World Record Progression: Earthbound

earthbound is an RPG with an enormous cult following known for its humor and setting a typical of a role-playing game it became a staple for the Super Nintendo so it's no surprise that it garnered an active speedrunning community as well with many glitches and tricks being discovered over the past decade the run has evolved into one of the most broken speedruns in the RPG genre and has many players fined for top spot so sit back and relax as we explore the history of this run this is world record progression of earthbound the story begins in Japan way back in 2010 with the first runs of earthbound coming in just under three hours not much footage exists from this period is the Japanese streaming service doesn't archive old videos but there were two big glitches that were known about back then the stairs glitch and the two sync lift skips which will go into detail on in just a bit the scene for America didn't really pick up until 2012 when a runner named Mickey mage got interested in the game he would watch videos from the Japanese runners and try to replicate what he was seeing which made it difficult since the Japanese runs were often segmented and made use of savestates which added a layer of obscurity to any replication attempts that Mickey tried to do there are no recordings of Mickey's times left except for a run he did at agdq 2012 so let's take a look at it and see how the glitches and overall route looked back then Mickey was able to learn enough about the stairs glitch in order to execute it from analyzing the japanese runners videos as well as the Japanese task runner that would come in to his streams and offer him advice on the execution so let's have a look at what it actually does the stairs glitch allows you to break out of bounds of the area you're currently in this matters because the entire earthbound world is contained on one huge sprite map instead of each area being loaded as an instance what this means is that the area you're normally in is considered to be active so the game loads it and unloads the rest of the areas around it on the sprite map they're still there but they aren't being rendered fortunately for runners there is another way to load them once you've broken out of bounds by using the sound stone or opening the map you get from the library and o-net you can load the areas interact with them the power of this glitch is that it allows you to bypass any trivial area of the game since you can just walk to anywhere in the world once you're out of bounds you're probably wondering why runners don't just go to the end of the game here and there's a few reasons for that you need to travel back in time by using the phase distorter before the game will set up cutscenes that play during the final battle if they don't get set up the game will softlock instead when it tries to play them to avoid the softlock there are two logic gates that need to be cleared in order to load the cutscenes before the final boss can be killed the first requires you to drop down the hole in lumen hall in order to make doctor enter nuts appear in Saturn Valley and the second is killing nightmare in order to get the phase distorted to appear once these two things are done the cutscenes that play during the final fight are loaded in the game will no longer softlock now that we know why we can't go to the end of the game when breaking out of bounds let's look at what we can do the first stairs glitch in the run occurs in 3d and it has quite the intricate setup that wasn't very consistent on the best of is when nests onto the stairs there is a very brief animation the place that transitions him from the platform he's on to the stairs themselves the transition is about 15 frames long and if a text box appears while it's occurring the animation will be interrupted and the player will then be able to break out of bounds to get a text box to appear here the players make use of the delivery guy mechanic who will seek the player out when called and allow them to do some inventory management there are cases when he won't arrive and instead will call and say he can't find you which usually occur when you're in a tunnel or sanctuary area which is just what we need for this glitch to work the stairs glitch uses the text box from a delivery guys phone call to interrupt the transition animation inside of the three tunnel so getting the delivery guy called just after you enter the stairs transition breaks you out of bounds and gives you access to the entire world map Mickey's original setup for this involved of starting a stopwatch from the time he called the delivery guy and moving on to the stairs when he thought the correct amount of time and passed just before his agdq 2012 run a more consistent setup was found involving audio cues from the song playing in the tunnel so calling the delivery guy then getting to the tunnel following the consistent path would let him set up so that when he heard the cue he could walk onto the stairs the same time the call was coming the other glitch Mickey made good use of in his runs where the cliff skips into sin this glitch is exactly as it sounds it allows you to skip over cliffs that otherwise keep you in bounds how it works is that each pixel forming the edge of a cliff is marked as impassable by the game but sometimes due to the shape of the cliff you get places where one of those pixels are marked is passable if you can find one of those pixels and there is another passable pixel diagonally adjacent to it you can do certain d-pad inputs to have Ness clip through and this can be made easier by the use of a skip sandwich that increases necess speed normally if you try to leave to stand early via the tunnel you're chased back by ghosts but once you're in three if you try to go back to two soon the ghosts chase you back to three until that area is cleared but by breaking through two sets of cliffs and toussant you can get to the 3d side of the tunnel and once you enter it the ghosts will chase you back to three with this skip you can cut out the entire section where you need to rescue Paula which saves about 20 minutes after using the cliff skips and stairs glitch to get out of bounds the rest of the run was routed to be marathon safe making use of a foggy grind to gain some levels picking up two flying men and magic ant in various item duplication glitches to stockpile revive and peepee recovery items Mickey's final time at agdq 2012 was a 227 38 and it was done on January 7th it wouldn't take long for another runner to pick up where Mickey left off and during the latter half of a new renter stepped onto the scene by the name of nemi 43 and he would push the game to its absolute limits of the early area of earthbound speedrunning nemi posted a number of times in the earthbound anypercent category from late 2012 awkward since speedrun.com didn't exist back then a lot of these times were posted to the speed demos archive forums as well as some spreadsheet leaderboards that existed back then the earliest times from nemi were a 130 656 in November of 2012 and a 130 257 in June of 2013 but nemi's most definitive run that is considered the start of record history is a 126 39 happening on November 30th 2013 these early runs are significant because they were a source of information for other runners in the category with questions in the YouTube comments showing discussion on strats being used at the time but the most significant thing these runs use is iron G manipulation early tasker's of the game discovered what they called luck manipulation when they realized that certain inputs had an effect on what happened next in battles this didn't apply only to battle so as it turned out that enemy spawns in the overworld were also linked to inputs that the player made and with the correct series of inputs you could block enemies from spawning this was because of two values referred to as iron G 1 and iron G 2 which we'll cover a bit later but for now all you need to know is that opening the menu and making cursor inputs will advance these values which changes what happens in the game nemi was the first to incorporate RNG manipulation in two runs taking reference from a Japanese tasarov periódico he mapped out manipulated segments for lots of the game in his 126 run he had been nipped the hill and a Starman fight and then routed more manip nemi also improved the setup for the stairs glitch in 3 remember him making mage had used a stopwatch and then an audio cue to perform a stairs glitch instead of using the delivery guy called nemi would take a red swirl fight with zombies intentionally then during the course of the fight he manipulated the iron G to get nest sick with a cold and then ran away having a cold is significant here because you take damage in the overworld while it's active and if your HP gets low enough a text alert pops up for the player they're about to die so after the fight he just needed to walk down the ladder and wait for an audio cue there occurs much sooner then walk onto the stairs as a text box alerting the player about neces condition popped up which interrupted the transition and broke him out of bounds the cold text alert saved time or the delivery guy method because you no longer had to go out of your way to make the call and then wait around for his call to come after this who'd perform another stairs glitch in summers and fall through the hole looming halt to land in the underworld which puts the phase distorter in saturn valley he would then manipulating items that he could duplicate later in the game to greatly improve his chance of beating bosses while being so underleveled after this he went to magic ant to fight nightmare which triggers dark o-net and would pick up two flying men when normally you only have one but since you're here out of order the game much you have more and they serve as fodder so that the main party members don't die the magic ant segment was manipulation since once he's dead you get enough experience to level up and this advances the RNG this left the two Krakens and the nightmare fight with zero manipulation which is why the duplicated items were necessary during this era about 80% of runs would died a nightmare since you're at the mercy of iron gee and you're so underleveled after this segment you had Darko net to do and then it was on a cave of the past to fight gigas no manip it for the cave of the past leading up to gigas so another out-of-bounds glitch was used to bypass it and go straight to the fight with your full party and two flying men the fight requires a lot of luck on the runners part it was another big run killer but nemi managed to pull off the kill and finished out the run for 126 39 nemi's run stood for 11 months with many runners trying to dethrone him but it wouldn't be threatened until another runner started doing any % and his name was Andy perfect Andy came onto the scene in mid-2014 and his first completed anypercent round clocked in at 204 51 in April of that year Andy's run was using the same strategies nemi's from the 126 39 back in November of 2013 and if you go through Andy's run you'll see that you've lost around 20 minutes to the nightmare split from being killed during the fight and two problems within maybe Latian itself once Andy managed to kill nightmare he finished the run without any resets but his time had a lot that could be improved from faster inputs during manipulated sections to better crack and placement leading up the nightmare and better RNG in the fight itself rather than grind out runs that would inevitably died a nightmare Andy had other plans he knew that the game could be manipulated beyond the crack and fight and in fact he created a route that avoided all three Krakens leading up the nightmare altogether enemies spawn locations occur and water referred to as spawn plates given any spawn plate an enemy can be present at any location on the plate knowing this Andy found him a nip that would spawn the Krakens far enough away from the player that he could just walk a clear path up to nightmare which avoids taking a fight and having the iron GC change from gaining a level so with a clear path to the boss let's talk a bit about how it goes in the casual playthrough of the game you normally only have Ness present during magic and as it takes place entirely in his mind nightmare was particularly tough even in the vanilla run because he uses an called glorious light which has about a 40% chance of killing the player instantly due to the out-of-bounds glitch performed at summers to get here we have Jeff and Paolo with us as well this is significant for one reason Paulo has the probability which can do a lot of different things when used but one of them happens to be making the enemy feel strange a small percentage of the time which can make it target itself when attacking it had been theorized back in 2008 by at a surname flugel that if Paolo were to be present in the nightmare fight she could pray to confuse nightmare and then he could attack himself while the player attacked him uninterrupted another Tasker named Knight rode on pointed out that he could potentially use glorious light on himself and end the fight instantly tired of losing runs the nightmare and wanting to overcome an 80% reset rate Andi was determined to turn the biggest run killer in the route from a battle for favorable rng to an input only section that relied on execution instead and it should come as no surprise as to how he did it I think his sigh of relief says it all here for the first time ever the nightmare of getting runs past nightmare faded away just like magic ant using the theory from Nitro Don Andy found him a nip that had nightmare target himself with his one-hit ko with the big run killer out of the way all that Andy had left was gigas and if you thought he was leaving that battle up to iearn G as well guess again the old gigas fight involved duplicating revive in PP restore items to grind out a path to victory it was incredibly slow and contained a lot of iron G which as we've learned was something Andy hated manipulating the gigas fight wasn't going to be possible without manipulating K for the past as well so Andy performed a reset before entering k for the past and started testing out different manipulations one of the problems he had to overcome was routing the manipulation so that had factored in the different stat values Ness could have going into the fight since onat wasn't fully manipulated Nath could have variable stat increases this presented a problem specifically for the guts value since the gut stat is involved in the equation the game uses for determining critical smash hits and II knew that leaving Lonette would have nests at level 10 so the stat ranges would always be in the same ballpark once he found RNG values that worked he mapped them out and routed the run so that even if nest left with a low guts value he would always smash during the guys fight with the help of SD FG another runner active during this time Andy was able to determine the algorithm the game used to determine Smash Hits based on a character's gots value it turns out the game was doing the straight comparison to the characters gots value to determine if a smash would occur or not so using this knowledge they created what would be the first fully manip trout from magic ant to the end of the game to understand how crazy all this manip was you should know that runners didn't fully understand how rng 1 and rng 2 worked yet so any problems encountered with manip right off Taniya explanation as to why they were failing and II did discover something else that was very important during the gigas fight however to beat gigas normally you have to progress through three phases with the first two requiring the player to deal a certain amount of damage to trigger the next phase the third phase however requires the player to use pala spray ability a total of nine times with the run ending after the ninth prayer the six prayer in this series has NPCs that move around in the scenes that play and NPC movement is one of the unfortunate events that causes RNG to advance since the movement is random and II wasn't sure if he could successfully route the manip through the six prayer after coming this far he may have hit wall some clever thinking saved his route however and II noticed that the damage done to gigas after the prayer varied so by observing the damage role he was able to determine what RNG sees the game was on and adjusted the manip he needed to perform accordingly using this new manip and he would begin grinding attempts and then on October 26 of 2014 he completed the first run using the nip for the final two splits of the game with a final time of one 2601 beating nemi by 38 seconds and taking a record that stood for almost a year Andy's run had the potential to go a lot lower though he had to reset once in magic and due to taking a fight with a Kraken and during the gigas fight he dropped them a nip on his first attempt which caused another reset in all both mistakes would cost him about 4 minutes but with more attempts in practice it wouldn't take andy long before he got a run out of own at that had potential after own at the run lost some time losing over 3 minutes before the setup for the stairs glitch in 3 but the large time saves due to not resetting on the nightmare or gigas fight brought him back to the green he finished with a time of 120 208 saving over 6 minutes of time from the 3 minutes he was down in the early game giving him the first no reset run with a new route on November 15th 2014 now that nightmare and gigas were fully manipulated there wasn't much left in the run that caused players much grief so you would think the race to grind the record would be on but just two months later everything would change going into 2015's DFG would create a fully manipulated oh net the longest segment of the run which wasn't manipulated to this point this ended the early era of earthbound speedrunning and started the mid era where runs were now almost fully manipulated oh net before manip was a very long and unpredictable segment that had milk points where things would kill runs or end up costing a lot of time enemy spawns on the hill the fight with Frank the slug grind and giant step the Titanic ant fight and the cops at the end all had the potential to add time under your run or kill it outright three of these are boss fights so if you get a bad pattern on any of them you would die and have to reset the other two are a bit more unique with the enemy spawns leading up to the meteorite you have to hope they get stuck on walls or bushes or you're forced to D spawn them by walking away until they're off-screen and reloading the spawn plate hoping that it is empty the last large time sink an own ad was a slug ride which happened in giant step just before the Titanic and fight there are two types of enemies that spawned the first level of giant step riadi mouse and slopes in order to level up in the most efficient way to kill the Titanic ant runners would continually load spawn plates hoping to get a four pack of slopes to spawn in total they needed 22 to get the level 8 which gives them the PSI Rock and attack for the Titanic and fight you didn't want to fight the ratty mouse while grinding because they have a high gut stat which lets them smash you more endangering the run s DFG mainly ran the 80% glitchless category of hearth bound so in December of 2014 when he announced that he had fully manipulated own at the anypercent runners were quick to adopt it into their category you're probably wondering why Oh net didn't have a manipulated route already since is the first section of the game and there are a couple of reasons for this Oh net is a very long segment prima nip x came in between 27 and 30 minutes for top runners during this time which meant you would have to develop a manipulation of the game which would require a huge effort and was very daunting to attempt the second is that Anette contains a lot of NPC's which means that RNG values will advance when they are on screen and moving around so the route would have to take that into account as well and speaking of RNG it's about time we talked about how it works as mentioned earlier there are two RNG values and earth bound to control certain things in the game referred to as rng one and rng two these two values influenced a lot from turn order and battle enemy item drops the outcome of the bash action if an enemy spawns when a spawn plate is loaded as well as their position on the spawn plate itself both of these values start at the same numbers every time the console is reset and they increase on the same in-game events as each other which allows for consistent manipulation to be set up events like opening the menu moving the cursor in the menu and pressing B to bring up the HP PP menu all advance iron G 1 and 2 there are a few things outside of the players control that advance RNG 1 and 2 as well which makes creating a magnificant anytime an NPC begins or stops moving the values advance and any time a character is printed in a text box they will advance as well which is why runners always name the party members a single character to keep the Nippon sistent NPC movement is the largest roadblock to creating a manipulated route if you recall back to Andy's manipulated gigas fight one of the cutscenes that played had an NPC that moved but since you could determine what rng seed the game was on by looking at the damage role after the cutscene a route could be developed to accommodate for the different seeds in the overworld it's a different story as the number of potential events that could occur after an NPC moves is very large so accounting for all the possible outcomes and being able to adapt to them during a run isn't feasible so if the iron G briefer out of the way let's have a look at the first runner to incorporate the o-net manip into a run in early January of 2015 or really X was the first runner to take everything s DFG had created and incorporate it into a new route for any % with the magic ant through to gigas manip that andy created this run was almost fully manipulated from start to finish with only a few areas still containing unmanipulated segments graveyard dark o-net and winters comparing orys run to andy's previous record of 120 208 you'll see that Andy defeated thatíll boss and Annette at 26 23 which was a great time to get rid of Annette but an orys run he defeated captain strong at the 19 minute and 50 second mark over six minutes ahead of Andy manipulating the iron Jie made all the boss fights go as optimal as possible getting the fastest patterns that prevented you from dying and made you dish out the maximum amount of damage on your turns instead of despawning enemies in giant step to hope for large number of slugs or a used SDF geez giant step manip which gets bombs to drop from the slugs instead so that you can use them to damage the final boss quickly so the slug grind became a slug cakewalk coupled the o-net minute with great execution and auras part and you have a run that was shaping up to be top tier he saved time in every split except for one and on January 5th he took the 80% record with a 11450 you'd think that with this new route runners would be grinding it and racing to improve the time and while this is typical of any speed game that has a new route developed one thing you learn about earthbound is that no route lasts forever because while Ori was integrating the o-net manip for his world record run nemi was hard at work developing his own men approach for o-net there were a couple of things in Artie's route that nemi was able to improve on the first was to do with the map the player picks up at the library Ori would complete Anette and then double back to pick up the map which loses some time overall due to backtrack memy right at the mat pick up into his route so that he grabs it on his first time setting foot into o net after beating the star man Junior you're probably wondering why Ori didn't do the same thing in his run and that's because if you change a step in your manip the RNG values advance based on the new inputs so the input you have planned later won't work as the iron G seed they were made for is no longer what's being executed in the game's code the best way to think about an iron G seed and how manipulation works is like this imagine you're walking on a series of tight ropes blindfolded as long as you follow a certain path that you've already walked and know is safe everything will be fine and you won't fall but if you miss one step the entire path in front of you changes making the chance you will fall incredibly likely the next place nemi was able to save time was by manipulating a revived item dropped from the zombie possessor by manipulating this fight to get a secret herb but dropped nemi was able to cut out a walking section in the lost underworld where you would go out of your way to pick up some life noodles in a present not only that but nemi also found a more consistent setup for the stairs glitch in the 3d tunnel by getting possessed during the fight with the ghost the game puts a ghost sprite in the overworld that flies around the player in a circle as long as they are possessed the ghost flies at a consistent rate on a sec curve so by counting the revolutions of the ghost nemi was able to find a set up where if you walk down the ladder as the ghost was directly below you you could walk straight to the stairs and get the tax trigger that breaks you out of bounds with this manip and some tight execution nemi set to beating ori and he got on a good run just two weeks later he hit all of his new manip then hit his stairs glitch and he had a good fight with gigas and on january 19th 2015 he locked in the time of 106 17 and he brought the game to the closest that had ever been to being beaten in under an hour nemi's run would stand for over a year but there was a lot happening and earthbound anypercent during this period throughout February 2016 or he had been working on a neumann approach that used everything then he did up to the graveyard and then made some drastic changes to the latter half of the game in the old routes players would break out of bounds twice by use of the stairs glitch but doing it the second time when they got two summers required them to save the game and reset the console as there was no reliable setup to hit the glitch without doing so saving waste a bunch of time due to dialogue as you need to scroll through the entire conversation with your dad to be able to save and then the reset itself takes place which loses even more time using the little ghost from the possession status effect that nemi used as a visual cue re-broke out of bounds and read in which straight two summers but instead of leaving the house and going to save the hotel he went straight to the stairs and making use of the ghost as a visual cue again he was able to hit another stairs glitch the benefit of free setting is that it always brings the RNG values back to their starting point which was very convenient for writing manip into a run re routed his run without resetting at this point so everything he did from the second stairs glitch onward was an entirely new manip the next big route change that re made was the inclusion of the gutsy bat the gutsy bat drops from a Kraken in cave of the past and is one of the best weapons for Ness in the game as it raises his offense by 100 and his guts by 127 re theorized that the gigas fight would go faster if you had this weapon equipped during the fight so that you could more easily manipulate smash attacks normally for the gigas fight players save and reset when they enter cave for the past in order to clip out of bounds and walk straight to the fight re did the reset but instead of clipping out-of-bounds he read it up a nip that spawned only a single enemy the bionic kraken then using some more manipura and a drop a gutsy bat then he used Jeff's spy ability to pick up the bat and ran away from the fight re set to doing runs as soon as he developed all these new manipulation strategies despite all of these time-saving changes re wouldn't achieve world record with this route but he did clock in the time of 109 20 he encountered incredibly bad rng in the non manipulated parts of the run losing a lot of time to a death and brick road followed by a really bad Darko net with a lot of spawns but well look at those segments in just a bit what's important about ARS reroute are all the time-saving contributions he made some of which still exist in the room today there's one more thing that needs to be mentioned here and that's the discovery of a third RNG value that influences the game RNG 3 previously when rounding manipulations into runs players would encounter seemingly random hiccups that would throw their route off and end up with them resetting when s TFG was routing the first fully manipulated run of o-net he discovered why this was happening the iron g3 value holds influence over the other iron G values 1 & 2 but it doesn't advance by player's inputs like the other to do the earthbound map is divided into many 64 pixel boundaries and every time Ness crosses these boundary lines our g3 advances and it will also advance when you go through a door or when you fall down a hole given that the entire own net manip had been done without this knowledge really says something about the dedication of runners at the time they would rewrite their manip without a full knowledge of what was going on and worked around rng 3 whenever a route would die to it without even knowing what it was but while aura developed his route there were three runners grinding runs on an older router the game and posting really good times Daniel our GT classic James and ll temple these runners started running around the same time and we're putting in a lot of effort grinding runs Daniel had put up a 123 29 on September 18 2015 and he would improve it three more times until he arrived at a 108 11 in January of 2016 very close to nemi's record of 106 17 it was during this time that temple and James would start closing in on the record as well with temple finishing a 111 16 and James closing out a great run on October 19th 2016 James's run was good and had the potential to be even better but a mistake concave of the past would cost him close to two minutes using the new gutsy bat manip James is on pace for a 106 which would have made him the first person besides nemi to achieve such a low time but as James is about to initiate the gigas fight this happened sorry guys he pressed the talk button before he was in range to start the dialogue and initiate the fight this advances RNG meaning that the rest of the manip and I was on a different rng seed despite this setback he finished a run with a 108 58 a very good time in just 47 seconds behind Daniel feeling the heat from James it was just nine days later that Daniel would be doing world record attempts again and he got on a run that had potential coming out of winters he had really bad luck with brick road a seventh where you had three fights that have difficult but possible skips Daniel ended up taking all three fights and lost about a minute and a half but his three graveyard using are his rear out was really good and he made up almost all the time he had lost because of it then he came to Darko net and it's about time we looked at the segment of the game Darko net is an area of the game that wasn't manipulated but it's also a bit unique enemies with very aggressive movement patterns spawn here but there's a nice trick runners use to get around this the teleport ability teleport is a fast travel mechanic where you begin running very fast and if you keep building speed long enough you zip off the map and arrive at your destination however if you run into any object the teleport ends and you have to try again while teleporting enemies remain stuck in place so with a well-executed teleport you can dodge around enemies and cancel it just before you run off screen do this enough times and you get to the top of Darko net without triggering a single encounter there are risks to the strategy as sometimes you would stop your teleport and an enemy would spawn right on top of you meaning to need to teleport an additional time or take the fight and hope for a first turn run using the strategy Daniel had an amazing Darko net saving another minute and going into cave of the past he used the gutsy bat manip and saves another 38 seconds in the gigas fight his speed with input saved him some more time on October 28 2016 after 22 months nemi had been dethroned by daniel with a time of 104 55 knowing that he had the skill to lower the record James would set to completing a run and correcting his mistake leading up to the gigas fight despite getting all three fights in brick road James had a really good winter split saving almost a minute but in addition to that there are two things he did that need to be looked at a runner by the name of cerium started running around this time and James made use of two improvements that serum added to auras route the first was in the O net manip since the manip was initially developed for any percent glitchless and was adopted for this category the route had you pick up a bread roll because in the glitchless category you need health items cerium cut out getting the bread roll which changed the order of items would be in your inventory and since RNG advances on cursor movements this meant serum had to correct some spots in the manipular movements the second thing he did was reroute the gigas fight runners were doing an insane amount of beat presses in the first phase of the gigas fight to get on a good rng seed 34 presses to be exact cerium added new inputs to the first turn of the gigas fight that advanced the RNG to the correct seed faster than doing the 34 beat presses which saved a few seconds overall with these new changes to the route James would set to lowering his time and despite getting all three fights in brick road again James had a really good winter split saving almost a minute and going into the end of the run he wasn't slowing down across his entire run James would only lose a single second saving time in all the other splits and was an incredible gigas fight he would claim the 80% record with a time of 104 42 On January 17th 2017 oh my god oh my god guys that's world record right I'm like nemi's records set in January of 2015 James's record wouldn't stand for 22 months because of 2017 earthbound speedrunning exploded using the route he created cerium would grab the record in May of 2017 with a 104 20 just 22 seconds ahead of James this run didn't have any new discoveries it was just executed very well across every split oh my god I did it I did it it's world record with the record out of 104 I run her by the name of 4th horn looked at one of the non manipulated sections and started creating a manipulation for it he set his sights on brick road which if you recall contains three scripted fights of the game wants you to take the first and second fights were skippable but the third fight was a different story since once the enemy agroed it ran straight at you the problem with dodging this fight wasn't the movement required by the player but the movement the bubble monkey a companion took if bubble monkey makes contact with an enemy a fight will initiate and while moving he will randomly stop and start making it difficult to predict if he will hit an enemy or follow the players movement and avoid it knowing this the plan was to walk in place until bubble monkey stopped and then agro the present and dodge it if everything went well the bubble monkey would dodge the present when he moved to catch up with Jeff since it wasn't very common for him to stop and start again after already stopping and starting just before the movement started fourth one manip reproach that by following certain movements using certain buttons to advance RNG and by killing the first enemy with a bottle rocket you could ensure you skipped the next two fights 100% of the time fourth one changed the nip for the pawn cave as well which created entirely manipulated winters after the testing camp cerium took this brick Robo nip and started grinding runs he managed to lower his world record on September 29th 2017 but it wasn't a perfect run by his standards falling the minute that fourth weren't created for winters serum thought he dropped them in dip near the end so he saved and quit at the end of the section to reset RNG back to their initial values losing about 20 seconds even with this extra save and quit he finished a run at the time of 103 41 a full 39 seconds ahead of his old record wanting to correct his mistake cerium wouldn't wait long to lower the record again because just 5 days later on October 4th he hit the fulminant about by 4th horn and got a time of 102 52 following the tradition of he who developed the manip canning the record that nemi Andy and Ori established fourth one wouldn't let cerium get all the records with the newman dippy developed from when he developed it in September of 2017 fourth one would grind out attempts as well coming close to the record with a 102 58 just 6 seconds behind cerium however it wouldn't be until 2018 that 4th horn got on a run that had a chance of world record in late January of 2018 he was on a run that was milking each section for all the time saves they had left to give he was on pace for most of the run but going into cave of the past he lost time it was behind for the first time in the run by about since the run is manipulate in the end there wasn't any way for him to get record right well there was one way by rushing through the inputs as fast as he could fourth one was going to gain time on Sirian by pressing the buttons faster which opened him up to accidentally mashing too many times or hitting the wrong button with either of these errors killing his run but as he queued up the final prayer of Paula whoo-ho man that's the world record baby he ended the run with a time of 102 49 saving 11 seconds on his final split in beating Syrian by 3 seconds on January 28 2018 but there's one more runner we haven't covered yet in this era and that's EKKO Luke who had been running the glitchless category for quite a while but started grinding attempts of 80% around September of 2017 slowly improving their 80% time Luke Oh would become a contender for the record and we're fourth weren't only rushed inputs when he knew he was on pace for the record Luka rushed inputs during the entire run quickly becoming a contender for the record Lugo would post a 100 551 on September 27th 2017 but Luke oh never stopped grinding attempts eventually getting on a run in February 2018 that started off like any other run arriving at Darko net seven seconds behind their PB Luke who set out to destroy the split with some very favorable spawns and tight teleporting that +7 turned into a minus 33 saving 40 seconds on this split alone knowing that world record was guaranteed as long as the manip was done correctly Luke Oh slowed down at inputs during the gigas fight to make sure it was done properly losing 16 seconds throughout cave of the past and the gigas fight finishing with a time of 102 31 beating for thorn by 18 seconds and setting a record that seemed almost unbeatable fuko's record ends what is referred to as the mid era of earthbound speedrunning it started with a fully manipulated Oh net and went through a lot of changes such as or a single-segment double out-of-bounds manip and fourth horns brick road beneath the route as it existed didn't have much time left to be saved out of it and grinding for a record by one second was a daunting task with the speed at which inputs were getting done but there was one barricade that renders never expected to be lifted and it would bring the time even lower glucose record was good and throughout 2018 many runners tried to improve it but there I was so optimized that no matter how hard they tried they couldn't squeeze any extra time out but all that would change in 2018 when the Japanese TAS or Peru Kiko unveiled a glitch that would turn earthbound speedrunning on its head normally the players trapped a no net by a police barricade that only goes away once you've beaten captain strong as he radios the officers to let you through once he's defeated getting too strong required clearing some other flags as well beating Franck to get access to giant step and then beating Titanic int which allowed you to fight strong this took a lot of time about eighteen and a half minutes if you go by aku's time in the world record on September 18th of 2018 pure hiko posted on the forms that he found a way to load the barrier in a different location as soon as you came down from the hill after beating star man jr. and it saved a ton time the method is a bit tentacle as it involves understanding how the game render sprites in simplified terms the sprite renderer the game uses can only hold 22 sprites at a time so when you attempt a load of 23rd sprite into the list of 22 it loads the first sprite in the list where the 23rd sprite would be using a special setup pure hiko show that it was possible to do this in such a way that one of the barriers blocking the path out of o-net could be loaded in place of another sprite on the map and let the player break out early but that wasn't all pure heat were found in winters there was a task only strat using the teleport mechanic that allowed you to clip outside the cliffs that normally keep you in bounds using the strat it was possible to skip going through brick road and pond cave altogether so in Peru Kiko posted that he discovered a way to do the winters cliff skips without the task only strat three days after he dropped a barrier skip a no net the community went crazy in winters players had to go through brick road and pond cave which if you recall fourth weren't created a manipura to smooth out the segments by using the new cliff skips you could bypass both of those dungeons and it works similar to the cliff skips between two sand and three except the inputs were a bit different due to a very technical reason we won't get into once you were outside of @se camp with this trick you had to walk down to Stonehenge and perform another cliff skip to get back and bounce once back in bounds all you had to do was talk to dr. Andrew nuts and you could take the sky runner back to three to perform a stairs glitch both of these new skips meant one thing a neumann if needed to be done in order to incorporate them into the run successfully and the runner to do that would be someone that hadn't held the record for over four years Andy perfect since winters was being redone from the very beginning this meant that Andy had to reroute manip from winters all the way to the end of the nightmare fight from the time period go dropped the new skips on the 18th of September and he would set to work on creating the new route a large chunk of Oh net was now cut out so Andy had a difficult problem of finding manipulation for the zombie fight in 3d since Ness would be at level 2 and Jeff would be at level 1 if you recall this fight needs two things to happen ness needs to take damage and he needs to get hit with the cold status ailment so a text box trigger will break the player out of bounds when they go to the transition on the stairs since Ness was such a low-level and he needed to manipulate a low damage role on the zombie and for Nesta catch a cold which wasn't the easiest thing to do but if you give auntie manip problem he's going to find a way to pull it off the rest of the run just needed new manip for re-established skips and the gigas fight didn't end up requiring a reroute because the manip that re made worked even though the party was at a lower level so with all of this now established it didn't take long for Andy set the first of what would be a slew of records because just eight days later he did what was thought impossible for the longest time yes holy crap oh man oh I'm sorry guys I was so silent for that I took the menuing in that fight slower than anybody has ever took him taken menuing in a fight before ever in the history of earthbound because I did not want to drop this I wanted this so bad and he locked in the first sub our time in history for earthbound 80% with a time of 50 7:05 on September 26 2018 beating Luke O's previous record by five and a half minutes but that wasn't where he was going to leave it Andy's first run with the manipulated from winters of nightmare had a few problems he took the two sim cliffs low to eliminate some risk to the run and he took his gigas fight incredibly slow to make sure he didn't mess up the manip and have to reset there was also the issue of the cliff skips in winters being unreliable with runners buying multiple skip sandwiches to try and break through as these cliff skips were notorious for failing but we'll get to why just a bit using his new route and he would lower the record even further claiming the 5510 just two days after his previous record and then since he already achieved a sub hour he went balls to the wall on the gigas fight and this happened [Music] Jiji Andy got a 52:36 on September 29th 2018 in the span of three days he would lower the record by just under 10 minutes but it wouldn't last long with all the new tech pushing the time under an hour a lot of runners would get interested in any percent which would make October 2018 just as busy for earthbound as September was Syrian would be the first to challenge for the record getting a solid PB of 5325 and on October 4th he would get a few close attempts one in particulars on pace but it died to the gigas fight however later on in the night he got on a run that was just as good as Andy's and it had potential with steady time saves up to the winter segments he would be 32 seconds ahead of his PB but with incredible cliff skips that had him only used three skip sandwiches and winters he would be a minute and 26 seconds ahead of his PB coming into three-d-- losing only one second to nightmare and 20 seconds to Darko net Syrian would enter guy gets just over a minute ahead of his PB logging at a final time of 52 23 13 seconds ahead of Andy and a new world record despite all the new time saves runners were quickly getting frustrated with the new route as there was a high chance of losing time or even the run itself due to the difficulty of the winners cliff skips not wanting to constantly reset in winters Andy and Daniel would start looking for ways to set up a more successful skip the cliff skips have two components the skip itself which functions the same as a twosome 2-3 cliff skips and the skip sandwiches to be able to afford for skip sandwiches to minimize your chance of reset you need to go down to the Tessy camp and stay overnight to fix the broken spray can turning it into the defense spray then double back to the drugstore so you can sell it and afford all four sandwiches walking down to the Tessie camp and then back up to the drug store cost a lot of time so anything that would make this more consistent will be routed in almost instantly one night while looking for better cliff skips and winters Daniel would pop into Andy stream and announce that he'd found a setup for the cliff skips that was a lot more consistent Daniel's setup was good enough that the extra skip sandwiches weren't necessary so with a new setup the trip that Tessie camp was cut out as you already had enough money for two sandwiches when you first left the boarding school from this point on the winners cliff skips became known as the cliffs of Daniel and not wasting any time and he'd start grinding runs with a new setup he would end up saving a minute in 44 seconds to the winters cliff skips alone thanks to Daniel set up and with a solid run through to the end he locked in a world record of 50 101 this route was fast and the question of how fast quickly started to be asked could sub 51 was sub 50 possible that classic James was the first to try and answer that question with solid splits across the entire run and a Darko net that only lost 12 seconds James went into the final split before gigas at the 38 24 mark 31 seconds ahead of when Andy's run did and he had some incredibly fast inputs during the gigas fight if you look at Andy's gigas he lost seven seconds over the course of the split but James threw caution to the wind and went as fast as he could James would shatter the question of could this route sub 51 because he locked in a final time of 50 Oh for almost a full minute ahead of Andy which then made the question not is sub 50 possible but who would get it and when James said his record on October 22nd 2018 and that's where it would stay for the rest of the year looking back over 2018 the record changed hands eight times with six of those improvements coming between September 26 in October 22nd but all this activity would just be a sign of things to come because some other former record holders which dream attempts as well making 2019 the busiest year for Earthbound ever 2019 started out very fast and Syrian would be the first runner to get on pace for record he had a good early game and he ate his first skipped sandwich for the cliffs of Daniel popping through to the other side in the last few seconds of the speed boosts it grants from there he went down to the lab hit the skip 13 seconds after using the sandwich putting him 1 minute ahead of his PB which meant he needed a good Darko net if he wanted a chance at the record there were a couple of instances where he had to thread the needle of teleports but he came out of Darko net losing only 14 seconds then he got past the Kraken in k4 the past and this happened I it up I think I fixed it I think I fixed it oh my god I had to think immediately for that cerium dropped him a nip but recovered from his mistake by adjusting the iron G values on the fly to the correct number they needed to be which was only possible due to a thorough understanding of how iron G works an Earthbound with the mistake now fixed he set to beating gigas and no extra input was going to stop him cerium achieved the world first sub 50 run on January 16 2019 beating James by just 11 seconds but it wouldn't stand for long due to an improvement with the barricade skip and o-net normally for the barricade skip players would have to go into the hotel to reset the game so they could get on a good iron GC that made manipulate him skip easy to happen a runner by the name of Hunter who ran the 80% glitchless category made a joke to another runner named iridium challenging him to find a single-segment manip for the barricade skip and rhythm came back in two hours saying that he'd done it his single-segment barrier skip does one notable thing however it skips getting the mr. baseball cap which affects the run in a big way normally players grab the cap to sell it off so they can afford more skip sandwiches but by skipping the baseball cap they only have the money to afford one which meant the first two cliffs in thygesen had to be done with had sandwiches making the split a bigger reset point using the rhythms new barrier skip classic James would get the first world record with a 4935 on February 6 2019 but erytim wasn't done finding new skips just yet even with the new winters cliff setup found by Daniel the second cliff skipped to get into the lab was still a bit of a bother as it was based around sub-pixel positions and rhythm was set out to find a setup that didn't require you to mash inputs these two skip improvements would start a war for the record with cerium Daniel and fourth weren't all vying to lower the time [Music] let's go baby got a reprieve and donut you better move your ass away from the phone oh we're I made it there it is oh my god Oh [Music] it was cool I was so nervous that's all kind of solid we might actually be ahead coming out here okay okay I want to take it easy guys I'm not gonna try to go crazy fast all I need to do is bring it home [Music] whoa that looks good okay let's go let's go let's go let's go baby let's go baby Daniel had ultimately squeezed this route for just about all it was worth with his 4824 being a last record that this route would provide and this wasn't due to runners getting tired of the category it was because Hannah will Graham showed up Hannibal had been lurking in the earthbound community for years with foreign post dating back 11 years on speed demos archive he didn't get around to doing his first runs until much later starting with the Boogie percent category back in April of 2019 but he got interested in any percent shortly after completing his first run in May of the same year on the same day he started learning the category it wouldn't take him long to get close to the top competitors either quickly making a name for himself with a 53:16 being posted just three days after he started learning the category but he wouldn't settle on just doing runs Hannibal did a lot of research and testing around the cliff skips and winters and he made some great discoveries based on the current setup the game would give you six possible cliff skip outcomes for that didn't work one that barely works and one that's guaranteed to be a quick clip through the setup that Hannibal found made sure you were only getting to the superfast or just barely variations with visual cues that let you know which setup you were on but he wasn't done with cliff skips just yet and he set his eyes on too soon not wanting to do a rhythms route where you do two cliffs without sandwiches Hannibal would change the to sand cliffs altogether cutting out one of the cliff skips and setting up a route that had you only do two skips requiring only the second skip to use a skip sandwich using all this new information that Hannibal had found serum would go to work on getting the record back and thanks to the cliff skip setups in particular he would do just that because on June 3rd 2019 this happened world record finally finally dude after all the dropped runs finally about time dude and that's a decent one that's more than by just a couple of seconds which some of the others were looking like they were going to be a great Darko netsplit would put cerium ahead enough that losing some time and gigas still gave him a 9 second improvement over daniel's record with a 48 15 this is where the record would stay for the entire summer as well that is until hannibal had anything to say about it around the time serum posted the 48:15 hannibal was experimenting with changing the manipulation for two fights nightmare and gigas leading up to his 48 24 Daniel had rerouted the nightmare fight to be faster than the previous manip but surely after serum lowered the record Hannibal would find him a nip that saved four seconds and removed a high risk input that had an increased chance of a runner hitting the wrong button and throwing the men tip off the gigas fight was something else entirely because it has something runners call the clone seed which is an rng seat that looks identical to a safely manipulated route except it kills the run and there is no way to distinguish it from the identical safe route with gigas Hannibal was looking at solving the clone seed he was especially motivated to do so since the clone seed had just robbed him of a run on pace for 49 flat and since he was on emulator he rewound the game that night and got to work so what exactly is the clone seed if you recall back to Andy's first minute of the gigas fight there's the issue in the sixth prayer where an NPC will move during the cutscene and advance the RNG and he routed this so that two outcomes were determinable based on the damage value see after the prayer and he had developed a nip for both of them however one of these outcomes had a chance of being the clone seed and if you got the clone seed your run would get into a place where it wasn't possible to finish which killed your attempt on a random chance Hannibal didn't figure out exactly what was causing clone seed but he did find manip inputs that worked for the safe route and the clone which ended the clones reign of terror as an orangy run killer using his new discoveries Hannibal set to lowering his anypercent time for the record and he'd get close on July 23rd 2019 he posted a time of 48 16 just one second off the record and he knew he could do it with a few more attempts then on August 12th this happened and you guys for the first time in its history the ante percent record had a tie and Hannibal wasn't content to leave it there but instead of grinding runs he set to work on something else until now it hadn't been necessary to manipulate Darko net as the time lost I getting some bad play spawns wasn't overly bad but any percent was getting to the point where no matter how small the time saved someone found it would be routed in one of the issues with creating a manipuraka net was that some of the spawn plates had a rate of 100 percent which meant that no manip was going to stop them from spawning enemies the other issue was that the enemies here home dine on players so they couldn't be cutted or dodge like some other enemies teleport had to be used to avoid them here hand will work meticulously on this manip and he solved the problem rather eloquently since d spawning wasn't an option and the enemies charged towards the player Hannibal found Minetta had the enemy spawn caught on walls or stuck behind bushes even with two seemingly impossible problems to deal with Hannibal found a way around them and using this new route serum would come back and start streaming attempts bringing him a dark own Atman it would prove to be the deciding factor in serums next time as up to the nightmare fight he was in the red for the entire run but knowing he had time to save with the manip he pushed on determined getting back to Saturn Valley is cerium saved 26 seconds in Darko net and put himself 18 seconds ahead of his previous record with a fast gigas fight he pulled off a 47:15 saving seven more seconds and getting the first sub 48 time on October 1st 2019 it's worth mentioning here that after getting this record serum iguana to sweep the earthbound leaderboard getting the record in every category and holding them simultaneously but that's a story for another time he wasn't the only runner to use this new route either with James and Hannibal all running 80% at the same time it was a race to see who would improve the record next December rolled around and no one to beat serums time but that would change quickly when James hit some very fast cliff skips and too soon after his cliff skips he would gain and lose a few seconds each split but ultimately he'd go into guy gets 23 seconds ahead and with some fast inputs let's go guys let's go that's a really good time that's a really good time the only thing that wasn't Syrian would continue streaming any percent runs during December and he gets small PB on the 11th of the time of 47:43 saving 3 seconds in his gigas fight with fast inputs then falling in James's footsteps Syrian would have a run that was very similar in progression to the record James set with some fast cliff skips into stone setting the pace for the rest of the run but where James would save time and came to the past and gigas Serra mildews some time it wasn't enough to stop a new record whoever and on December 16th 2019 he'd achieved a 47:29 yes student did it didn't do it some forty seven thirty oh my god dude who so nervous oh my god I'm so glad I brought up you would think with every section except for the small walk of the three-d-- graveyard being manipulated that there wouldn't be much left to change in the run especially with the barricades kept cutting out the last roadblock to the route but there was something that runners could theoretically get by that had been known about for a long time if you look back at Mickey majors running from 2012 you'll hear him mention a Starman junior skip that was TAS only due to the player needing to perform around eighth frame perfect' inputs in a small window to bypass the trigger making it next to impossible to do in a run but when Hannibal hears the words impossible he doesn't move on he gets to work instead of finding a setup for the Starman junior skip that the tas uses hannibal tried another method once you get to the top of the hill in the first of the game you get a party member named buzz-buzz who is very powerful he has high stats said if you trigger a fight he will always go first but luckily he uses the shield ability on the party on turn one and doesn't attack until turn two it had been known that if you die before reaching Starman junior he would spawn back at your house so you're probably wondering how hannibal pulled this off with buzz buzz in the party he manipulated a fight with a crow on the way up the hill so that ness would take damage and be at low health he then manipulated an enemy to spawn on the plate directly below the meteorite before buzz-buzz joined the party this let him used the game's red swirl mechanic to manipulate a fight where the enemy goes first even though buzz buzzes in the party so the enemy would target ness for lethal damage before buzz was even had a turn what this did was trigger a death wart that spawned you at your house with buzz buzz in your party so from here you could walk to pokies house without fighting starmon and get buzz-buzz out of your party which clears the flag to open Anette up to you if you look back over what Hannibal had done he never got the 80% record with any trick or manipulative aisle AIT's a doctrine of he who makes the manip gets the record two days after Syrian posted his 47:29 Hannibal got on a really good run that didn't use his Starman junior skip since it hadn't been routed in yet due to how much it changed the rng seed he would finish three to eight seconds ahead of Syria once Hannibal finished winters he would lose time over the record until he went into the gigas split with eight and a half seconds saved over the record this gave Hannibal enough time that he didn't have to worry about going fast with inputs and he instead opted to take the fight a little slower and on December 18th 2019 he proved the doctrine to be true with a time of 47:27 beating Syria by just two seconds Hannibal would hold the record for the rest of the year with James running a few attempts over the holidays to try and lower the time if you look back at the records James achieved he would almost always improve her out after it had been optimized like he did to Daniel in 2017 and with the three records he set in 2019 James fed off of new discoveries in the community and always seemed to come back after one was made to improve his time it wouldn't take him long to get keyed in on the Starman skip as well and on January 6 2020 he got on a run that started off 20 seconds ahead of world-record after starring skip and using that time save he would head to again to sometime losses in the twosome cliff skips and three Graveyard through the winners but once he went through the nightmare fight he knew he had something special nice man let's go that is a good time holy crap I'm so happy I didn't screw that one up thanks guys thanks for all the Gigi [Music] ma'am now him [Music]

Channel: Abyssoft

Views: 160,347

Keywords: world record progression, earthbound record progression, earthbound, any%, agdq, stairs glitch, cliffs skip, tas, mother 2, shigesato itoi, speedrun, rpg, speedrunning, world record history, history of earthbound, ness, giygas, nightmare, progression, earthbound history, history

Id: zUJWGE6MVJU

Length: 52min 45sec (3165 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/EyeBallEmpire]

And I thought I spent a lot of time playing EarthBound. I just play through it once or twice, vanilla, every year.

[u/Myth-o-poeic]

The history of world records for Earthbound, if you're remotely interested in the series or game, this will likely pull you in and not let go.

[u/Phearlosophy]

I thought it was a summoning salt video and got really excited for a second. I'll check it out either way

Edit: it's really great! The audio quality is a little lacking but fantastic content!

[u/subterfugeinc]

Yo that starman jr skip at the end. Icing on the cake. Great video!