Huge Discovery Shocks Final Fantasy VII Speedrunning!

[Music] hello you absolute legends what is the greatest game ever made this is a question that has been asked countless times we've seen list after list after list of people trying to rank games and put them in the order of what they believe is the best of all time as hard as this challenge may be i actually think at this point in history we can safely say what the greatest game ever made is and of course it's the legend of zelda ocarina of time i know some of you out there may disagree but by most metrics it's hard to argue the case for any other game ocarina of time has featured on more top lists than any other game and has been cited as the greatest ever by more publications than anything else it has the highest score on metacritic and still to this day is universally ranked extremely high even after thousands of new games have been released since it came out however it wasn't always the case that you could confidently make this claim if you were online in the late 90s and early 2000s there was another game that gave ocarina of time a run for its money in fact in 2004 and 2005 game fax which was possibly the most popular gaming website in existence at the time ran two best game ever polls which were voted on by the public in both polls ocarina of time placed second and each time it was beaten by the same game final fantasy vii it's hard to overstate how big of a deal final fantasy vii was when it was released in the west it almost single-handedly popularized role-playing games on consoles and was the most expensive video game ever produced at the time final fantasy 7 showed the true power of cd-based console gaming and left nintendo owners craving the kind of depth and sheer volume of content that could never be provided on cartridges i personally grew up playing crpgs from the late 80s like ultima and wizardry and essentially stuck to rpgs on the computer until i received a nintendo 64 for christmas this basically ended my life as an rpg gamer until i purchased a playstation 2 with final fantasy 10 many years later you might point out that rpgs like final fantasy and chrono trigger were around on earlier consoles but what you have to realize is that at the time these were still relatively niche as a kid i didn't even know they existed final fantasy vii was what put final fantasy and console rpgs into the minds of gamers outside of japan final fantasy vii is undoubtedly one of the most influential and important games ever created but what's interesting is that time hasn't been as favorable to it as it has to a game like ocarina of time nowadays when it comes to discussions of the greatest games ever final fantasy vii falls lower and lower down the list as years progress i think final fantasy vii had the impact it did because it was a lot of people's first experience of that kind of game but it had been done before and since it's been done even better the undercurrent of appreciation for the game is still blatantly apparent though when its remake which only so far is focused on a portion of the original game became one of the best selling games on the ps4 the love is obviously still there but outside of the remake you don't hear about it as much these days in speedrunning this is especially true games of the same era like ocarina and mario 64 are still some of the most popular games to speedrun and are still at the forefront of the community and yes it's true that you can't compare platformers with rpgs directly but final fantasy vii was such a cherished game there's a good argument to be made that is undervalued in the hobby just like most other popular games however groups of dedicated runners do sink countless hours into cracking the code of final fantasy vii learning every possible mechanic exploit and glitch in order to reach the end as quickly as possible and even to this day almost 25 years after release new discoveries and strategies are still being found which leads me to the reason i wanted to make this video in october of 2021 a massive new glitch was discovered that allowed speedrunners to skip a major section of the game the new strategy now known as calm skip is absolutely genius and seeing as i've never covered an original playstation game on this channel there is no better way to start than by covering one of its most classic games in this video we will take a look at how this new skip was found and how it works i really hope you enjoy now legends before we go on this video is sponsored by honey honey is an online shopping tool that searches the web for promo codes and coupons and when you reach the checkout it will let you know if there are any available and apply them for you gone are the days we need to spend hours searching for codes honey does all of the work after you get it it just sits in your browser and pops up with a message when the time is right i basically forget it's there because it's so seamless it just chills in the background but i still end up saving money all the time when i go to buy things using honey i've saved over 50 dollars in the last month alone honey works on a ton of your favorite websites and you can tell it's good just by the reviews on google it has a 5 star rating with over 160 000 reviews which is honestly crazy best of all honey is absolutely free and you can add it to your browser by going to joinhoney.com or by clicking the link in the description it's super easy you're already shopping online it really is a no-brainer just click the link in the description [Music] speed running in rpg like final fantasy 7 is the antithesis of how i would normally play the game i love to spend countless hours grinding random encounters building up the strength of my characters i do everything i can to avoid the main storyline making my team as powerful as possible until i'm forced to progress out of necessity speedrunners do the opposite keeping encounters to an absolute minimum and making a line directly through the story in order to reach the end in the shortest amount of time still despite keeping encounters to a minimum the speed run for the original playstation version is almost 7 hours long this is due to the immense amount of cutscenes and dialogue dispersed throughout the story and while the game seems to present itself as an open world adventure until the later portions of your journey it plays very linearly the world map which at first glance appears to be a vast expanse of possibilities imposes restrictions on the player in the form of impossible terrain a swamp mountains rivers and oceans all prevent travel without the requisite mode of transportation this forces the player to move through the game in a particular sequence in order to progress sometimes the restrictions are admittedly extremely arbitrary your buggy will randomly break down forcing you to seek help at the nearby town of cosmo canyon or even worse a dialogue box will simply tell you to turn back given that grinding for experience isn't necessary to complete the game it really is these restrictions of movement that force the speedrun into such a long drawn-out territory with each compulsory stop comes more cutscenes and more dialogue therefore it's sequence breaks that are always regarded as the holy grails of speedrunning tech if we can find a way to overcome these artificial barriers we can shave off swaths of time several sequence breaks have already been discovered in the game so generally they are relatively simple the oldest and most well-known is the raid on midgar skip which only involves holding down and run on the controller during a cut scene in order to execute another is the sooner skip which involves wiggling your way past a guard that wasn't quite blocking off an exit properly arguably the most complex skip that was ever found was the original cosmo canyon skip as i mentioned previously your buggy will break down while passing the town requiring you to drop by to get it fixed but through a process involving several steps in order to get into a glitched state you can continue driving the buggy even after triggering its breakdown this skip was absolutely genius and is way too convoluted to explain in this video but ultimately the original way of doing it was completely discarded after it was discovered that you could just get out of the buggy at a precise location and skip the breakdown entirely you can just walk over it you are scum there was one skip however that was always considered a perfect candidate near the beginning of the playthrough cutting off the player from the rest of the world is a mountain range the passage through is called the mithril mines and is quite easy to reach but when you try to walk through the mine the game interrupts you with character dialogue saying that before you move on you must visit the town of calm after leaving the starting city of midgar the player is required to visit the town of calm as the next stop on their journey as far as progressing the story goes this visit is essential as the game will not allow you to continue until you do as previously mentioned if you try to get through the mithril mines which is the only way to the other side of the mountain range the game will just tell you to go back this restriction is completely arbitrary however it's simply a long and drawn out flashback sequence that may provide you with some backstory but otherwise doesn't do anything of consequence the flashback takes almost 20 minutes and is incredibly boring before leaving calm you do get the personal handiphone system but this gets immediately removed anyway when you reach the next required stop the town of junon so in effect there really is absolutely no point to come at all when it comes to progressing the game as it stood the only reason speedrunners visited the town at all was so that the dialogue would not be triggered when they entered the mithral mines final fantasy 7 has been played by millions of people and at no point were there any documented cases of someone walking over or around the mountain range the geographical formations do a very good job at preventing people from proceeding without visiting calm first on the other hand glitching through barriers isn't exactly a rare phenomenon and is used in many speed runs of different games so the concept of finding a way over the barrier wasn't crazy however it was so much time already invested by speedrunners and even casual players testing the boundaries of what they could explore over multiple decades it seemed unlikely but then came along the player kuma who was certainly no stranger to finding skips in fact in early 2021 it was kumar who found the most recent version of the cosmo canyon skip kumar took it upon himself to investigate the potential for a calm skip and his weapon of choice would be the chocobo it's been well known for a long time that you can do some weird and wacky things with chocobos on the world map for example the old cosmo canyon skip involved getting into a glitched state by dismounting the chocobo onto the edge of the desert surrounding the corel prison kuma's first idea was to test different areas along the mountain to see if he could glitch into it by dismounting the chocobo he actually managed to clip on top of it which was extremely promising though he was never able to run all the way across kumar then turned his attention elsewhere as the mountain wasn't the only barrier preventing progression to the northwest a river achieved the same result there was just one problem when you get off a chocobo at least at this stage in the game it will always run away the only reason the chocobo wasn't running away outside of the mithral mines is because this is an intended mechanic of the game in this specific area in order to reach the mithral mines you need to get across some marshes these marshes are inhabited by a creature known as the medgar zolem the zolum moves very quickly and cannot be outrun therefore trying to run across will simply lead to an encounter this creature is supposed to be too strong for the player to kill at this point in the game and it essentially acts as a gatekeeper that forces the player into learning how to capture a chocobo the chocobo runs quick enough to avoid the solemn so the player can safely get across the marshes the developers also knew that some players would get to the mines before visiting calm and would need to turn back but if the chocobo ran away they'd be left stranded and couldn't return which would be devastating therefore in this specific area the chocobo will stand and wait for the player kumar needed a way to retain this special property of the chocobo when roaming elsewhere on the world map and in order to do this he needed to create a brand new glitch when you fight the zollem and flee the game will place you back on the grass on the edge of the marshes the side it places you on is dictated by which side you came from so if you step onto the marshes from the right it will place you back on the right and if you stepped onto the marshes from the left it will place you back on the left this value only gets updated when you step onto the marshes and not when you leave so if you enter from the right and run across up onto the grass on the other side the game would still put you all the way back onto the original side you came from if you were to theoretically initiate an encounter with the solemn and flea the value telling the chocobo to stay in place works differently it gets activated when you move on to the grass and deactivated when you leave the grass thus if we were to theoretically initiate an encounter with the xolem while on the grass outside of the methyl mine not only would we be placed back on the other side of the marshes but the value telling the chocobo to stay in place would also remain active and that's exactly what kumar was able to figure out how to do initially he achieved this by placing the chocobo on the edge of the grass while standing in the marshes in the moment before the zolum reached cloud he would mount the chocobo activating the trigger as the encounter began though it was very quickly realized that this step of mounting the chocobo wasn't even necessary as the zolomz hitbox extended out far enough to hit you if you were just standing on the edge of the grass after fleeing this encounter the player is now back on the other side with the required trigger active to get on and off the chocobo at will with this first hurdle out of the way kuma did some preliminary testing in the area around calm and was able to pull off some really interesting things including running over the top of water this seemed to indicate that it might be possible to get over the river near the town of junon which is where he would turn his attention to next and on the 8th of october 2021 after almost a week of trial and error and hours of randomly getting on and off the chocobo kuma made history by clipping into the ground and walking across the river to the other side completely bypassing the methyl mines and the town of calm this clip was without a doubt amazing and was one of the most important things to happen in the game for a long time but unfortunately for kuma he wasn't able to reproduce it either it was a freaky current or there was something else more complex happening on the surface it seemed simple just get off the chocobo with the right spot and you can clip through though hours of further tries yielded no results kumar posted the clip to the final fantasy speedrunning discord and flocks of players immediately took to the task of recreating the glitch within two days the runner sooner had already found a way to replicate the glitch at this point in time players still had no idea why this was even happening it was purely trial and error and when we come to learn what exactly is going on it ends up being more insane that this was found at all in the first place sooner's method went something like this dismount the chocobo at a very specific corner between the river and the mountain get back on the chocobo and go directly up and then directly right until you pass the town of calm then turn around and go back to the left and then down all the way to the original corner now when you dismount the chocobo you will glitch underneath the ground and you'll be able to walk across the river so why does this happen it's due to a glitch called stale triangle reference i'm going to give you a very dumbed down explanation but if you want the extremely technical breakdown i suggest you watch the video by ace zephyr which i will link in the description when cloud is on the world map the entire world is not loaded at the same time the world is divided into regions via a grid and at any one moment only 32 regions are ever loaded each region is divided into triangles which among other things help tell the game where cloud can and can't move and also can and can't stand when cloud is standing on a triangle the game stores the data for that triangle as well as the region that the triangle is in it also stores the data for up to six total triangles at any one given time what's interesting is that when cloud mounts a chocobo the game does not update the data for the stored triangles so in the instance of this new skip the players stand on a particular triangle in order to store that triangle into the game's memory then they get on the chocobo and run north and then east until the region that triangle is in is unloaded then they return to that same triangle and dismount the chocobo but this time they glitch through it so why does this happen well as i mentioned the game can only load 32 regions at any given time and when they are loaded they can be loaded into any of 32 designated slots for simplicity we can number them 1-32 so in this instance the region is loaded into slot 30. when the player moves away the region that was loaded into slot 30 becomes unloaded and a new region replaces it however the data for these stored triangles remains when the player returns and the region containing the stored triangles is loaded back into memory it is now loaded into a different slot this time it is loaded into slot 20. due to a quirk in the way the game handles these triangles this causes an error and places cloud underneath cloud is now free to walk around even in inaccessible areas but only up to a distance of six triangles which is how many triangles the game can store luckily this is just enough to allow us to get to the other side of the river and onto a valid triangle so we can continue moving as normal what makes this discovery so unlikely is that you cannot just merely unload and reload the region and expect this trick to work it has to be reloaded into a specific slot which requires very specific movement so not only did kuma have to mount and dismount the chocobo at a precise location but his movement had to be very precise as well and remember this was a brand new glitch that had never been done before so it definitely wasn't the result of prior knowledge it was pure trial and error and power of will within a week records began to fall with the runner zeal becoming the first person to set a new world record with the skip since the skip was first found the final fantasy speedrunning community has had a chance to reverse engineer it and figure out exactly why it happens with this new information a brand new type of exploit has been uncovered this even led to another version of the calm skip that goes straight through the mithral minds directly which is handy because it skips the need for the solemn glitch entirely this new incredible discovery is only one of several major skips that have been found in the last several years despite being 25 years old it's clear that final fantasy vii still has a ton more secrets hidden in plain sight it's a very exciting time for the community and i really look forward to hearing about what they manage to unearth next big thanks to ace zephyr and kuma for helping me learn about this new skip as i said before i recommend watching aseph's technical breakdown if that's what you're into the link will be in the description as always thank you so much for watching new legends i hope you are having a fantastic day and i will see you in the next video

Channel: Karl Jobst

Views: 506,132

Keywords: speedrun, finaly fantasy 7, final fantasy VII, final fantasy speedrun, final fantasy glitch

Id: f4jmS6e0kNg

Length: 20min 53sec (1253 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 28 2022