Hi,

I'd like to get into running Final Fantasy VII, but I have a question about the "fast disc speed" option on the PS2: How much time does it save over the course of an any% run?

For various reasons, I thought I'd start by practising with a PS1 emulator, but I noticed that I was already two seconds behind PS2 players after the opening FMV. I'm not expecting to challenge the top of the leaderboard any time soon but it would still be useful to know how much time I'm giving away by not being able to play the game on a PS2. Does the fast disc speed setting only speed up FMV loading times or other things as well? If it's the former, it should be easy to calculate - I could do it myself - but if it's the latter, it will be much more difficult, if not impossible.

Thanks.

Probably around half an hour. Not exactly sure but it is quite significant

That said, don't let it deter you from learning/practising on emulator anyway. My advice is to make sure speedrunning the game is your thing before investing in a PS2. You should probably do that eventually though if you want to compete. Or just run the warpless PC categories. I think they're a little less competitive but the route is essentially the same (if not identical, just different encounter manipulation afaik).

Thanks for the quick reply and the encouragement, Cereth!

I do actually own a PS2 and a physical copy of Final Fantasy VII, but they're both in pretty bad shape, so I'd have to replace them if I was going to take it seriously. And get a capture card, of course.

I've never been a fan of the PC releases - including the newest one - but I'll consider it. Does a fully glitchless category of the game exist? I'd basically like to run the game "as intended" - beating all the storyline bosses, but not Ruby, Emerald, etc.

And one final question: what are the restrictions on using an emulator for submitted runs? I'm thinking ahead here, but I notice the leaderboard can be filtered to show only times on an emulator (even though there aren't any at the moment), so I'm assuming such runs are allowed, even if they're never going to be #1.

Feel free to just point me in the right direction if these questions have already been answered, since I wouldn't want to take up too much of your time. Thanks again. :)

Alright I asked around a bit, and it turns out that emulator is actually faster than PS2. As such we decided it would end up on the PSX digital leaderboard with PSTV runs (at least for now). Keep in mind emulation is always a grey area so runs might get moved/seperated or possibly completely removed in future. Surprisingly, there actually aren't any emulator runs on the leaderboard right now.

As for glitchless categories, for PC, the 'less glitchy' (warpless) run still does the midgar skip on disc 2 which skips ~10 minutes. Midgar turks and Proudclod are skipped from that. PS runs do this too. There is also the all bosses category which is as it sounds, but isn't very popular. PS has all bosses glitchless (no w-item dupe etc.) and PC just has all bosses (so it includes W-item dupe, vincent mug glitch and maybe others).

I'd recommend joining the FF Speedruns discord here: https://discord.gg/0tjIC3eQA7VFd6Qw to discuss with the other runners. As you may have noticed, these forums aren't really used.

One final note, just because categories exist, you can always create your own. It's usually just preferred to conform to a category so the leaderboards aren't a miss and so there's actually some competition. But if glitchless is what you really want to do then don't be afraid to step up. But it'll only add 2 trivial boss fights (and it's arguable that Turks skip is intended anyway). I'd recommend just running No slots