FF7 Speedrun For Charity This Weekend!

[AltF4]

Hey all!

Some friends and I will be doing a marathon stream on Saturday of Final Fantasy 7! It's a 12 hour real-time speedrun. To the best of my knowledge, nobody's really done this before, as game time runs are more popular. 12 hours is the goal, but we'll try to get it down as much as possible in one contiguous run.

Also, we're going to be doing all of this for charity! We'll be soliciting donations to Child's Play. It's a good cause, check them out.

So come and hang out with us while we BS and play one of our favorite old games. It'll be a good time. If we finish early, then we'll stream some smash.

11AM PST Saturday May 14th - (hopefully!) 11PM

http://www.justin.tv/altf4_streaming

PS: As an added bonus, I'm going to be streaming it all using entirely Free Software. Instructions how to do it yourself can be found here: http://www.phx2600.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1399

 

[Spire]

Awesome! A 12 hour FF7 speedrun would be mighty impressive. Unfortunately I work during the bulk of your marathon so I'll only be able to catch the first few hours.

Good luck, and you have my full support!

 

[_Dice]

best time for speed run is almost 8 hours. but thats segmented.

 

[AltF4]

Yea, that's using a lot of tricks for the in-game time. You have to play the game differently in a realtime speedrun.

A lot of the techniques you use in a game-time speedrun involve getting reaaaaaly lucky, and playing boss battles over and over until you get it right. Obviously that doesn't work in realtime, so your time will be sub-optimal. Honestly, I'm hoping for 10 hours, but it's hard to say since I don't know of anyone doing this before.

Originally, we were going to do the HDINS challenge. (Half-day No Save) But it would be kind of dangerous to do for a livestream, you know? What if we died after 5 hours. Not fun for you guys. So it's a straight speedrun with saving. (Though obviously deaths will cost time!)

 

[_Dice]

So are you guys going to be using tifa's shenangians to beat most enemies?

 

[Teczer0]

Wow, that sounds really fun. Damn, I think I'm going to a tournament while this is going on =/.

But I'll definitely try to sneak a peek during the tournament. I also wouldn't mind donating a little for your cause altf4

 

[AltF4]

I'm not 100% positive that we've decided, but I think Tifa's "shenanigans" are a bit too risky. I assume you mean her one weapon (the name escapes me atm) that increases power with status effects. That gets pretty broken, but if I recall correctly you stand a decent chance of it backfiring miserably. (Since she might miss and stuff)

 

[_Dice]

I'm not 100% positive that we've decided, but I think Tifa's "shenanigans" are a bit too risky. I assume you mean her one weapon (the name escapes me atm) that increases power with status effects. That gets pretty broken, but if I recall correctly you stand a decent chance of it backfiring miserably. (Since she might miss and stuff)

power glove gets uber when she is critical. and allows her to hit int he thousands early on, as well as deathblow for 9999 very early.

 

[Falcoty]

We'll probably be using the powerglove simply for the power boost, but we won't be relying on deathblow. Deathblow is great when you're resetting over and over to get the hit, but since that's boring (and takes forever in the real world), we won't be doing that.

 

[AltF4]

Yea, we're going to do a "run from encounters, but level at key areas" method. Wutai sticks out in my mind. You get loads of EXP plus x-potions and turbo ethers. Very handy. Maybe something before then? Possibly the cave right after the Midgar Zollom.

Also, there's 3 of us. (Myself, Fa(i)lcoty, and EnixMoogle) We'll be swapping out playing periodically. Probably each half hour.

 

[_Dice]

Yea, we're going to do a "run from encounters, but level at key areas" method. Wutai sticks out in my mind. You get loads of EXP plus x-potions and turbo ethers. Very handy. Maybe something before then? Possibly the cave right after the Midgar Zollom.

Also, there's 3 of us. (Myself, Fa(i)lcoty, and EnixMoogle) We'll be swapping out playing periodically. Probably each half hour.

you are likely best not fighting anything in midgar until the tower, and then just steal the sword from the guard and keep running. you don't need levels to beat those bosses especially if you get the sword.


though some of the materia within the tower is important for making things go even faster, i dunno.

 

[Binx]

You should probably do a practice run before hand so you have a good strategy down. As far as wutai goes I would probably skip the whole thing, there are some places in the game you might be able to gain some levels fighting ghosts using some phoenix downs, I haven't done a speed run of this game so I'm not sure, but I've definitely done a low level game of it and most bosses are easy to beat even at level 7/8

Bio is your best friend on 90% of bosses, and puting chocobo on a weapon with status materia will give you stop on normal attacks which is awesome vs a lot of enemies and some bosses(palmer, who can also be stopped by cloud's cross slash)

Also early game you can really abuse grenades to kill enemies quickly at low levels. Watch Garland the Great's speedrun its really good.

 

[Falcoty]

You should probably do a practice run before hand so you have a good strategy down.

I currently have my own game running, plus two separate speed runs by others.

 

[AltF4]

I don't mean actually playing the whole Wutai side-quest. We won't even have Yuffie to trigger it. I just mean hop on the island and fight some of the enemies there.

The boss battles really only start getting tricky around the red dragon. That's where the game-time runs start using lucky tricks and restarts. So Wutai might be the first place we need some leveling. But if we have trouble before that, I'm thinking the bridge to Corel might not be a bad place.

1) The bombs have Right Arms for stealing. They're really useful, but game-time runs usually have to do lots of restarts to steal them "quickly". If we level there, we could steal some and level at the same time.

2) There's a number of encounters there with lots of weak enemies. Easy to 1-shot with a good spell/item. But I'm hoping to just skip that spot for leveling altogether.

 

[_Dice]

what you should do is give a character (aeris until she dies) many copies of the same materia + 1 all with the most materia slots possible.

pretty much to super buff up her magic stat, and then 1 shot the high number of enemies weak to that element. like the bugs weak to ice. ect. allows for very fast AP/XP in 1 cast.

 

[AltF4]

JEEZ, SPOILER ALERT, DICE!!!

jkjk

The summons do a good job of boosting magic attack, too.

 

[AltF4]

We've started!!!!

Come check us out:

www.justin.tv/altf4_streaming

 

[_Dice]

And now i have entertainment for 12 hours.

Was very good thanks for doing it guys. definitely entertaining

 

[AltF4]

Wow, that was a ton of fun! Thanks so much for the people that came and watched. Especially Dice, who was there from start to finish with us. And in fact, gave us pretty good advice on things that we didn't know all day long.

(The game doesn't tell you that gigas armlet increases attack! Why?!)

We managed to finish the run in 15h 45m. The video of us doing the whole thing can be found on my Justin.tv account. It's cut into two halves, since I managed to crash the stream halfway though, and restart it. XD

Some notes to anyone who would dare do this again / things we could have done better:

1) Grenades and Right Arms win you every battle easily until Red Dragon. There's no need to level before that.

2) Our decision to power level in Wutai was a good one, I think. But we spent too much time there. A half hour is too much, we could have gotten by with 15-20 mins easily.

3) We missed some key items that would have made it much easier. Deathblow, added cut, and the first elemental materia come to mind. Those were just mistakes.

4) We underestimated Tifa's powersoul, for sure. It's true that making her stay in critical is too risky most of the time, but even without it it's worth the damage. Plus if we were to have leveled cover properly we could have deflected enough attacks to probably get through her being in critical.

Otherwise things went pretty smoothly. We died only a handful of times. One or two were from really unfortunate events we could do much about. (Carry armor picking up two characters and killing the other!!) But some we definitely could have helped. (Falling from the second hand in the Temple Of the Ancients clock room)

If we were to have run more smoothly (more direct routes, no simple mistakes) and not changed any strategy, we could have made it down to 14 hours or less easily I think. If we were to revamp our strategy entirely, 12 hours is totally possible.