Hello friends!

I am still trying to find bugs and glitches for a little game called "7 Blades" for the PS2. A friend of mine and me are currently the only runners for it and we don't have any previous speedrunning experience.

We had a fun little session over the weekend to try and find glitches and bugs to make the speedrun more consistent or faster, but the game seems to be really stable even tho it sucks in so many other ways 😁

Please just read through our findings and give us some ideas what else we could try.

1. ) Ego perspective "stops" the character

In the PAL and Japanese version of the game we found a glitch with the ego perspective you can trigger by pressing "select". While the camera is zooming in to get you to the ego perspective, you can input for example a jump or a special attack. If you do it with a special attack, the end animation of that move triggers when you cancel the ego perspective, but the attack does not hit or deal damage. If you jump at the right moment when the camera zooms in, you will be slightly above ground. This has the effect in the PAL version that you can use the 4th blade to make your helicopter move and actually gain height. It is possible to get through the ceiling in a certain level to get into the floor above. Sadly that's not useful at all since you are supposed to run down in that specific level. In the japanese version (which is older), you can use that glitch as well, but instead of just being slightly above ground, you are still considered being on the ground, so you can input a second jump, or use a special/super move mid air. If you use a special or super move, you will be pushed to the ground mid animation. We did not find any situation where the extra height would be helpful yet. Technically there is a level where you have to go between two floors multiple times, but the extra height is way too low to reach the other floor.

Part 1 / 2

2.) Opening the quick menu before pausing

In this game there is a quick menu on the lower left of the screen. You can press square to highlight it and use any of the four directions to switch weapons or use food. If you use one of those features, or if you use weapons or food in the menu, your companien throws that item towards you. In the pause menu, there are 4 states which apply to weapons.

Green = not equipped, not in the quick menu

Yellow = assigned to the quick menu, not equipped

Red = currently equipped weapon, not assigned to the quick menu

Blinking = your partner is ordered to throw it to you, will also blink in the quick menu

The red state actually prohibits you from assigning that weapon to your quick menu since you already equipped it, BUT if you hold the square button to highlight the quick menu, then open the menu with start, you can assign also the currently equipped weapon to that slot. You just have to set your cursor to that weapon in the pause menu beforehand, since you cannot move the cursor while the quick menu is opened. The first direction input moves the currenty item of your cursor to the quick menu. That now has the funny effect that you can switch your current weapon with the same weapon. If you put your current weapon with that glitch into a slot and then switch to a different weapon in the quick menu, the same weapon is in 2 different slots. If you reassign that weapon to another slot, the game will automatically clean the other slots and it's only in one slot as intended. With that knowledge we tried to duplicate food, by ordering your partner to throw food with the quick menu and then reassigning, or even removing the assignment of the food that gets thrown, but the game sadly checks for it and removes the food item in your menu anyways. There are also empty slots in your pause menu (unless you are at the end of the game, then all weapon slots are filled). If you move the "empty" slot of a weapon to the quick menu with that glitch, you get a glitched weapon in your quick menu. If you highlight the quick menu, it shows as the 1st Blade, if the quick menu is not highlighted, it shows a glitched sprite. If you try to equip the weapon with the quick menu, your partner does the throw animation, but nothing happens. We think it's a default state weapon or an out of bound index or something like that. We were hoping to find a way to maybe equip late game weapons in earlier levels, but we don't seem to be able to move that pointer at all (yet). The same glitch exists in the PAL and japanese version. Being able to equip late game weapons early, would vastly speed up some boss fights.

3.) Active doors act like enemies when getting hit

The super bar of the male character has 3 states. Fully red, fully blue, or red and blue. While it's red and blue, receiving damage fills it up with red and you are able to get into a power mode for a few seconds. This mode is very useful since your damage skyrockets and you don't flinch on enemy attacks. The blue mode gives you access to one super move with your currently equiped weapon. Those are not that great in the PAL version, since the damage sucks and the animation takes very long. There are only one or two fights those super moves are useful in a speedrun. You fill the blue bar by hitting enemies. We found that certain doors, which can be opened by running into them or by hitting them, actually fill your blue bar if you hit them. If you use a weapon that does multiple hits at once, which would usually make the enemy flinch, hit the door non stop, filling the blue bar instantly. One little difference between the PAL and japanese version: in the PAL version you keep the state of your super bar when you go to other levels, in the japanese it resets.

What else can we try?

We did not find any differences between emulation and real hardware yet, so we will probably use the emulator (PCSX2) to test more stuff. Is there an easy way to look into the games memory to maybe find a way to move the pointer from glitch number 2? There are gameshark codes that manipulate memory to change the weapon mid game, maybe we can look for exactly those adresses. I doubt there is, but is there a way to visualize hitboxes? We think the game has very simple, but very tight collisions, which makes it hard to get through them, but as we proved in glitch number 1, it is possible to phase through floors.

If you are interested in helping us out a bit, please feel free to discuss it here. I would also be willing to make some discord calls to look into it together or explain game mechanics.

Cheers,

David

Part 2 / 2

Hi fellow countryman o/

I'm not really good at glitch hunting, but maybe a general recommendation how to find glitches: Look at similar games from the same developers on the same platform. Maybe similar glitches are in there possible. Cause well... copy pasting is not a new technique. It might be worth a shot.

Otherwise it sounds like you're already onto some things. Just keep exploring the borders of what you already found and maybe some new variation of a glitch appears.

GL HF at glitch hunting, happycamper

Hello :)

Great to see some austrians here!

Good idea, I'll try to look up some other games. If anyone is curious: The game was made by Konami and was a release title for the ps2. Released 2000 in japan and 2001 in europe, had no release in the US due to some heavy 18+ themes. The game is also very small (around 2 hours for the first casual playthrough), maybe we can find a way to decompile it and look into the code... no idea how that works but maybe someone else here has some ideas? :)

Cheers,

David