Hi Gallax,

The leaderboard is well verified and I don't believe any of the runs are breaking the rules set for each category.

There is one exception for NSG runs to allow Tidus to learn Flee, but otherwise there shouldn't be any sphere grid usage.

The combat booster is allowed only in the "Any% w/Boosters" category. I'm curious where you think FFXED is being used and for what purpose.

If you could provide more details or links to specific runs I'll be happy to investigate or help explain why something may or may not be allowed for certain categories.

Is it possible that speedrun.com loaded incorrectly for you and was showing Any% w/Boosters runs instead of NSG runs?

Yeah I was actually going to do it sometime this week, but I can do it now.

There are still some issues with the 4x booster but it's mostly working

The community put together an extensive guide on how to beat the game quickly, which you can find here: http://bombch.us/DREl

I'd strongly advise against using it for casual stuff, there's a relatively strong chance that the story progression could reset in some areas if you backtrack or revisit areas after getting the airship, and when that happens it can overwrite the auto-save too which can be frustrating.

We'll hopefully add better support in the future, but right now we only test functionality for any%

This video is very old, and from an era where Twitch used to record videos in chunks of 30 minutes. Over time, some of those chunks were lost, and I think that's what's happened here. A 30 minute chunk was lost and it was skipped.

Also, because this run is so old, I would strongly advise against using it to learn the run, because the strats will be very outdated. I would suggest learning from the Any% No Slots/No Warps 30 FPS category instead. The FPS difference won't change any of the strategies.

Thanks Pac <3

In your last post you said you didn't know the colour of the Chocobo...

You don't get the boat until disc 3, so by what you've said he certainly wouldn't have skipped from disc 1 to 3, if the skip happened after he got the boat.

It might help to clarify which airship you're talking about. If there's any truth to this, there's a chance the game recognises every vehicle on the world map the same, since as far as I remember you only ever have access to one vehicle at a time (separately from chocobos), so maybe it can be perceived as a sort of "vehicle level".

You say the airship was next to him after inserting the new disc, but none of the discs start on the world map (all of them start in cutscenes) so I'm pretty sure this would have nothing to do with the card but more likely putting in the wrong disc at the wrong time.

Probably worth mentioning though if this is the case, that it's sort of an unwritten rule across all speedruns to not really touch the hardware while the game is running, in FF9 this means not opening the disc tray to skip cutscenes, for example. In multi-disc speedruns, it's a rule to only open the disc tray when the game prompts you to, and as a result, skipping between discs like this may simply be impossible under the current rules, unless the game is still able to run through the story and FMVs while on the wrong disc (i.e. playing through disc 3 while on disc 1, then putting in disc 4 when you get to the end of disc 3).

Finally, the gold Chocobo bug is an old myth that has no proof of ever existing and, in speedrunning at least, is pretty strongly believed to not exist and is meme'd on a bit.

Hope some of this helps. If there's any truth to this, my speculation is that you've put in the wrong disc while standing in an unusual area or something. It'd make sense to me at least if he was trying the other discs because the correct disc kept freezing on a cutscene (due to a scratch). Maybe when trying the other discs the vehicle got a free upgrade

I'll add some clarity to the rules but yeah essentially all skips are banned, so even if there is a new one, it'll very likely be banned too.

As for timing, yeah you can change the system clock if you want to, but for JP that'll eat into your time a little bit. Though you could probably simply do

1. Power on
2. Change time
3. Power off
4. Insert game
5. Power on + start timer

I'm not sure what you want to change the time for though. Have you managed to achieve RNG manipulation on PS2?

There is a mod that drastically speeds up cutscenes which might interest you for your own playthroughs, but as DTG said, mods are banned and so running the game without cutscenes isn't possible right now, sorry!

As I always say though, you can always do speedruns in your own way (with the mod) and everything, it just means your times won't be uploaded to the leaderboards. If you really want to run the game, it might be worth considering doing something like this and then just occasionally doing runs without the mod when you've improved a lot.

It has existed in the past, but I believe only had one run (by Flobberworm4), and it wasn't very well optimised. It can be added again if you're able to show some passion and seriousness toward the category so it doesn't simply rot away as a poor excuse for a leaderboard again ;)

Just trying to avoid situations where people do one or two runs and then nothing ever comes of it. A leaderboard needs competition to really serve any purpose.

My opinion is pretty irrelevant because I've no intention of running this but I'd like to add some food for thought anyway.

I think with a category like this I think you need to step back and consider why you're routing it in the first place, and that's probably to add more strategies and change up the routing from what you're all used to. I think if you go about circumventing this by clearing battles in questionable ways it kind of makes the category less interesting. So I'd argue, for the integrity of the category and interest in routing, it'd be better to fight these battles properly anyway. Mostly looking at Armodullahan here considering Zaghnol would just be attacks (but Zaghnol could also change your equipment/shopping I don't know).

Anyway, if you're doing all bosses I think it's better to actually fight them, there aren't exactly many additional bosses in this game anyway so it's a bit of a waste to basically skip the extra ones you do get. Technicalities on what exactly a boss or a victory is aside, I think the goal should be something that's interesting to route/run/watch.

It would be most ideal if you were to run the game on PC or one of the other existing categories, as we'd have to adjust things to account for your run.

Either we create a category for Vita (which is a bit silly because it would so rarely be used and you'd be on your own), or add Vita runs to PS3/4 category, which I think is the better option. Vita is most likely slower than PS4 (as is PS3) so it's not a fair comparison by any means, but at least you can compete with something this way.

Language in this game doesn't make an awful lot of difference because text appears instantly and you're only changing the size of the text box. The boxes still have to 'grow' and 'shrink' to different sizes to fit different text so you can still save a frame or two on a text box, but it's much less significant than other games. I'd be surprised if it amounted to anything more than like 5 seconds.

It would need some discussion with the community, but I think Vita would be its own category, and PS4 might get thrown in with PC (I think they're essentially the same?), if they're different then that'd also be its own category.

It's not a waste of time to do a speedrun on them at any rate. Speedrunning is supposed to be for fun, not just to put a time on a leaderboard. You can still get your own PBs and do your own thing. It's a bad mindset to think you ¤have¤ to stream, record or submit speedruns.

Make a post somewhere when you've completed a run and we'll open a discussion on where it goes on the leaderboard.

Yeah, if it's faster it'd be its own category most likely. If it's proven to be the same speed or slower, it should be fine to be on the normal PSX board

This is without any discussion on the matter so it isn't concrete, though. There isn't any current stance on PSP because nobody has done it yet and asked to be on the leaderboard (to my knowledge)

Any PS emulator is allowed, but the key thing by using them is that you should expect your run to be slower, which is why they're allowed. I recommend just accepting that your runs will be slower than console, and count them as practice for when you do get a console. By hunting for the fastest possible settings, you creep towards making the emulator faster than console, which would exempt your run. For fixing crashing/stuttering you should be able to google FF9 emulator settings and fiddle around with anything you find to see what works for you, it's a popular game so there should be plenty of help for it.

I think EZCap and Dazzle are both fairly popular cheap-ish reliable capture cards (dazzle being more expensive but more reliable), but I don't have much advice in that regard

Is it acceptable to just move TVs or in some cases entire tables in order to play games in a group?

I assume because of power, moving tables might be somewhat limiting, but I hope it's ok to move TVs at least

Since last year Hall B was used almost exclusively for Mafia and Rock Band, I can't help but notice there's no intended location for them this year. Ideally Rock Band is located somewhere a little isolated to mitigate the noise issues, perhaps the small conference room outside of hall B (room 1212) that was almost unused last year.

On PC the Slots limit is much easier to get Game Over as the evil flag is off much more often (i'd estimate about 50% of the time compared to 1/64 on PlayStation). If you're intending on running on console I'd suggest emulator over the PC version as there are a number of other differences to account for as well (such as encounter manipulation and the double-input menu bug thing)

As Kyon mentioned, you'll want to play on an NTSC-U Slim PS2 (70k+ models)