemingly 5 genes, I assumed maybe its a GA code, the birds being a hint that tells you whether to use lowercase or uppercase, further making sense given you have 5 genes. I still assumed the ITH might be the way to go though. I was confused why evtWR didn't work in ITH or as a GA code. You said "in the order they appear", and i felt it was right, but since it wasn't working, i tried some things, such as reversing, putting the raw gene code in the ITH, maybe reading the genes in a different order. Like really weird stuff, and was confused. At this point I thought maybe the other clues mattered, maybe the yellow W had something to do with the W in evtwr, maybe the newt puzzle had to do with the R being P, since it meant red = p. I wasn't sure of those, but I always felt the birds had to be relevant because of hint 4. I was going crazy, and was basically just waiting for hints, only to be frustrated that the hints only seemed to mention things i already got (the code being gene cipher, how to get the hero gene, ...), and not things that confused me (like the hints which I later found out were for the second part). The hint saying there are 5 genes and that you need to distill them to 1 letter were nice confirmations that I had something right, but as you saw in my almost "give up" message, I felt burnt out of ideas, and it was clear that I was just missing something, and to me surprise, my guess as to what confused me was right, that being the order and the "it's all downhill". I ended up trying a couple of things, and then notice, oh, maybe the R should be based on the location of the word search, and it actually worked EVTRW, It actually worked, wow.

PART 2:
Given that I got to part 2 so late, with only a 1-2 hours to spare on the puzzle, I was really excited but also a little scared if I'd hit a roadblock. First thing I saw upon completing the ITH puzzle was the rainbow, saw it was only 5 parts, remembered the color stuff in the GAs, and it was clear to me the code was going to be ROYGB in order, with each section representing a letter. Briefly looked at the hints, and used hint 9.1 as a basis to get the letters quick, but i was kind of confident which things would be needed. I also had most of these things in my text doc at this point so it made things easier. Yellow = W, Green = T, Red = p, easy. Went to the orange, and 1 was my first guess, so Orange = 1. Blue was left, and it was clear the birds would come to play. Tried Blue = 5 for five birds, but didn't work, went quick back to the hints, saw Hint 12.2, oh, Blue Jays, J, like the Green Tea being T. I try it with capital J, doesn't work, try it with lowercase j, p1WTj, and SOLVED. That was way easier, only 3 tries.

So yeah, i think the biggest thing i think you made confusing was mentioning the birds in the first section. You didn't mention the yellow W or the Newt one thing, but you mentioned the birds, so I felt they had to be Incorporated somehow. Furthermore, because I felt they had to be incorporated, and because there were 5 genes, and because the birds seemingly represented the casing of the genes, and because I knew ITH puzzles do not care about casing, I was mostly inputting things as a GA code. I did also briefly think that maybe Apple and Bottom might be necessary for the ITH code, maybe apple meant red , and red was p, or maybe apple was connecting to the GA with the many apples and one orange. Bottom maybe meant the last clue, which was the yellow W, and then you say jeans in order, so maybe pWevtwr in ITH.

The Newt One thing also confused me because #F0000, didn't seem to represent anything. i thought of color, and red did come up, but I wasn't at part 2 at this point, so the idea of using colors wasn't in my mind, and I assumed it was intentional. You also never mentioned it in the hints so I didn't feel it would be right to bring up. I don't think the mistake would have been a big deal if I got to part 2, and by the time i get to part 2 you had fixed it, but as i was still in part 1, it was really damn confusing, and even when you fixed, I was still confused because I was unsure how red=p was relevant to the genes in anyway (although I did guess some ways as described above)

My fundamental failing was not understanding that the R was ordered by the word search and not by the Hero. The downhill thing frustrated me for that reason because I assumed it simply meant what you said in the ITH of inputting the jeans in the order you see them, which to me was EVTWR at all times, until the final moments.

I also want to share my text document, I was happy that I caught on things like Green Tea, even before I figured out I was working with genes. I also listed some things that were actually not-hints, because i didn't want to miss anything if ever needed. i was surprised you used the GA numbers as hints because my document was already set that way so it was super convenient:
(Click here for my text doc to keep track of the Persona 4 puzzle). Line 31 and under were written first and kept mostly the same through out the puzzle, kept as easy reference to clues and getting to GAs.

Even though I ended up figuring it out, I really meant what I wrote in my "give up" message. I would have been happy had I not figured it out as well. I had also given you whitelist days before that, because I liked the perplexities and even the Persona 4 puzzle felt cool even though i hadn't solved it yet. In particular, I had a fun moment figuring out you meant jeans = genes, and the hero gene being the word search was also really damn clever in my opinion. It was also a smart incentive to completing the whole block of the first 17 puzzles, although I will say it did quite distract me from the later puzzles because I was focused on the Persona 4. Once again, thanks, it was fun.