FFX Was Finally Broken After 20 Years By Speedrunners

the final fantasy series is one of the most iconic and popular jrpg franchises of all time with just the games themselves selling 161 million units worldwide as of june 2021. this popularity also extends into the running community with basically every game seeing runners take on many different challenges they have to offer in many of the games runners have come up with ways to break the way they are played almost completely some games are broken through corruption of the game's memory while others can simply use game mechanics to take down bosses with ease in final fantasy 10 though strategies have evolved in a very interesting way today we're going to dive into some obscure findings in the final fantasy 10 community and find out about how even 20 years after the game's release the game has been finally picked apart thanks to the tireless efforts of those looking into the game's code [Music] to understand what's going on now in the world of final fantasy 10 speedrunning we need to take a look at the any percent speed run itself for this example we'll use care card vi's groundbreaking sub 10 hour run on the ps2 which he obtained earlier this year in the final fantasy 10 speed run the goal of the game is pretty cut and dry travel through spira and gather the aeons to help end the spiral of death and deal with titus's daddy issues in the meantime while the run's route is pretty linear there are a few things that cause variance in how runners take on the game's fights stats and equipment are paramount to the success of an ffx any percent run and without focusing on these things the run would be much slower than it is now for example winning the main story blitzball tournament in luca is important due to the prize being a strength spear which helps immensely with titus's damage output for the rest of the game but the blitzball match itself can go completely wrong randomly even with the right strategies being used other situations come down to whether you obtain a weapon that deals thunder elemental damage from a drop after the obliterator fight which allows either titus or waka to deal additional damage during the extractor fight and move flow later on titus's weapon being dropped from that fight is about a 1 in 4 chance and waka's drop is about a 1 in 16 chance these weapons can also be attained in besaid or kilika encounters but the likelihood of getting these drops is extremely low these equipment drops do save time but they're not run killers if you don't attain them as the current world record does not get these drops skipping ahead to the calm lands and after the defender x fight the real run killer at the top level comes from just under 8 hours into the run and it's all because of this equipment encounters become pretty irrelevant after a certain point in the game and the only reason many of them are taken in the run is to farm items to make bosses easier things like stealing fire gems are important thanks to the trio of 9999 being used after the remyem temple there's a few points however where enemies are fought for spear grid levels but characters get most of the levels from overkills on bosses during late mount gag is that non-word runners don't need them anymore and this is where the cavern of stolen faith comes into play normally runners would avoid this cave since it's off the beaten path and doesn't do anything for the run however this is the first chance to find an enemy called a ghost and ghosts can drop in equipment that has the no encounters ability the no encounters ability is exactly as it sounds just equip the party member with the equipment that has the ability and you have no random encounters for the rest of the game that sounds easy enough right so why don't all runners do it the only bad thing about trying to get this equipment is a ghost has a 1 in 13 chance of appearing and even then the drop rate for peaceful equipment is only five percent and you might be thinking oh well they can just run from encounters using flea so it can't be that bad right and you would be correct since buying the sonic steel from milwaukee the 23rd in machelania woods gives titus the first action in every battle thanks to the first strike ability battles effectively become safe 12 seconds that's how long it takes to completely go into an encounter flee and exit the post battle rewards scene now take that number and multiply it by about 14. that's the number of encounters you can get just before the seymour flux fight alone in the first part of mount gagazet so you can see why karakarin wanted this equipment to drop from the ghost in his world record run he got the ghost on his third encounter and not just that but it was a first try drop from that encounter so how long did it take for him to get this insane luck you might ask a year of grinding the any percent category care khan basically grinded the game for a year to get this run with these strategies other runners watching were wondering if they could make the grind easier on caracarn by looking more into how encounters and item drops work and what they found was astounding in march of 2021 runners by the names of gray fox and matayama did some testing for ghost encounter rates and though they got similar results from their findings there was one thing that was odd out of a thousand encounters 500 of which were for a green zone with a documented 10 chance and 500 for a white zone with a documented 5 chance the green zone had 61 ghosts encountered and the white zone had 48 ghosts encountered greyfox wanted to try again to make sure he didn't get really lucky but another final fantasy runner sarith suggested that encounter rates might be seeded so what does that mean imagine that you have a set value assigned that basically determines all of your encounters in the game and is generated as you start up a file that's basically what this concept is at the time no one had any proof of this and it was just something that runners noticed with nemesis percent where you have to capture 10 of every monster in the game along with other requirements they mentioned that sometimes they would see a runner having many encounters with an enemy but another having a small amount of encounters with the same enemy now before i go any further let's turn back time a little bit a couple years as a matter of fact back to november of 2019 a final fantasy 10 runner by the name of odmog discovered he could use the ps4 system clock to manipulate a set seed in the hd remastered version he would then complete a run with that clock manipulation though no one knew how this worked at the time this was probably the first instance of someone taking the idea of seed manipulation and running with it researching the seeds would be a big undertaking and could take weeks if not months of painstaking research fast forward a little bit to 2020 and there was more talk about the idea of seeds in the research around it but nothing really came to fruition until more people started looking into it matayama found back then that damage rules at the beginning of the game were indicative of possible rng seeds and even duplicates of those seeds were found in additional testing but there was one problem in april 2021 multiple runners started looking at seeds for both the hd remaster and the ps2 version of the game and it was found that duplicate damage rules were found quickly in hd remaster but for the ps2 version no duplicates were found this meant that it was possible that the rng seeds worked differently between the two games with some looking into more of the seeds a runner named crimson inferno presented a tracker on april 10th to show when you could get a critical hit on the first boss fight sin spawn ames he manually tracked seeds to see when critical hits happened so he could line up a critical hit with titus's overdrive spiral cut this was useful because even though this was an early game boss aims casting demi constantly is slow and can lose quite a bit of time on the same day though another runner named rossi had a breakthrough with the ps2 version of final fantasy 10 as to how rng seeds are created rossi wanted to look more into the actual rng of the game to see if karakaaron's ghost encounters can be influenced in some way making it easier for him to get those encounters he figured out that it's based off of a formula that includes this system clock the number of frames since the game is booted and that it gets set sometime after hitting new game on the main menu rossi broke it down even further by stating that there are a lot of seeds and the best way to narrow the amount of seeds down is to start the game as soon as possible if you hit new game within a minute of getting control of your cursor you end up with 1 out of 226 378 seeds if you hit new game within one second you end up with 1 out of 7 5555 seeds in the midst of these discoveries rossi also starts to figure out more of the rng values themselves for several games that we've covered on this channel so far these values are pretty tame with only two or three in the game's memory that affect random things in the game for final fantasy 10 though how many do we have 10 20 50 how about 68 it was later found that there are 68 different values that affect random aspects of the game with each value being attributed to something unique in the game's memory it was found out that there were rng values that affected enemy drops encounter formations and camera angle rng believe it or not it's actually more simple than it seems but before we go into how these things work let's look at the rng seeds overall in may of 2021 crimson inferno posted his completed seed spreadsheet letting people be able to see what possible seed they had for the remastered version it wasn't 100 of all the seeds but it was enough that people could use the spreadsheet to find out what seed that they might be on this was only really useful for damage rolls to start but rossi took this a step further with the ps2 version and made a ghost encounter tracker based on the first six attacks in the game using those numbers it tells the player what number of encounter the ghost will appear on in the cavern of stolen faith all the player needed to do was to count the number of encounters they got in their run and they can make the ghost appear on that specific encounter number even though this didn't incorporate the no encounter equipment drops needed to destroy the end game it was a big step as to knowing when the encounters would happen unfortunately karakan got his pb the day before rossi got his tracker working this was the initial reason why rossi started on this project in the first place but this wouldn't stop him from continuing the endeavor this would only be the beginning however as rossi would look into how drops actually worked in the game there are three different rng values that control drops out of the 68 that were mentioned and another that controls whether it's a rare drop or not the rng values for drops are called rng 10 rng 12 and rng 13. and rng 11 is used for the rare item drop roll to be a little more specific rng 10 determines the item 1 item 2 and equipment drop chance as well as deciding if stealing an item will succeed or fail rng 12 determines the equipment owner the type the number of slots and the number of abilities rng 13 actually determines the abilities for equipment this is where things get a little more complicated so let me break it down for you basically when these rng values are used it does something called a roll and advances the rng value for rng 10 this is directly controlled by the player's actions as it can be advanced by character and monster deaths with a count of three advancements stealing also advances rng 10 once moving on to rng 11 if you get an item as a drop or a steal rng 11 advances for every item to determine if it's rare or not rng 10 can be compared to the drop table mechanic in zelda 1 speed running when you kill an enemy in zelda 1 you get a specific item that's based on the kill count and an enemy grouping even though this isn't the same you can kind of see the parallels in the concept back to final fantasy 10 rng 12 rolls four times for each equipment drop if there is any one rule for each of the four things that it determines which i mentioned earlier rng 13 rules for each ability that was generated during the rng-12 process now that the main rng values for drops were discovered and the ghost encounter tracker was made for the ps2 it was time to dive into the pc version crimson inferno gave rossi a lot of his data he had already collected and a few things were discovered almost immediately remember how i said that the ps2 has an absurd amount of seeds with little chance of getting a duplicate and the hd version saw many duplicate seeds it turned out that parts of the memory that the hd version read like the ps2 red for the frame since the game was booted were just the value of zero so what does this mean that took the amount of seeds from about 2 to the power of 32 to just 256 and just a couple of days after finding that out rossi had mapped every single seed on the remastered version the encounter tracker was updated for the pc version for runners to use so now ghost encounters could be easily tracked for each seed oddmog and some other runners ended up confirming that this tracker worked solidifying all the work that rossi and crimson put in to making this a reality now that this was done they now had to face their next question if the ghost encounter could be mapped then why not the rest of them in order to make this happen rossi would need information on every encounter table like for the areas in the cavern of the stolen faith then include forced encounters that runners take as well as some of the possible guato encounters during the makalania temple escape so rossi kept at work with parsing through the information in the game's code and on june 17th 2021 he posted the first 1000 values for the rng one encounter and preempted strike index basically rng one is used to determine encounter formations and if the encounter is a preempted strike or an ambush while the data was incredible it wasn't that useful in its current form so gray fox made a script that shows the ambushes and preemptives from the rng seed and posted it on june 17th not even a couple days after that more advancements were made by crimson inferno using rossy's encounter rng info and encounter tables crimson had been researching up to mushroom rock road things slowed down for a bit because crimson was still reverse engineering the encounter tables for the rest of the game but in july the things started to heat back up again when rossi posted the raw values for rng 10 12 and 13. using this information crimson and greyfox were able to rewrite it to make it usable this allowed them to not only do that but to also calculate the next rng value based off of the previous one over the course of the next several days prims and rossi worked through some of the kinks that didn't make sense with the rng 10 advancing including finding out that the bevelle monks rifles and flamethrowers count as enemies that advance rng 10. it is actually speculated that the developers intended for the monks to have holdable weapons that could be destroyed and dropped the concept didn't make it past them being counted as enemies in the game's memory while this was all happening greyfox also looked into the prize structure for a ghost which is basically the drop table and eventually made a tool for the equipment drops however for the tracker to work properly and actually needed the price structure from every enemy that runner spot in the speed run this was a list of 43 enemies total so it would take a good amount of effort to get all these tracked thankfully this didn't take long because rossi was able to get the raw data to crimson inferno and on july 11th crimson inferno posted a file showing all the prize structures for the listed enemies gray fox was able to use this to make the first full rng tracker for the pc version of the game a few days after that crimson actually updated his tracker workbook to a new version that not only included the seeds from before but now the rng tracker that greyfox developed putting all the tools needed to perform the manipulated run in one place after a few more instances of figuring out how the game handles multiple enemies being killed at once among other things greyfox updates his tracker once again and this time it uses a file that rossi provided showing all the rng information from the 256 seeds on the hd remaster using this information runners were able to perform their own runs with the rng manipulation including crimson inferno getting an eight hour 52 minute and three second pb on july 26th 2021 you would think that this would be all the manipulation possible but there actually was more to be looked at on the 29th of july greyfox was actually able to update his tracker to include damage critical hit and escape rng overall these use rng 20 through rng 26 for each party member respectively and rng 27 for seymour and the aeons without going into much detail about how these exactly work one thing can be said for certain being able to manipulate not only encounters and item drops but also critical hits was a massive win for the community the last update to come from grey fox was actually on october 3rd less than a week ago as of this writing where he included a way to properly track all the ps2 rng and yojimbo's attack rng on the hd remaster with the deep dive into rng manipulation out of the way what does this mean for the final fantasy 10 community well community leaders had the forethought to separate the hd remasters console any percent category into set seed manip and non-manip since setting the system clock directly affects what kind of seed you can generate since the pc and ps2 versions don't have pre-run setup when it comes to rng tracking those categories allow c-tracking as normal thus making rng tracking essential for top runners gray fox and another runner named camper were also able to use the newly made yojimbo tracker to beat pendants in the pc hd remaster with manipulation driving times down immensely as for the any percent category on the pc version several runners had pushed their times down and a couple down to sub 8 hours and 50 minutes without loads 20 years after the game's ps2 release the rush to push final fantasy 10 to its limits has come to a head with more runners adopting the seed manipulation and others making use of the rng values for even more manipulation the randomness that this game drove runners mad with has finally started down the path of being tamed even though so many developments have been made who knows what could be next thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: DoctorSwellman

Views: 882,827

Keywords: ffx, ffx speedrun, ffx glitches, ffx world record, ffx manip, ffx equipment, ffx items, ffx abilities

Id: ehi7LMgwEk8

Length: 20min 22sec (1222 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Matto5000]

Good watch

[u/Zilyn]

I'm playing through the Pbirdman Hard mode mod of FFX right now, very interesting to see a look into how the coding of the game functions. Great summarization of the concepts, thanks for sharing!

[u/transvoiid]

Just when I'd been thinking about starting speedrunning with the first Final Fantasy I played...

[u/Revarf]

Is there a tl;dw for this?

[u/DoctorSwellman]

Holy moly, thank you all so much for watching. The FFX community did a lot of crazy work making the manip a reality, so please tell them they’re cool or something!