This 17 Minute Skip Was Intentionally HIDDEN From Speedrunners For 10 Years

Final Fantasy VII has a long speedrun history dating back to the early 2000s and along the way Runners have found glitches that range from saving a couple seconds to skipping entire sections of the game however there's one glitch that was found in 2008 and kept secret for over a decade before being released and it saves a whopping 17 minutes today we'll be looking at the timeline of this skip break down how it works what it skips and why it was hidden for so long I hope you enjoyed today's video Final Fantasy VII has a lot of Secrets and hidden bosses but none are as formidable as this video's sponsor rage Shadow Legends this month raid has The Saint Valentine's event happening and love is in the air with special rewards for new players like themed Champions and even Amazon gift cards worth up to one thousand dollars if you want to get in on these awesome prizes download raid Shadow legends from the links below then head to raidlovequest.plerium.com once there enter your player ID and you're ready to set out on The Saint Valentine's Quest running until March 14th if you're an existing player you can share in the love as well use promo code sync valentine23 that everyone can use to get a small Valentine's gift one of the things I love about raid is the PVP battles in the arena where you can outsmart real players to achieve Victory and this month's Prime gaming drop for raid features genbo Dishonored a powerful void Champion best suited for PVP that's available until March 2nd if that wasn't enough there's a brand new faction in raid as well the Sylvan Watchers who may make their home in the Mist with a dense jungle on the east of Tulare there are some very cool designs in this faction's Champions with nature being a big inspiration some of them are even literal trees so let's make like a tree and use my link or scan a QR code right here and get a free starter pack with this cool in-game Loot and with that let's get into the video Final Fantasy VII speedrunning started back in the early 2000s and there weren't many skips known about in this era the main time saved that speedruns made use of were strategies that involved getting the power Soul item on Tifa and an enemy ability called death sentence powersole is a very strong item that you get in the first third of the run before you fight Materia keeper on first appearances it looks like it has substandard stats but there are two special properties that make it the best weapon for Tifa in a speed run while powersole is equipped antifa is in critical HP the weapons damage output will double then if she is put under the death sentence status effect it will double her damage output a second time death sentence puts a 60-second clock on anyone affected and will KO them when the timer reaches zero but Tifa doesn't have to worry about this since her damage output is so high no boss can stand against her for more than a few turns the latter two-thirds of the speedrun revolve around getting the power soul combo online for each boss fight and you're probably wondering what this has to do with a hidden skip so it's time to look at this video uploaded in 2008 what you're seeing is a section of the game that occurs as you reach Cosmo Canyon the buggy you're riding in is supposed to malfunction and leave you stranded with the game forcing you to go to Cosmo Canyon to proceed inside of Cosmo Canyon are some dialogue cutscenes the caves of GE dungeon G natak the dungeon boss and more importantly the basic enemies sneaky step and g-spector these may be the most important enemies in the entire run since they have the death sentence skill that you need to acquire to bring powersole fully online to acquire this skill normally you'll need two Materia items that you can place in slots on your gear to give your characters new stats and abilities the first is the enemy skill Materia and the second is the manipulate material enemy skill allows you to learn certain abilities when they're used on the character that has it equipped and manipulate allows you to control an enemy so you can can force the ability to be used on that character the cosmo Canyon section of the game takes about 17 minutes to complete and is integral to getting tifa's power Soul online but the mysterious video uploaded by brutal lerpa appears to show that the cut scene where the buggy breaks down when you try to go past Cosmo Canyon was skipped allowing you to proceed without entering it now it's worth mentioning that upon close examination of this video you can clearly see that the Buggy's position jumps which means the footage was likely spliced but this didn't stop players from talking about the theoretical skip nonetheless information moved a lot slower back then and the video wouldn't be mentioned until 2009 on the speed demos archive forums Garland G who was working on his own speedrun was approaching Cosmo Canyon and was asked if he would be doing the full sequence or getting past it using the buggy glitch Garland replied that the skip was almost impossible to do and that it may have bad effects on the rest of the game since a major section was being skipped and the flag-based progression system may get broken because of this he was pressed further and resolved to try and task the skip to see what would happen but the task never materialized and the discussion was left there fast forward to 2010 and new users on the forums are again asking Garland if he's seen the buggy glitch video and a new discussion popped up asking about details for how the skip is performed this time people are skeptical of if the skip would even be worth it since not only will you be missing experience from the dungeon but death sentence would be skipped as well it can be picked up later in the run but you would be without it for several bosses which would lose a lot of time it had been written off as an impossible trick or at best a trick that wasn't worth doing since it delayed getting death sentence so it started to fade into the annals of history that is until 2014 with the growing popularity of twitch and YouTube allowing users to upload videos longer than 10 minutes longer speedruns such as ff7 star started to attract more Runners and no one was more prominent in this era than Carnage 64. Carnage would achieve many world records in the game and during one stream a user named Alburn would appear in chat and had this to say I found a new skip that saves 17 minutes and then just as mysteriously as he appeared he went silent no one knew what this skip could be but it was hard to doubt Auburn's claim over the last few years he had given out new skips as rewards for players setting certain Record Times in the game and was responsible for finding almost every skip used in the run the only problem was he never elaborated on what this new skip could be until 2016. Auburn would be working with another runner on some technical details and had given them tools that he believed would lead them to the skip he was hiding Unfortunately they never stumbled upon the information he wanted them to and his attempt at revealing the skip failed so two years later in 2018 he came up with a new solution or in this case problem a firm believer in people working for their rewards he came up with a puzzle that would lead to the new skip he sent four different codes to forerunners of the game he said that all four codes were needed to solve the problem it didn't require Advanced decryption tools and that elementary school children could solve the puzzle despite their best efforts the community couldn't come up with a solution so after two months he altered his terms it's possible to affect the RNG in ff7 to manipulate encounters by following a step count but there are some places such as the Overworld and certain boss fights where it's not possible to do this in a speed run but it can be done if you have a second console the idea is that you start the speed run on one console while you manipulate the RNG on the second then when you reach the limits of manipulation on the first console you switch to the second and continue repeating this process as needed Auburn stipulated that if a dual console run could be performed with a final time under 7 hours and 10 min minutes that he would release the skip lose Bell had the record at this point with a 734 and with normal Strat the time Auburn wanted would have been impossible but the Dual console method came with a huge bonus you could manipulate things you normally couldn't one such thing is the emerald weapon fight in normal gameplay you have two options fight the boss without the underwater Materia equipped in which case you have 20 minutes to defeat it before you get a game over or equip the Materia and take your time but there is a third option if you defeat Emerald weapon as the timer reaches zero a glitch will activate where you game over and win the fight at the same time if you continue while in this state every battle you enter will get a data error and end instantly in a win even if it's a boss fight this would make things easier but the Run wasn't to walk in the park first the technical requirements were quite high as you needed two capture cards and two consoles and second you needed to come up with a manipulation route that would work for the entire run means Baker and lose Bell would tackle the challenge but ultimately came up short as a manipulation route proved to be very difficult it looked as though the skip was going to remain with all burned forever but almost a year to the day Meese would solve Auburn's puzzle previously the community had tried assigning each letter in the alphabet a number starting with one then laid the codes on top of each other sum the numbers in each row then took the totals and found the corresponding letter if the value overflowed they started back at the letter a and kept counting which gave the result of ffv NLS despite the first two letters being the initials for Final Fantasy the community couldn't make sense of this code in any context but Miz did something that cracked the code instead of starting the assigned letter values at one he started them at zero if you do this the code then decrypts to read CC Skip and while a few people thought this meant Cosmo Canyon skip lose Bell was skeptical and thought it could mean Condor Corel as that area also takes about 17 minutes to complete that was in April of 2018 and in August a definitive answer would be given because lose Bell finished the Dual console run with the help of the new guard skip that skips 18 minutes worth of early game content the Dual console run finished in 7 hours and 2 minutes which meant it was time for Auburn to finally Spill the Beans it turns out that the video from 2008 was uploaded by Auburn the reason he edited it was to hide how the skip was performed Cosmo Canyon skip was possible but it wasn't easy when you arrive at Cosmo Canyon in the buggy a scripted sequence happens where a text box appears in a small cutscene plays but using a chocobo Auburn found that you could avoid triggering this sequence and continue to the next area so let's see how it works when you're on a chocobo and try to enter the desert a text box triggers stating that you can't walk across this terrain and then forcibly Dismounts cloud and if you point away from the desert on the control stick while cloud is dismounting he will enter into a glitch state where the text box is still on screen and he moves without an animation this glitch is very important to Cosmo Canyon Skip and requires one more ingredient to work the buggy if you Dismount the Chocobo into the glitch State and cancel the text box with the same button pressed that you use to enter the buggy you'll preserve the glitch while you're riding the vehicle with this setup the game thinks you're still on the Chocobo even though you're in the buggy and if you can get to Cosmo Canyon while in the state you can perform some specific inputs in a precise position and skip the trigger for the buggy breaking down this sounds easy enough but there was one huge problem if you had a single Overworld encounter while the glitch was active the game would remove the glitch when you exited the battle meaning you had to make it the entire way from the desert to Cosmo Canyon which is about 20 seconds of movement you're probably thinking that Runners could manipulate the encounters to make the skip easier but this wasn't an easy solution by any means when you're in a dungeon possible to manipulate encounters with a step route due to how they are programmed but in the Overworld random battles have extra systems influencing them so they can't be manipulated in real time this was one of the reasons Auburn held onto the skip for so long he didn't like the idea of the Run becoming dependent on a trick that required pure luck and when he revealed it to lose Bell he also sat on the glitch out of fear that someone could fake the RNG and just claim they got lucky with no way of being proven wrong eventually on March 13 2019 Luz decided to release the skip but it wouldn't see use in Iran until 2020 and it wouldn't be through dumb Luck instead a setup was found that involved manipulating Overworld encounters without getting too deep into the technical details the game generates Random Encounters when you're not in the Overworld using two values that are tied to the number of steps cloud has taken by switching between running and walking you can manipulate when you'll receive encounters with this being referred to as a step route Overworld encounters are a bit different as the in-game timer is involved with how they are determined but it turns out that they can be manipulated despite this if you arrive at the buggies location at a certain time the RNG will be in a known state which makes it possible to manipulate encounters based on how you move on the map for this trick there is one encounter you do need and that's for a chocobo to appear so you can capture it and start the rest of the trick once you manipulate a chocobo being caught you still need to maintain precise movement during and after the glitched buggy setup as any encounter will remove the glitch this took the luck aspect out of the Skip and put the burden on the runner to stay on Route while executing if you deviated from required path by a pixel the entire glitch would fail meaning you spent the last two hours getting to this point for nothing Zeal would be the first person to Route the skip into a run setting a time of 7 hours 7 minutes and 40 seconds on September 8th 2020 putting the Run extremely close to the sub 7 time this answered the question on if the skip would lose time to delay in picking up death sentence as it only lost seven minutes to the boss fights until you could learn it again later in the Run meaning it saved 10 minutes overall since Cosmo Canyon takes 17 to complete things were moving fast in the run at this point players were frustrated that the slightest deviation in their setup would end their run so three community members acephir Kuma and mitsuo got to work on finding a setup that didn't require manipulation of Overworld encounters since the trick was based on the in-game timer being at a certain value what happened if you arrived early or late in one case you had to waste time waiting and in the other you've missed your window and have to reset set anyway so what if a setup was found that didn't depend on the glitched buggy that's exactly what was discovered it still needed precise movement but it no longer required manipulating a chokeable battle and getting an encounter didn't stop the new version from working either as players get out of the buggy mid-run to acquire the enemy skill big guard all that this trick demanded from the player was following a specific path to Cosmo Canyon so you can land on a particular pixel next to the trigger where the buggy would normally break down then if you exit the vehicle and get back in the game will recognize you as being past the trigger and allow you to proceed this was huge for the run as it eliminated the tedious RNG manipulation so you didn't have to worry about being late or early for the setup you're probably wondering how much time is saved and if it was enough to push the record below the sub 7 hour mark and to answer that question you'll have to stay tuned until I finish the Final Fantasy VII world record progression and if you want updates on that be sure to support me on patreon thanks for watching and I hope to see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Abyssoft

Views: 198,909

Keywords: Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy Seven, FF7, FFVII, Final Fantasy VII, Cosmo Canyon, Cosmo Canyon Skip, CCSkip, CC Skip, Hidden Skip, Speedrun, Speedrunning, World Record, Abyssoft, 1997, decade

Id: sdnx3estlzU

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2023