Greetings fellow speedrunners and glitchhunters!

I recently started speedrunning a game with a friend of mine. The game is called "7 Blades" for the ps2. We are using the pcsx2 emulator and it works perfectly fine and we had some decent runs. We found some strats here and there to optimize routes and trying to remove some rng in enemy behavior.

Sadly we did not find a single glitch or bug in the game so far which would be useful to a speedrun. My first idea was to look around in every map to find a way to get out of bounds or find a way to manipulate enemy patterns since they are hecking agressive in that game (especially the PAL version). Especially one of the latest levels in the game... It's an auto scroller but it takes a random amount of time to finish, sometimes it even takes up to 3 minutes more (!) in a speedrun which is under 1 hour.

So I am here to ask for advise or tricks on how to find useable glitches or a way to manipulate the auto scroller to make the run more consistent or even faster. I would really appreciate your help and wouldn't mind showing my gratitude with a giftcard or something if you can help me find stuff. I am really passionate about the game (even tho is pretty bad lol) out of nostalgic reasons and because no one has it on their radar which makes it kinda cool to me to run.

PS: The PAL vesion is currently much faster because damage is wayyyy higher then in the japanese version for some reason. The japanese version is also older and runs on an older build/version, maybe there are glitches hidden in the japanese version which were patched in the PAL version.

Cheers! David

Whenever I'm trying to find tech in games, and my experience is limited so I hope others will join in, I do exactly what you're talking about, going under the map, playerspace, or out of bounds assuming that the game has that modelled in and it's not a fully fixed zone. Also seeing if gameplay mechanics can be exploited, like trying to move through locked doors or new zones early by pushing the character at different angles, or walking and doing certain inputs, it is a truly tedious process to be honest and all the more so when you aren't being helped or playing alongside a bigger community. I also don't know anything about the game sadly, but to do with attacking enemies the same principle of exploitation usually applies, can you find stuck spots, or carry weapons or attacks to a certain point in the game where you're not meant to have them? Again this is very general advice but it's hard area to discuss.

It's possible that old internet forums exist for games like 7 Blades and other things by the same publisher/company, which may be hard to track down if they still exist but people may have discussed the game online closer to the release and discussed problems or bugs they'd found if you're really lucky.

One thing I will add is that different release versions often do have different issues and bugs, so if you have access to the Japanese copy it's worth trying out different tech on both copies, and diversiftying leaderboard categories accordingly if the gameplay is different.

Thank you RaggedDan for your insight!

Good idea, I haven't really looked up any old community or publisher/company posts at all, maybe I can still find something, I will give it a shot.

Regarding exploiting weapons or enemies etc. to push me outside the map: So far it seems pretty impossible to do so. Even tho the game is pretty mediocre (or even bad), it seems to be technically extremely stable. The geometry of the map is visually completely different then the actual wall hitboxes and the hitboxes seem to be very simple shapes without any room to squeeze through. Also the character gets pushed back inside on every attempt of pushing through with any kind of attack or damage boost. Maybe there is a way to actually look at map data or make the actual hitboxes visible ingame by some kind of hack (sadly I didn't find any existing cheats/hacks that are powerful enough). I was also thinking about using "CheatEngine" to look into the memory of the game to get more info, but I don't have enough experience with CheatEngine in regards to emulated games. If there is anybody out here with CheatEngine experience regarding PCSX2 (version 2.x.x ongoing), I would appreciate any kind of help. I am a softwareengineer and usually understand those technical things, but I am not much of a memory reader lol

I will also try to push more on the japanese version, maybe I focused a bit too much on the Pal version.