FinlandPS4 Any% No Slots if you also don't want to use Cait Sith's Limit Break. If you want to use Slots and no boosters, you are out of luck as there is no category specifically made specifically for it.
I believe the PSClassic is essentially just an emulator, I'm not sure if it would fall in that category though (PSX Digital).
Region is irrelevant for PC. You can see some people select the USA region or EU region if that's where they're from, but it doesn't matter for anything.
The game doesn't have a separate category for PS3, it falls under PSX Digital as the rules even mention PS3 in that category.
French is the fastest out of the ones available on Steam. To use Japanese version you would need to have a Japanese Steam account, which is not easy to get.
No I don't think anyone has done a german guide. Best I can do is give you this: https://www.speedrun.com/ff8/guide/ladhs
There you can find all the publicly available notes (NOTES not full guides). Some are in french and some in english.
I would stay away from "mods" even for the emulator version if you want to get your time up on the leaderboard. If you don't care about the leaderboard you can do whatever you want.
ePSXe and PSXFin 1.13 are probably the most used ones.
By 100% do you mean doing everything needed for the Platinum trophy or getting all achievements on the Steam version, or do you mean something else.
Probably the answer to either one of the cases is no.
I would not allow it. For me this right now only makes starting a new run more of a chore for no meaningful difference in the run. Encounters in FF8 are meaningless and pose no threat and provide no benefit.
Saying it doesn't change anything for new runners is, I think, a bit false. The game has everything (except Esthar Menu) challenging about it in the first hour of the run (Early Quistis, Zell card manip, Diablos fight). Adding another thing on top makes the game seem more challenging to a beginners eyes. Right now beginners don't have to follow a step count either, which right now saves about 2 minutes, adding this on top makes it closer to 3 minutes. It's a meaningful time save that beginners will look at, and think they will have to do that too.
Whether we should think about the beginner perspective when making rules is another discussion.
As it stands right now, there is a rule which allows Pre New Game manipulation. This means that before you start the timer, you are allowed to manipulate the RNG of the game and then start a run. What this means right now is that you could manipulate your danger value and step ID to start at a different spot than normal, thus leading to fewer encounters overall throughout the run.
As it stands right now, there has been no runs that have used this, but recently Luzbelheim has brought this rule to question, as he has worked on a new stepcount with this manipulation which would remove a couple encounters from the run, thus saving a meaningful (for WR) amount of time.
What this means in practice is that before you hit New Game, you would load a save file at some specific point, do your manipulation (walking/running around to get correct step ID / Danger value), then do a soft reset (Ctrl+R on PC) and then start the timer and the run as normal.
This kind of manipulation is not allowed for FF7 mostly because it also removes an important glitch from being acceptable, but is allowed for example in FF4 and FF6 for the same usage, a different step count.
Do you think this should be allowed or not? Please give a clear "Yes, allow it" or "No, don't allow it". Any reasonings for your answers are appreciated.
You do not need a timer to run the game or to submit it for the leaderboards. The video itself is the evidence for your time, not the timer.
Haven't heard of anyone testing it, but if the only difference between the versions if the amount of characters, English might be the fastest. German at least is known to have a lot of letters, Italian, Spanish and French I don't think are significantly shorter. Feel free to test it out yourself, start of Disc 3 is probably the longest section of text and minimal movement so I guess that would be a good place to test it.
Short answer: No, turbo is not allowed for anything except the JP version currently.
Luzbelheim and pingval both have ran the JP version of the game, where turbo is allowed. For that category, if you use a 20 Hz or a 30 Hz turbo, it changes which patterns you can get. With a 30 Hz turbo you will only see frames 1 or 2 (Elastoid or Malboro patterns), with 20 Hz turbo you will also see the 3rd frame (Biggs & Wedge) every now and then. For that reason, if you use 30 Hz turbo you can only practice the first 2 patterns and use cards that win only those 2. When Luzbelheim originally found the early Quistis method, he only found the first 2 frames to be winnable because of his card selections, but as pingval used the 20 Hz turbo he worked out the cards needed to win all 3 patterns, that's why people will refer to these card selections as Luzbelheim or pingval cards / strats.
For the PC version and NA console version, where turbo is not allowed, the pingval method is obviously the preferred method since it gives you an extra frame that you can win.
This is a perfectly fine place to ask questions, another option is to join the public FF Speedrunning discord. which you can find by googling. You'll have a bit faster response time there. The original game and the Steam version are the same game, everyone just uses the Steam version.
So there are two types of encounters, world map (WM) encounters and "dungeon" encounters. The world map encounters are still totally random as far as we know and there is no way to minimize the amount of encounters other than just trying to minimize the distance. We do know that running in a forest increases your danger value (once danger value reaches some random value, an encounter is triggered) more than running in the field or beach. For this reason, some people opt to run around the forest when going to the Fire Cavern, but I am not sure that it decreases the chance of an encounter happening.because you also need to run quite a bit further in order to do so. So in short, getting an encounter before the Fire Cavern is random, nothing you can do about it, sometimes you'll even get 2 encounters.
What most people consider a "good World Map" is 2 encounters on the whole before and after Ifrit, so going to the Fire Cavern, going to the beach, going back to Balamb Garden. 3 is probably average and 4 happens often if you get an early encounter. Though what people should focus more, is how many total WM encounters they get. The last place to get a random WM encounter is before going to Deling city, as we learn Enc-None before we have to do any WM movement after that. I think 4-6 encounters is normal, average being 5. 3 at the start, 1 before Laguna Dream (LD) 2 in the forest, and 1 after (before or after entering Galbadia Garden). Considering each encounter only takes roughly 15 seconds, it's not something you should worry about too much when you're starting out.
So the Step counter is actually quite a complex thing, but in short: We walk in certain places for a certain amount of steps in order to skip an encounter that would otherwise happen. For each section that we walk, we skip one encounter. The FH encounter is an encounter just like any other, it's just the last place where we don't have Enc-None for random encounters.
As for the quick menu open and close, this let's us get further ahead on the step counter. When the screen is fading from black, the step counter is not active for a couple steps so we get a bit of free movement when we do this. For the Fire Cavern it's usually done in order to push back the encounter that happens before Ifrit normally (2 Bats 2 Bombs) because if you end the battle with both Squall and Quistis in critical HP or dead, you will save a bit of time at the start of this encounter. Also doesn't hurt to get a bit ahead of the step counter to ensure that you don't get the FH encounter. This is the reason the step counter is easy to maintain in FF8, even if your movement is bad as long as you do the steps correctly, you can catch up to the normal step counter with a few menu buffers.
Step counter is not necessary when you're starting out though, and will be impossibly hard to maintain if you don't have a certain level of movement. This will come with experience and time.
In more detail if you're interested: There is a Step ID, which essentially tracks how many steps you've taken (doesn't relate to actual visual steps in game 1:1). There is a Danger Value, which increases by 5 for each Step ID that you run, and by 2 for each Step ID that you walk. Resets to 0 once an encounter is triggered. This is the cause for walking a certain amount of steps in order to skip encounters. There is a Battle Check value, which changes for every Step ID and once Danger Value is higher than BCV, an encounter happens.
So because the BCV is different for each Step ID, and Danger Value increases differently while walking as compared to when you're running, you can walk for a certain amount of Step IDs to skip an encounter. Here's an example: You are at 0 Danger Value, you are on Step ID 0. Let's say that for each Step ID 0-9 is too high to trigger an encounter (each BCV is higher than 50 for example), but at Step ID 10, the BCV is 48. So you can see if we just keep running the whole time, we will trigger an encounter at Step ID 10 because our Danger Value will be 50 and BCV is 48, but if we walk for 1 Step ID (Doesn't really matter which Step ID we walk in) our Danger Value will be 47 at Step ID 10, thus skipping this encounter.
In order for us to actually benefit from this, it is not enough to just skip an encounter, because otherwise we could have a situation where in Step ID 11 the BCV is low enough to trigger a battle anyway, e.g. 6. In that situation, yes we would have skipped the encounter at Step ID 10, but then we would get an encounter at Step ID 11, whereas with the normal "just run" strategy, we would have gotten an encounter at 10 but NOT at 11, thus resulting in 1 encounter for each strategy.
Sorry for the long posts but I want to provide a certain level of detail instead of just saying "do as the notes say and you'll be fast".
AFAIK it's only Windows 7 where the FPS is limited to roughly 31.5 instead of the 30.5 (why isn't it 30 Square?!?) that other OSs have. The exact FPS is likely different from machine to machine as well, but differences are much smaller than in FF7 PC for example, where people have FPS of 32-36 depending on their PC.
For this reason we've thought about adding a new category, the way FF7 PC has, for a 30 FPS category that uses a similar fix to cap the FPS of the game at 30 FPS, but there's not been enough interest to warrant the creation of a new category yet. Also, I don't know if anyone has tested the same fix for FF8 and how well it works.
As for having some sort of FAQ, I'll think about it, If anyone else wants to, feel free to make a FAQ post yourself, I can sticky that if it's made well enough.
SS vs RTA is kind of an old thing for FF8. There were two routes, one did the Caraway code manipulation with a hard reset and the other went to the Tomb of the Unknown King to get the code, hence Single segment (no reset) and RTA (with reset). Nowadays the distinction is not really needed but some people still care about having a SS time rather than RTA. Nowadays this applies more to the final party manipulation rather than the Caraway Code manipulation, since there is an easy way to get the Caraway code without resetting and without getting it from the TotUK. The normal party manipulation requires a hard reset before Ultimecia's Castle, but there is also a version which does not do any resets and relies in the same idea as the Caraway code. Therefore, the whole run is doable with Single Segment without drawbacks as long as you know how to do the manips.
Q/Q+Z just means which cards you got, they are short for Quistis and Zell cards. Since Zell card is normally (without manip) very RNG heavy, 10% chance to appear in any single game, a route with only Quistis card was made. There is also a manip for getting Zell Card on the first game, which makes that route superior, but obviously requires you to know the manip once again, and this one is probably the hardest one for beginners to get down correctly.
Having someone else's notes (there's multiple for each route in the Guides section) up while watching a run is a good idea. This way you can also edit them if you think you might need extra stuff or if you find some stuff unnecessary in the notes. Just watching the game in general will actually help you get better in the beginning if you actively try to memorize screens. Playing the game and running it yourself is obviously better since you will get the muscle memory going as well as actually having to think about correct movement, something you don't really do while watching other people play.
French language is roughly 5 minutes faster than the English in the any% run, because the text scrolls faster for whatever reason. This is not something you need to worry about in the beginning as you will likely lose more time than save if you try to switch languages before you know the game well enough. Movement is hands down the biggest factor in getting a decent time, and menus after that. And mostly just Esthar menu, if you can do the Esthar menu mostly in time (before 15:00 on the timer), you're good to go for a sub 7:45 imo, don't even need to know the other menus by heart.
Just as a heads up, I'm sorry if you know this already but since you have no runs in your profile I'm assuming you are maybe not sure what segmented runs truly are.
They are not just an easier way to fit a 9 hour run into your schedule, they are not runs that you do in 3 segments of 3 hours. They are usually runs that grind a particular segment tens or hundreds of times until they get the desired results from that segment and then move on to grind the next segment. They often require even more game knowledge than the normal any% in order to take full advantage of the crazy mechanics the game has to offer and they abuse the high variance stuff in order to get the best result.
In case of FF9 you can think about the world map for example, in segmented runs you want to be able to run the whole way from point A to B and not get an encounter, and you wouldn't have to stutter step either thus saving time. You can imagine this takes a lot of tries in some longer runs on the world map.
If you are looking for a way to compete with other runners but don't have or don't want to spend 9 hours doing so, I think FF9 is not the game you're looking for unless you are willing to play Booster%. But if you just want to do the speedrun for the fun of it, no one is stopping you from doing it in chunks, like 1 disc at a time. You just won't be eligible for the Any% leaderboard, you can still compete against yourself.
Anyway, in case that you want to do or have already done a segmented run, then my apologies.
