As far as i tested out, respawn is in one of the rackets nearby ... if none, dunno

After the first 24 hours of testing, that's what we collected on the Discord channel (between all the runners)

• First 3 areas are pretty much straightforward, I'd say Cassandra's (Hollow) then Vito's (River Row) then Burke's (Pointe Verdun) ... then personally I went Thickfaw Harbor and Southdowns for immediate proximity, maybe other runners took different strats, don't think changes too much since most of the missions are inside the relative area

• Death Warp: Dying after completing missions will warp you to your area boss (depends on the area), consider this while routing, could save driving time, especially we can test (and hopefully exploit) this when we need to leave Bayou, that's way far away from anything else

• Door unlocking: after the first part of the minigame (finding the green short area for unlocking), spamming E seems to solve the second part of the minigame pretty much most of the times ... if it doesn't work, you lose like 1 second and you can retry normal way.

• Window clipping glitch (could be worth in a couple of missions, will depend on route/strategy)

• Wall clipping (didn't see any video, found out by Mattmatt10111, same as window clipping)

Hello everyone, i'm DJPao86, member of the Italian Speedrunning community and member of the staff behind this project. I'm mostly handling the technical part (hosting, streaming etc.)

Since it's a rushed event (we actually were scheduling something similar for the end of the year ... but Tiger explained well what happened, so we thought it would be wise to anticipate and rush the event), we're forced to handle it as an online event.

Italian internet connections are quite bad, so it will be impossible to use one of the runners' bandwidth to stream both his run and keep the main stream up. The solution I'm actually considering and testing is to loan a virtual machine from Aruba datacenters (costs are not high, I'll be covering those) and use it for streaming, music and so on. If needed, we could have two and have a language restream (like one in Italian and one in English).

We're accepting ANY kind of help, technical, graphical (<-- this please!!!), help with plugins ... and runners :) we have a bunch of runs, but ofc it's not much :) Everything is well appreciated, especially from people that already handled an event like this.

Thanks in advance = DJPao86 =

1. Hi :) i'm DJPao86, I speedrun Final Fantasy games and Mafia 2, at the moment
2. I started speedrunning for the reasons that many other runners point out: adding replay value to the game and competition
3. Glitching is often compared to Cheating, but it's quite different. As long as you don't input codes (like no-clip cheats, invulnerability cheats and so on), it's just abusing the game bugs and simply using game mechanics (intended or not) to your advantage. Often, glitches require mechanical skills to be replicated, while cheats ... are just cheats :)
4. Depends from glitch to glitch. In Mafia 2, one of the games i run, glitches save up to 20/30 seconds, in a 3h+ run. The community nowadays is big enough that, in most of the games, separates runs between glitched runs and glitchless runs ... so if somebody doesn't like glitching the game, he can simply compete in the glitchless category.
5. To me, it's the same game, but the goal is different.
6. Yeah, glitching is trying to find ways to break a game, every runner that is deep into his games try to find skips, glitches, tricks and optimizations every moment he can.
7. Didn't really understand the first part of the question ... but I'm not comparing speedrunning to arts, if that was the point. Sometimes speedrunning is frustrating, but that's not the games' fault, it's the competition behind it. To me, speedrunning has gave more life to games that would be dead, if speedrunning didn't exist.
8. Depends from game to game ... but I don't really associate a style to a particular runner. Most of the time, the runner has close to 0% room, it's unlikely to exist 2+ different strategies that lead to the same result ... usually 1 is strictly faster than the other.

Great idea, immediately added (and joined the May race, that i didn't knew about :P)

As happens for FF7 and FF8, i guess boosters will not be accepted for the "main" category (speed booster and no-encounters could form 2 sub-leaderboards, as happens for FF8 with F12345% category)

Of course PC% will be split from PSX%, that is just obvious

100% joining :)

Nice Ahra, good to know :)

1 Question though: last year I had an issue during a run, can't remember much since it's almost 1 year since that happening. I popped Hero on Irvine on Ultimecia Phase2 ... and by Phase 3 it already ran out. Can't remember much about that run, i didn't check if I still have vods of that.

As far as you know, what are the maths about Hero/Holy War duration and any interaction with Ultimecia's spells and/or junction missing/removed?

To be honest, i never had that issue.

I checked my splits with Luzbel WR splits and neither me nor him sell any elixir in Balamb, but we both go for late Quistis card.

Maybe it's that route having issues, the early Quistis card route ... because the time between the seed graduation and the train catch would be shorter so the SeeD payment will be late.

Good to know, I don't know if I will try it any sooner, after the FF9 race i'll go back to FF8 but I still have to derust and gain time from many other places ... so the Early Quistis card for shorter resets is not really something I'm in the need to try asap.

Thanks Ahra for the times round-down, precise as always :)

@W1ndows91: I personally never had to sell an Elixir to buy the Train Ticket (i guess you mean to Timber), my first shop is in Timber and the Elixir is still needed for GeroGero. Never saw other runners sell an elixir for money issue.

Did i miss something ? Is it a 100% route issue? Because in any%, that's not happening (btw, Car would be still be faster)

My 2 cents (i'm not a FF9 runner, but I have a decent knowledge of the category):

Given infinite runs by any runner (turbo or not turbo), turbo should be 100% faster than non-turbo.

In my opinion, people run the game because they love the game, not just for the Turbo/NonTurbo categories. Both categories imho should be merged since there is no strategy/route/goal difference between them, apart the hardware difference between a turbo controller or not.

Another point in favor of the merging is: if Luzbelheim was on WR pace and switched to turbo controller .... would it be eligible for both WRs? if yes=merge, if not=argue why not.

yeah exactly. If you get the coat from your house, you wont be asked to get one ... but as long as we still get it from the shop anyways, it's fine

yeah, that coat isnt allowed ... or better, it's allowed as long as you still get the coat in the cloth store

today a new 2nd place run was accepted. It links to a video way older than "today" (it's dated 1 Nov 2014 on Youtube), without timer, without proof of being RTA (could also be segmented and video-edited right after) and using DLC cars.

I guess we need specific rules ... as far as i'm concerned, the run is not valid before further proof, but it was accepted.

Hello guys :)

in Chapter 1, there is a little glitch that makes us able to skip the balcony shooting (before the machinegun shooting), saving us around 15 seconds. The glitch is not 100% repeatable, happened once offline and 1 online in a random testing, but i was able to 2:43 Chapter1 with a really bad start (so it's doable sub 2:40)

link to highlight:

in Chapter 6, second O'Neal fight, most of the time with a hard combo (the one with the right mouse button) is enough to defeat him